Four Go Mad In Okinawa - Part One

Cor, get a load of those pictures, nice aren’t they? Aside from the one of me flashing my keks of course. Yes, last week (September 21^st if memory serves) myself, Americans Sean and Melissa and Australian Mark took a flight way down south to the sub-tropical Japanese archipelago of Okinawa for a sun-drenched five days, taking advantage of one of Japan’s many bank holiday weekends and the cheap flights Sean was able to get with Japan’s excellent ‘domestic flight birthday discount offer’.

Having been before last year, it was very good of Sean to go again to pretty much see the same stuff as he did last time, inviting the rest of us along for the ride. The first three nights were spent on the beautiful and extremely sparsely populated island of Zamami, an hour away by catamaran ferry from the region’s main island. Once there, we endured a pretty painful half hour or so trek in the sweltering heat with our backpacks to the campsite we’d booked, set up our tents and then marvelled at the beach we were staying next to, just the other side of a small mangrove. That’s it, right up there. Gorgeous is the word I’d use, with the bluest water I’ve certainly ever seen before, clear enough to make out the distinctive shape of the large tracts of coral just beneath its surface.

After an initial hour or two getting settled and tucking into our supplies of food, we ventured ‘town’wards (more a hamlet, really) where as luck would have it, the local population were celebrating an annual festival in which they all gave offerings to the God of the sea by stockpiling large amount of sake and local brew awamori (more on which later) in a small shrine, leaving it there for a while, and then cracking it all open, to the accompaniment of dancing and general drunken festivities. For our part, we paid 1,000 yen apiece to be allowed inside, and were then presented with a dinner of a whole deep fried fish accompanied by clementines, while also being allowed to tuck into their lager supply, largely consisting of Okinawan tipple of choice, Orion – a very pleasant quaff indeed.

Alas, with none of us having thought to bring our cameras along, no pictorial record of this event exists, at least in our possession. What we saw consisted of the great and the good of the entire island (there was maybe a hundred or so people gathered in the same small space as us) entertained throughout the evening by a hardy-looking fellow in his sixties singing and playing the samishan (traditional three-stringed instrument that resembles an elongated banjo) and his mate accompanying him on Taiko drums. May the God of multiculturalism strike me dead for saying for this, but his repertoire was a bit, well, limited. Pleasant enough, but the ‘songs’ he did sort of ran into each other from what I could tell. The crowd were definitely digging it though, the many children present especially. There was much unstable dancing from locals, who of course managed to drag us gaijin in from time to time. The dance that we were encouraged to follow reminded me rather amusingly of the ‘waving one’s hands above the head emergency signal’ from recent puppet flick Team America: World Police…

Now that I’ve poured arrogant scorn upon centuries old Okinawan music tradition, on to my biggest regret of the trip – in a desperate attempt to locate the toilets at this place, I ended up accidentally wandering off, missing one of the coolest things our party got to do. Stumbling blindly into an izakaya after roundly failing to locate any kind of pissoir, I thought it terribly rude to just use their facilities and promptly leave, so opted for a scotch on the rocks first, as you do. After a baffling five minute wait for said drink (I was one of very few people there), I got talking to a particularly attractive girl visiting from Chie prefecture, staying with one of the bar staff. What was said, I can’t even begin to remember, but it ended with me promising to return with my companions in tow. Conscious that said friends may well be wondering where I was by this point, I made my way back to the party shrine where it turned out I’d missed the passing of the habi awamori trophy chalice.

As briefly mentioned before, awamori is an insanely strong alcoholic concoction similar to the Japanese shochu drunk on the mainland, intended to be diluted before drinking. Some varieties of awamori are interestingly served alongside a poisonous snake known as the habi, usually by placing them in the bottle, in a similar fashion to the worm found in traditional tequila, only slightly more extreme. In this instance, the winner of what I think was some kind of boating and/or fishing award placed a habi (dead, I would imagine) in his large bowl-shaped trophy, filled it up with awamori and proceeded to pass it around the crowd. While I wasn’t there. Which really bothered me, as I’d wanted to try this habi juice myself since first hearing about it, and knew I’d be far too stingy to buy a whole bottle of the stuff myself. Either way, according to the others it was good fun but didn’t taste too great. Now there’s a surprise.

With Mark and Melissa opting for an early night, Sean and myself briefly chanced the izakaya where my latest acquaintance appeared to be busy helping out the others running the place, leaving me to repeatedly try and subsequently fail to catch her eye. Hey ho.