Lost Hours

Dearest Rachel –

We lost an hour on our way here, honey; Japan, it so happens, runs an hour ahead of Taiwan.  I set my alarm to go off fairly early, so that it would be a reasonable hour in terms of Japan time, only for that moment to have been part of the hour skipped as part of the transition. As a result, the moment that my alarm should’ve gone off never existed, as far as it was concerned, and so it never did. Fortunately, I woke up barely 15 minutes after it was supposed to have gone off, so I didn’t lose much.

The ship also lost an hour somewhere along the way.  You see, there are certain locations for which they need to bring a local pilot in to direct the ship into port, and in this case, his flight was delayed in terms of getting to the ship and to the bridge.  We received notices on our door informing us of this delay when I got up to leave for breakfast.  So that hour we lost, I basically got back, in terms of time to prepare.  It probably means our excursion will be cut short, though; we’ve got to lose the hour somewhere.

The wait outside the Safari Lounge for immigration processing may have been part of where that hour was to go; some of the passengers behind me started to get a bit antsy.  About a vacation is that it’s hard to really get upset much; I mean, you’re on vacation. But there are certain time pressures that are part of this that will occasionally get to people after a while.  They don’t base the word “travel” off of the term for “work” for no reason at all.  And the fact that “time’s a-wasting” at this point might serve to get on certain people’s nerves.  Still, getting snippy about it isn’t going to make the line move any faster, and it has the added result of making fellow passengers more annoyed as well. So it’s not worth it.

We are literally going around the entire island today; our docking port is in the southwest corner, and we drive for some thirty or forty minutes around the coast to Kabira Bay on the north side.  From there, we will head east to the Tamatorizaki Peninsula in the far northeast before heading to a small shopping plaza in the southern part of the island. I’m not sure how we expect to do this in the limited amount of time we have, but that rather depends on how long it takes to get from point A to point B to point C, and how long we spend at each. In any event, it isn’t as if the ship is going to sail off without us; we’re all in the same boat here, and they won’t leave those of us behind who are on an excursion they’ve sanctioned and arranged.

Enough concerns for now; we pile into the bus, and head out. As we do, our guide, Sui welcomes us to Ishigaki, and to Okinawa in general. Unlike the main islands of Japan, the Ryukyus are not volcanic islands, but rather made of coral and limestone. There are caves on many of the islands, as well as coral reefs surrounding them, which we are to see as part of our first stop.

As a postscript: when I got back to the ship, they served Beef Wellington for Easter dinner, and I asked if they’d gotten some of the local beef for the dish. I have never seen a headwaiter laugh so hard. I assume that was a ‘no,’ but I’m not clear as to what was so funny about the inquiry. Does the dish take too long to prepare to use locally stocked produce? Is Ishigaki beef that unfeasibly expensive, even at the source? I’m starting to get genuinely curious.

Sui-san speaks of the Ryukyu Kingdom and its independent state – she is native Okinawan, and speaks of the Japanese in third-person terms.  I ask if there is any bad blood between the two cultures (the phrase puzzles her, and I rephrase it with ‘animosity’). It turns out that it’s complicated; among other things, the Okinawan language was suppressed during her childhood.  Her parents and grandparents spoke Okinawan, but she was essentially forbidden from doing so when growing up.  During WWII, twenty-five percent of the Okinawa population was killed in the ground fighting, defending a country they hadn’t been a part of for even a century (and even then, were incorporated by conquest). She doesn’t say ‘yes’ as such to my question, and there is a great deal that suggests that Okinawa is very much a part of Japan, and satisfied to be so, but it doesn’t quite seem as if everything is settled here.

Wars aside, though, Okinawans are famous for longevity; there are a number of centenarians who have lived here.  Sui-san claims it’s due in part to eating less than one’s limit: “you should only eat eighty percent of what would fill you up,” she says, while (jokingly) giving us grief about eating to capacity while on our cruise.  “I’m sorry to say, you won’t be living so long,” she smiles.

Wait, smiles?

Anyway, we’re at our second stop, the outlook at Tamatorizaki.  We can see the spit from here, with the Pacific Ocean to the right and China Sea to the left.

Okinawa was administered by the U.S. until 1972, at which point it was turned over to Japan.  For all of its reputation as a place for people to live long, they also have issues with obesity, domestic violence and drunk driving (to be fair, the last is due to not having the robust public transportation system that ‘mainland’ Japan does, because it’s a series of islands, so people drive more.  More drivers mean more drunk drivers).  Whether these issues have anything to do with being administered by the U.S., I don’t know, but that these factoids come on the heels of each other suggests something.

Anyway, our final stop takes us to something that looks very much like a typical block-sized strip mall. Honestly, I’m fine with that; it’s that blend of completely familiar and utterly alien that is almost my element at this point.  Emphasis on almost…

Yeah, I wasn’t as careful going through the menu as I should have been, and as a result, I got something that I wasn’t expecting. It was okay, but nothing special. I did discover that I apparently like the taste of melon flavor, even if I will still insist that I’m no fan of actual melons. Make your own jokes about that if you want to, honey.

We’re back to the port at just about the time the all-aboard call is going out for everyone; I don’t think we actually lost out on time as such, but there’s really no time to knock about afterwards. And after riding around like we have, I think I’m just as happy; those few hours after returning from the shore excursion and before the ship leaves are always a bit awkward for me. Either way, it’s not the most devout way to spend Easter, to be sure, but I’ll manage to catch up with the services online soon enough.

For now, though, there’s another early morning to deal with tomorrow, so I should call it a day. Keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.