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Having lived in Japan for four years it is difficult for me to single out one day as my “best day” in Japan.  My day-to-day life was lived in Okinawa. Okinawa, though legally and politically part of Japan, is in many ways a different country where the people happen to speak Japanese. While in Japan I did take five trips to see “mainland Japan” and while talking about those trips might be interesting and certainly more lighthearted, I feel it does a disservice to ignore the people and places of the island which formed the core of my Japan experience.

I’d been on the island less than six months and aside from a few business trips into Naha and one foray up to Nago, I’d seen very little of the island. I met a friend on a pen pal site online, Rina, who worked in the local tourist industry as many people do. She spoke English as well as Japanese which helped smooth things over. She was from Kochinda, a town on the southern end of the island. One weekend day she suggested a trip south. “We will go to Himeyuri monument,” she said.

I knew Okinawa had been the site of a horrific battle in WWII. We would also visit the Peace Prayer Park that day and the very excellent museum there. But the word himeyuri meant little to me beyond the obvious translation “princess lily”. After a drive of two hours, we arrived at a small park like place situated between the usual tourist shops filled with shisa and beni-imo tarts and Ryukyu glass oddly made in Vietnam. My friend explained to me that several hundred nursing students had died in the caves there during the battle and this was a memorial. Given the ferocity of the battle I would not have been surprised if the entire island was covered with memorials to the war, and it is.

My father is something of an amateur historian, and WWII is a favorite field of study. So, I’ve seen museums on the subject in the US, and later I would see the museum at the controversial shrine of Yasukuni in Tokyo. Each tells the same history with a slightly different perspective. What is different about Okinawan war memorials is that history is not told from the perspective of the victors, nor the conquered, but the victims. When you round the gaping hole of the cave entrance where so many once took shelter and enter the museum, there is little discussion of the weaponry, or strategy used by the opposing Japanese and American forces.

The “nursing students” were not volunteers, they were high school students the same age as the ones I was teaching, who were conscripted into serving in the Japanese army hospitals and then abandoned to the battlefield when the situation became hopeless. The museum cases are filled with pieces of their uniforms, school pictures, sewing kits and small mementos of happier times that they brought with them and were later found in the caves where most of them died.

As I said, the memorial is located in what has become a strip of tourist development along the major route around the southern tip of Okinawa. Less than 1 km down the road, I spotted a building decorated with an enormous flower hat, the type worn by Okinawan court dancers when the island was an independent kingdom.

I asked to stop and Rina obliged. It was a shop of Ryukyu-shikki, or Okinawan lacquer ware.  Maybe you are familiar with the type from Kyoto. The Okinawan style is more garishly colored and covered in stylized native flowers, like the hibiscus. As we walked up and down the aisles of brightly colored bowls and bento boxes, my friend Rina explained to me. “Only old people buy this now; young people don’t like this style anymore,” I thought about the young Japanese people I knew in their tiny ikea-inspired minimalist apartments, and understood what she was saying, but I thought it was beautiful. Later, I became a very good patron of the Naha branch of the shop. I think the shopkeepers always remembered me because I was their only Japanese speaking foreign client. The stuff is expensive because it is labor intensive and handmade and I couldn’t always afford to buy much more than chopsticks or a hairpin, but I felt it was important of me to patronize the shop. I always wonder if I go back will it still be there with the shop ladies serving sanpin-cha and small bricks of the black cane sugar to their customers.

The last stop on our southern adventure was Seifa-Utaki, a sacred site both during the present and the Ryukyu Kingdom. Because of the battle there over 65 years ago, very little of Okinawan material culture survives. The castles and other “historic sites” tourists are led to are all very carefully restored reproductions.  All that stands at Seifa-Utaki are rocks. The rituals performed there during the Ryukyu kingdom are largely forgotten, but Rina thought it was important to take me there.

With a large part of their material culture destroyed during the war, Okinawa of the present and the future is largely built on memory, the memory of those who survived, and won’t forget.  One of the great experiences of travel is to discover how we define ourselves as people by what we chose to remember, and what we chose to forget.