Enamored with Okinawan stones

(click to enlarge)

There is one thing that you can never ever avoid if you are living in Okinawa.

That is ecstatic encounters with
mysteriously beautiful stone structures.

These delightful encounters often happen when you least expect it.

Like when you are strolling through a tiny remote village whose sparse population consists of aged people and their equally aged companion dogs.

It is in one such village that I had my latest encounter with enchanting stone structures.

As with most memorable moments you have in Okinawa, it came as a shock and fascination at the same time.

Shocking because of its outrageously random choice and composition of stones.
Fascinating because of its astonishing beauty as a whole.

I doubt the person who built the steps started with a well-thought-out plan.
More likely than not, the person chose stones and stacked them as his or her inspiration capriciously dictated.

And the result is an enthralling creation that grabbed my attention and gripped my heart deeply.

Standing still and staring at the stones, I felt the stones were whispering some words to me.

"Go with your flashes of inspiration," the stones' voice was sounding like some enlightened guru.

"Don't go with your brian. If you want to let the magic happen."

A Story of Love

"Let's fall in love first," the bridegroom told his bride on the wedding day, "and become husband and wife later."

It was an arranged marriage. The groom, a 23-year-old tax clerk, and the bride, a 20-year-old daughter of a school principal, met for the first time on that wedding day.

Luckily for them, they proved to be a good match. They did fall in love and become man and wife in the true sense of the words.

But their happiness was like a fleeting dream. It ended abruptly when the husband was taken away to a battlefield on a foreign land. Japan was at war.

The wife wrote him everyday. The husband managed to write back once a week.

"Today is our son's birthday. I prayed hard for your happiness."
"I'm imaging how our baby son is toddling."

His last letter was from New Guinea, where he probably died from a disease. His remains never came back.

The wife decided to remain a widow for the rest of her life and has never get married since. She is now 94 years old and writing letters to her dead husband every day.

"My dear. The plum in the backyard is giving off a wonderful scent. I know you are smelling it up there, aren't you?"

 "Thanks to the fine weather, the laundry has dried pretty well. (snip) I remember how I sent you off on that train platform when you were departing for war. The scene comes to my mind in a vivid panoramic image."

**********

The story above is from an article of the Asahi Shimbun Digital.
Every now and then, I encounter words that I treasure in my mind for a very long time. The quote in the first sentence is undoubtedly one of those words.

Dazzling beauty of nothingness

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

Long time no see

Wow. This is my first posting in 6 years. What have I been doing for all these years? The sad and scary fact is, I don't remember many things I've done, which clearly indicates that I've just been idling my time away.

It is very very likely that this posting will be the last posting in the next, say, 6 years, considering my whimsical pattern of doing things, of doing anything, actually. But still, I want to leave, by writing this silly posting, a little footprint of myself as of today, a woman in her late 40s still enjoying the life in Okinawa after 15 years, quite an accomplishment for a person like me who alarmingly easily gets bored.

Here is almost the only thing I've done in the past 6 years. If you are interested in Okinawa or Nihon-go (Japanese) or the Asahi Shimbun newspaper or architecture or, by any remote chance, in me,  please have a look.
http://www.asahi.com/and_M/okinawa_list.html

Cherry blossoms in winter

Shiju no tenarai (taking up something new at 40)

I'm an awfully fickle person. I often take up something new -- like yoga, macrobiotics, classical music -- and devote my time and energy to learning it, but after a while I suddenly get tired of doing it and move on to the next interest. In the world of my ever-changing interests, few things can survive. That's what my past experiences tell me.

So I'm not at all confident that my latest interest, photography, can keep me interested for a long time. I hope it will, at least for some more time, since I've just signed up for a photography class. 

The photos are from a shooting tour we went on recently as part of the class. The place is Sakura-zaka, a nightlife district in Naha. The area is full of things to catch your attention, with its old rusting buildings, dark little alleys, and colorful signs of bars with funny names on them. It is uniquely photogenic and I was really like a kid in a candy store. 

But as I found out later, my photos of this very unique and interesting place are neither unique nor interesting. 

I don't know how I could have made them unique and interesting. I have absolutely no idea. But I know that it must be really hard and take a lot of learning, experience and talent to do that. A friend of mine who is a professional photographer has told me that taking good photos is as difficult as painting good pictures but most people don't understand that and value photos unfairly lower. After my disappointing first shooting tour, I totally agree with him.