Day Thirteen: Sanya to Okinawa

We flew over from Sanya to Okinawa. After landing, we had a lengthier customs procedure than in the other countries, because we were switching from an international flight to a domestic one. Once we were through, we headed straight into the city and walked down to the main shopping street, Kokusai-dori, where the first thing we did was go for lunch at a little izakaya. It was a good way to start the trip.

Kokusai-dori is lined with souvenir shops and awamori stalls and shisa lions everywhere you look, so we spent a while just wandering through it.

From there we made our way over to Naminoue Shrine, which sits on a cliff right above the sea. It’s the most important shrine on the island, and gave us a little taste of all the shrines we’ll probably see during our seven days in Japan. We finished the day at a teppanyaki restaurant eating wagyu, which was genuinely excellent.

Day Fourteen: Okinawa 

The next day we gave over entirely to the war.

We started out at the old Japanese Navy Underground Headquarters, which is a network of tunnels that the navy dug by hand into the hillside, and it’s where they made their last stand in 1945. You walk down into it through narrow concrete passages. In the tunnels, you can still see the marks the grenades left on the walls in the rooms where the officers took their own lives at the end rather than surrender.

From there we went to the Himeyuri site. This is the memorial to a group of schoolgirls, students and their teachers from two local girls’ schools, who were pulled in as a nursing unit during the battle and sent to work in the field hospitals set up inside the caves. Most of them didn’t survive, a lot of them in the final days once the order came to disband and they were left to fend for themselves out in the open. The museum is built around their own testimonies and photographs, and it tells the whole thing very plainly without dressing any of it up.

Afterwards we drove to the Peace Memorial Park, up on Mabuni Hill, which is where the Battle of Okinawa finally came to an end. The centerpiece is the Cornerstone of Peace, a series of long black stone walls carved with the names of everyone who died in the battle. What makes it different from most war memorials is that it lists everyone, on every side, soldiers and civilians, Japanese and American and Korean, regardless of nationality. There are well over two hundred thousand names. As we were walking along it, we saw that even a Mr. Frey fell.

From there we drove out to Cape Kyan on the very southern tip of the island, where the cliffs drop straight down into the sea. It’s a beautiful spot, though it has its own dark history from the end of the battle, as this was one of the last corners the fighting reached, and with nowhere left to retreat many soldiers and civilians died here, some of them jumping from the cliffs into the sea.

We stopped at Ichiran, the ramen chain, for a quick lunch once we were back in Naha. If you’ve never been, it’s the place where everyone gets their own little booth and you barely interact with anyone at all. The funny thing is that it means everyone can sit on their phone the entire time without feeling bad about it, since that’s more or less the whole point of the design. The ramen was great as well.

This was where we said goodbye to Fabio, who left. After a short afternoon break, we wrapped up the night at a small yakitori place in the city.

All in all, two really good days in Okinawa, one for wandering and one that gave the history buffs among us a lot of reading.