Birthday Perorations in Okinawa

On my birthday, I treated myself to a double cheeseburger at McDonalds. I was walking around that morning and I got hungry. If you were in Kokusai St. in downtown of Naha City, Okinawa, Japan, you’d discover that even if you wanted to treat yourself to a good meal because it’s your birthday, budget and prices will prohibit you, and you’ll quickly discover that McDonalds’ is the cheapest place to eat. And so on the day I turned a year older, I had me a burger with fries and a large diet soda.

Playing the tourist at Kokusai Street, Naha City, Okinawa

It was my plan to spend the day by myself. And of all places, I spent it on a location where the exotic characters that left me illiterate and child-like, and the unknown language made the aloneness virtually complete. It was a strange and yet compelling experience, an existential exercise one needs to subject oneself occasionally. When the familiar is taken away, and the crutches of the usual are displaced, one is forced to confront that which cannot be taken out – the Cartesian self. So, with only myself as company, I began to explore Okinawa, and the exploration soon became a brooding inward journey to self. It was an odyssey long overdue.

Kokusia Street (International Street) surprises, and delights, and shocks ($4 for a bowl of soba!). It is a flood of sensory delights with its vibrant colors and flourishes. It is mainly a commercial district with the garish and the vulgar blends effortlessly with that which is truly sublime and artistic. Kokusai at some point became the microcosm of my Japanese experience (of course they say it is totally a different scenario in Tokyo and other places in Japan, but I was where I was) – unfamiliar, beautiful, exhilarating. At some tucked-away corner, a tiny garden with a fountain and a colorful horse sculpture waits to be discovered, while high school girls in their impossibly short skirts try to act cool and sophisticated as they explore the street and where characters out of a Fellini movie (or should I say, Kurosawa?) mill about. The surreality of the moment was further intensified when a man in full skiing attire (mask, overalls and boots) strode by as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

I turn a corner and suddenly I was at the public market – wide, labyrinthine, full of curious things. I have reached the epicenter of this throbbing metropolis, its heart. I sense a vibration quite different from what I am used to. I feel a beat not quite the same one I march to. I gawk at people as they walk by, seemingly involved in their own private world of subsistence and my sense of otherness is magnified by just how familiar yet bewildering the ways things are in this side of the world. It was a disconcerting feeling – this experience of otherness. I was the foreigner. I was the outsider observing the way things go, and the most mundane of things like the act of selling, or street signs or the fishes at the wet market take on significance and mystery that those who live there no longer notice. As I was showing the pictures I took at the market to my friend who was born and who lived in Okinawa all her life, laughed and asked “Why did you take pictures of these? These are ordinary things!”

The public market as the heartbeat of the city

But this disconcerting feeling of otherness is not entirely unpleasant. Some of it I welcome. I am anonymous. I can be someone else. I remember a Luis Joaquin Katigbak story of a man who lost his wallet and went around the mall trying on new identities. I can be someone and can look at myself from an outsider’s perspective and see what I have become. It was my birthday, and therefore was ripe for some introspection (the character on the story was having his birthday as well by the way). And this is what I have come to conclude: The steps that brought me here, in this place, at this time did not happen just because of sheer happenstance. Other things came into play. It was a result of a process that took years in the making – the tentative friendships and connections that were made, the opportunities for growth, the providential hand of Him who is the architect of our lives, and many others. We are the sum total of moments and specific details that only belong to us, and yet are connected, woven to a tapestry of human existence. Can you separate yourself from all these circumstances that made you who you are? I do not think it is possible nor advisable. I am who I am, regardless of unfamiliarity and otherness, shaped, hewn and carved from my very own contextual existence that is bounded by time and space, and yet an essence of transcendence becomes an integral part of my life. And these become the molecules and the moments of the kaleidoscope that make up these sensory revelations.

Perfect way to end a perfect day: a double flat tire on our way home, near midnight. My sympathies to our new-found friend, Tracy whose car needed two brand-new tires and rim. That's Tita Joyce Gray, co-adventurer in the land of the rising sun.