People talk about culture shock, but having always wanted to come here I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. The shock is realizing how helpless you actually are when you don't have the language. In Iceland last year, I had a few fears about how we'd handle the language, but the beauty of Iceland is that nearly every single person has enough english that they could probably fool you as a native speaker. I didn't meet anyone I couldn't at least partially communicate with. The other thing is - 80% of our alphabet crosses over. Yes, they have a few odd characters we don't have in the english alphabet, but once you learn those, it's completely possible to sound out any word you see.
When you see "Sundlaugavegur" on a sign...even if you have no idea what that means, you could probably do a pretty close impression of what it should sound like, and ask a passer-by how to get there. When you see "Þingvellir" on a map, once you've learned that "Þ" is a "th" sound, and two l's together is a "tl" sound, you know to say "Thingvetlr", and it's not that hard. Someone can probably tell you how to get to Þingvellir.
But what do you do when the sign says よなはビル6階?
I've taken Japanese classes before, and I've even studied some hiragana, like I mentioned previously. But not recently. I can tell you that the third character in is "ha". But what about that Kanji at the end, after the 6? I don't think I could even write that down accurately enough to show someone. You can take photos of things, and show your camera screen, and the lovely thing about Japan is that everyone is willing to help you...but that only takes you so far, and there's not always a Japanese person around to bother, and even if there is...the odds of them having enough english to actually help you is medium to slim. Probably 50% of people know enough english to let you know that the text above is the address of a hostel in Kumoji-so, and only 30 - 40% could direct you there with any certainty. Fortunately, there are also a lot of ex-pats in Okinawa, and a hell of a lot of Marines. But man...if you thought parking signage in Toronto was cryptic, try it here. I dare you.
The big saving grace on day 1 in Japan, was that I spent half of it underwater. There's not much signage underwater, and when your mouth is occupied entirely by breathing air...language is sort of a tertiary concern.
Also, the diving here rivals that of the great barrier reef. Okinawa is a diving island. There's not much to do aside from drinking, and diving. Naha (the capital) is a big tourist town, and there's a certain amount of back and forth with the thousands of marines on the island, but as soon as you leave the city (or approach the coast) it's just dive shops, dive shops, dive shops. Just as well.
Jan (our dive instructor) had left a message with instructions at the hostel we were staying in. Having a largely unhelpful GPS, he gave us easy, albeit minimal directions. An hour's cruise north of Naha into a town called Onna, and we were stopped at the Family Mart, waiting to meet up with him. Jan's a German ex-pat who's been diving (and living) here for 6 years or so. He's got something like 3000 dives under his belt, and knows the area really, really well. He brought a buddy of his, a lawyer from Iowa, along for the trip.
Lindsay had never dived before, so Jan went over the discover Scuba routine with her. Basically a quick crash course made to get you into the water in the least amount of time, without doing anything...irreversible. Mostly covers the basics, and tells you all the ways you can...well, kill yourself. It's very much a "what not to do" sort of talk. They did a few skills on the boat, and a few skills on the water's surface.
JP however had dived the site we were headed for 80-something times. So while Lindsay got underwater for the first time, I dove with JP.
Within seconds of being in the water, I felt amazing...I haven't dived in warm water in two and a half years. Victoria was dry suit, and 12 degrees. Iceland was dry suit, and sometimes as few as 2 degrees. Lake Simcoe was dry suit, and not only was it 10 degrees, but with five feet of visiblity, there's nothing to not see.
Okinawa, 24 degrees. 100 feet+ visibility. Shorty wet suit (which is like short-sleeve, no pant legs). And LIFE.
Within five minutes, I was seeing things i'd never seen before. Almost right away, we saw a sea snake, which I later was told is one of the most poisonous snakes in the world - and though this is highly disputed, I decided not to try to find out for myself. We kept a pretty wide berth...so the footage I have of it isn't really worth seeing, although later in the dive we encountered a much smaller one, which was safe to approach because it's mouth wasn't wide enough to actually bite a human.
(EDIT: This snake turned out to be a blue-banded sea krait. Venomous, highly. Dangerous, not really.)
Stills don't really do this one justice, but I'll get some video up eventually - JP spotted a cuttlefish in camo-mode. They change like octopus, rapidly and to any colour, pattern, or combination imaginable.
It looked like a part of the reef...then when I approached, it turned a translucent blue...then as I got closer, it started flashing neon lights at me. Bands of random colour that rippled along it's body like some kind of LED display.
It didn't look organic enough to be real...like some odd squid-like digital oddity. Cuttlefish, and most cephalopods are pretty intelligent. In Honduras, we saw a whole school of cuttlefish as we were diving, and they all stopped to watch us, changing colour in unison as they decided what they thought of us. After we headed out, they actually followed us for about 50 feet before deciding we weren't worth the trouble, and they flashed their psychedelic lights and took off into the blue.
The first dive was on a sea mount, and we'd started at the bottom to work our way slowly up. The more sun, the more light, the more life, and so in the top 10 metres, things really explode. Tons of corals, sea cucumbers, parrtofish, trumpetfish, mahi-mahi, starfish, little snakes, sea fans, invertebrates, filter feeders, everything imaginable was packed onto this reef, and the warm water and slim backplate BCD I was diving with made gliding around it all feel so effortless.
What a beautiful world to have the chance to be privy to. Sometimes I have to stop and remember how lucky I actually am. What a moment to remember that this is happening now in your life, and it's REAL. Totally, completely amazing.
After a quick surface interval to rehydrate and gush about what we saw, we went out again. There's a dive here called Blue Cave, where you can either walk down steps inside the rock into a big air-filled cavern, or swim in through a crack from oceanside. Oddly, the step entry is regulated by the Japanese government, and so you're allowed 15 minutes. Not a moment longer. More oddly, the sea entrance is not...and so if you hop out of the boat and swim in, you can stay as long as you'd like. Very strange. JP of course knows about a wall nearby that stops at 115 feet at sandy bottom. We can check this out first, swim up along the wall, then into the cave. So we do.
Diving walls always feels a little bit like diving along the edge of the earth. To one side, comforting, solid rock, coral, invertebrates and other things you vaguely understand. To the other, nothing. If you think staring into the infinite blackness at the bottom of a basement staircase is a little unsettling, imagine that x10000. It's just a blue that goes on forever.
Not a lot of sunlight penetrates to 115 feet, so not a lot of life exists here either. It's very sparse, like the surface of the moon dotted by occasional visitors. Like this trumpetfish.
It's that same feeling you get driving in the shadow of a mountain. There's this enormous wall - it doesn't care about you, but it dominates the existence of everything here. It's presence is felt, at all times, and it's what makes life what it is, in this corner of the ocean.
A little bit of overhead is always exciting - although moderately dangerous. The cave itself has air above the water, and quite a lot...it looked pretty amazing both above and below the water.
The boat had only left the rest of the divers so long to be in the water, so we had to hustle back after checking out the cave, since we'd gone to dive the wall as well. As though we hadn't seen enough in our time down...we got treated to this group of tiny fish schooling their hearts out in a huge bait ball just as we left the cave.
It was a pretty tremendous dive. The most unbelievable thing was that after all this...the day was only half over.
We'd driven up to Onna to do the diving, and discovered as we were tooling around afterwards that this weekend was Onna's Matsuri (which is a festival, where the whole town turns out to celebrate being a town.), and so we decided to crash. Some elements were decidedly traditional, Lindsay told me that certain foods are always served, there's entertainment and so on, but for the most part it felt a lot like a festival we'd have in North America. You've got your bouncy castle, your food vendors, your bad high school band with one die hard fan...
The big difference is the togetherness. People talk...largely because they all know each other, something much more common in small towns, but far less common in North America. There's even a giant pot for cooking broth, I'm talking GIANT, and the idea is for everyone in town to bring along something; leeks, garlic, vegetables, and add it to the massive pot so that as it's served to people, it continues to grow.
It's like a super-potluck. I thought that was pretty neat. We ate pineapple on a stick, and traditional hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, which is like an omelet of noodles and other goodies.
After hanging about the festival for a little, we decided to head back to Naha city.
Okinawa is not the Japan I expected, and it also is. I knew this would be an odd, tropical, americanized perversion of the real Japan, but even knowing that, this took me by surprise.
A & W is sort of hailed as the big place to eat American on Okinawa. They of course have McDonalds, but after the McDonalds went up in Moscow, I feel like it was decided McDonalds was sort of a ubiquitous denizen of the world. The McDonalds didn't surprise me here, but this did. The best part about it of course is that it's completely the Japanese imagination of what it means to be American. The names are all Japanese-ascribed western adjectives. The Big Melty. The Melty Deluxe. Melty's a popular adjective. Customer service is also wildly different here, but we'll get to that later...though I will say hearing a chorus of "Arigato gozaimasu!" in six high-pitched voices all in unison as you leave any place...takes some getting used to. Lindsay, having been in small-town Japan for 7 months, was thrilled to see something North American, and left with a root beer and a smile.
Once we got back to Naha city, and found a place to park for less than a billion dollars (no easy feat) we decided to walk up to the main strip and have a look around before bed.
This was the Japan I expected...though because Naha is such a tourist town, the...Japanese-ness of souvenirs and things is cranked up to 11 for the sake of the foreigners.
Except for driving on the wrong side of the road, some parts of Japan can fool you, though it's always the little differences that pull you back. Seeing vending machines, completely unmolested on every corner, in every alley, on every street. They all sell cold coffee, pop, energy drinks, beer, and cigarettes. In Canada those would never survive graffiti, theft, and general mistreatment. There are NO garbage cans, anywhere...and also no garbage. People would never throw something away on the side of the road, that would be a terrible reflection of who that person is. All the signage is in Kanji, sometimes with accompanying Hiragana. The traffic lights are kind of odd. You can approach a red light that also has a green arrow pointing straight ahead, and you can go. Everyone smokes. Taxis are pretty polite drivers. There are almost no birds, but billions of cicadas, and the list goes on and on.
There are lots and lots of little things to remind you where you are. It's only when you stop to do something like read a sign, buy a snack, or cross the street (you'll look the wrong way) that you remember "Holy crap. I'm in Japan. This is weird."
-Jeff
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