During his first trip to Okinawa in 1959, Taro Okamoto, a widely popular artist even after his death some 20 years ago, visited one of Okinawa's hundreds of sacred places called "Utaki."
He had expected to find something in there. Something symbolic that could have reminded him of the sacredness of the place. Instead, he found "a little patch of open space in a forest, a patch like any other patches of land with nothing particular about it."
That quite ordinary little space without anything indicative of its sacredness, however, moved Okamoto deeply. He was moved so deeply that he coined a famous expression, "vertigo of nothingness (nani-mo-nai-koto-no-memai)," when he wrote a book about that trip a little later.
His book, titled "Okinawa Bunka Ron (Essays on Okinawan Culture)" is one of my all-time favorite books on Okinawa. And I think that famous phrase, "vertigo of nothingness," is the coolest thing that has ever been said about Okinawa.
That is why I paid a tribute to Okamoto and to his famous words when I wrote my last story for my column, "Okinawa as an Architectural Paradise." I titled the last and the 30th story of the series "Vertigo of Diversity" and wrote about how diverse Okinawa's architectural townscape is, where the diversity comes from (its history of being constantly under diverse influences from Japan, China and the United States), and how much that diversity makes Okinawa's scenary uniquely colorful and immensely fun.
If you are interested, the article is here.
Vertigo of Diversity -- Architectural Paradise, Okinawa
