Day 11 In Okinawa

So, working with the Boy Scouts, I tend to be a little more aware of my surroundings and potential hazards that most (y'know, "Be Prepared").  But, really, who does tsunamis and earthquakes better than the Japanese?  I had never experienced either during my two years in Okinawa.  In fact, the only shaker I've ever felt was a 5.4 in the Portland area during my senior year of high school.  Yes, in Okinawa, we (missionaries) got slammed by typhoons every other day during typhoon season, and those were quite fun.  (I vividly recall hurrying out of our typhoon-confinement in our apartment to hit the McDonalds while the eye of the storm moved slowly overhead.  The baffled expressions on the faces of the employees were reward enough for the risk associated with hustling back to the apartment before the eye passed and the back end of the storm hit.)

But this morning, we were awakened by a 7.0 quake.  It didn't feel that big because it wasn't that big by the time it traveled the 22 vertical kilometers and 81 horizontal kilometers (it struck east of Nishihara).  As if the rolling wasn't enough to awake us from our stupor (or, slumber), we were then notified by the local village loud speaker that "a tsunami is coming, but don't worry about you're on the other side of the island."  Even for those who were on the tsunami side of the island, they had little to worry about as the tsunami was only large enough to get a few surfers excited.  

The second shock of the morning greeted me as we sat down for breakfast and I found some goya in my egg thing.  For those of you fortunate souls who have never eaten goya, it tastes like freshly mowed lawn.  Really bitter and really...green tasting.  Apparently, it is one of the secrets to the long living Okinawans.  Their average age is about 187 years old, but if you have to eat goya to get there, pass me the meat and gravy, and let me die at 72.  (Seriously, though, it was not uncommon for me to chat it up with an 100 year-old obaa working in the sugar can fields.)  The rest of the breakfast foods served to us were nothing like the cereal and milk I am used to.  Yeah, there was an egg something-or-other with goya in it, but other than that and the reddish rice, I don't think I could identify exactly what I ate.  Most of it was pretty good, though.

After breakfast, we went up to Hedo Misaki, one location I never had the opportunity to go to while serving on a bike.  I tried to convince one of my companions in Gushikawa that we could make it up there and back on a P-Day, but he demurred.  Having driven it now, I'm convinced we would have been hard pressed to pull it off without having to stay the night in the Ishikawa (or even Nago) apartment on our way back.  Besides which, we never would have gotten permission to leave our zone for that purpose.  Traveling down the east coast of northern Okinawa is a bit like driving in the inaka portions of the Oregon coast.  Very rugged, very beautiful, and very lonely.

Every once in a while you would run across a small pocket of population which made you wonder where they went for groceries...until you realized that they do it the old fashioned way - they catch it or grow it themselves.  Every so often (and this, mostly on the west coast on the way up), we'd spot a huge parking lot obviously designed for tour buses with a big and busy looking store there.  I'd ask what it was, and the answer was that it was a souvenir store.  "A what?  Why here?"  A foreign concept to me, but somehow it made sense.  Perhaps it was a glorified rest stop where wearied Japanese tourists would need to stop to use the washroom...and buy a few o-miyage's.  

Either way, we didn't stop at those spots.  Our touristy spots were carefully chosen and mapped out, and it was a great day...despite the early morning wake up call and the goya.

The Gushikawa Apartment