I went to Okinawa a couple weeks ago. It was fairly amazing. Above is a picture of the sunset taken from the balcony of the place we stayed. Okinawa is to Japan as Hawaii is to the United States. I was there with the other IES students for four days, and they were a fantastic four days. Below, the top picture is one of the caves that are all over the island. Next is a whale shark at the aquarium we went to, apparently the largest in Japan. Second from the bottom is the castle which used to be the center of the Ryukyu Kingdom, which ruled the Ryukyu islands until the 1800's when Japan absorbed them. That was interesting because most of the castle used a lot of stone, which they were unable to do in mainland Japan due to earthquakes. The bottom picture is the peace memorial. The walls are covered with the names of those who died at the Battle of Okinawa, American soldiers, Japanese soldiers, and Okinawan citizens. The last category made up for half of the casualties at the battle. The museum there was well done and fairly depressing.
I unfortunately forgot my camera in my dorm room, so all the above pictures I took from others on my trip. We also got a chance to do some glassblowing, which is something that Okinawa has become famous for only in the past sixty years. I also do not have any pictures for when we got a chance to play the sanshin, an Okinawan instrument that was the precursor to the shamisen. All in all it was an excellent trip.
A week ago I went on a field trip to Yasukuni Shrine, pictured above. This was the national shrine until a constitution forbidding a state religion was adopted after the war. In it, all the soldiers who have "sacrificed for the Emperor" are enshrined and deified. There is a museum attached dedicated to remembering Japan's fallen soldiers, or more specifically everything that they did that was not a war crime. The place is pretty controversial because it enshrined something like seven class A war criminals. I had a more lighthearted field trip last Saturday to Kamakura, which is just southwest of Tokyo and was the capital a little less than a thousand years ago. We went to a Buddhist temple, the gate of which is pictured below Yasukuni. Below is a Shinto wedding taking place at the shrine we went to following the temple.
That is all the exciting news I have for the past few weeks. I hope to get out a little more in the coming weeks. I still have three or four places on my list of destinations in Tokyo that I hope to get to before I go, but I do have a good deal of work ahead of me. I think I should be able to find time to visit most of them. At any rate, until next time I leave you with the Kamakura Daibutsu (Kamakura Great Buddha). He was two or three stories tall, and apparently quite old.
