The Quiet Ripple Defines The Pond

One memory of my 50s and 60s childhood that I hold dear is the joy of bread and dripping. Dripping is the fat and meat juice that exudes from roasting meat, usually beef and pork. It gathers in the bottom of the roasting pan and given time cools into a white surface with an underlying stratum of meat jelly. It is delicious on toast, on bread or on the end of a finger. Dripping disappeared from my life for several decades. I think because butchers removed excess fat from roasts. Not so in Okinawa where pork in revered and a big slab of fat and skin on pork joints allows me to recreate the roast pork of my youth. Crackling and dripping.

Breakfast

I realized that I have not been writing much and wondered why. Pressure of work? Er, yes but what’s new? Getting used to Okinawa? Well, yes but still a trillion things to write about.

The real reason is the very comfortable sofa, combined with  the 42 inch screen, combined with download facility.

Sean Fitzpatrick - he used to wipe his sweaty head on referees' shirts.

I can now download all Super 14 rugby matches almost instantly. I can settle on my leather sofa and eat fatty pork whilst watching the Crusaders play the Cheetahs. The best of New Zealand rugby against the best of South African rugby in amazing clarity.  Few scrums, fewer line outs, dazzling speed and handling. Wow!

Anticipation

So this is why I have not blogged so much.  I am couch rugby whipped.

Villain of the piece

March 17 is St Patrick’s Day. This is a festival that never really swum into my ken until I went to California. There it is big time with green beer, green grass, green whatever. The American influence has made it also relatively big time in Okinawa. Do they celebrate St Patrick’s Day in Ireland?

Brought here from Brazil by Okinawan diaspora

The Islanders – Okinawa’s best Irish Traditional Band – are playing. I set off and pass many beautiful trees covered with OTT yellow flowers. My learned sister informs me that they are Silver Trumpet Trees.

The sun is setting. It is a very soft evening. I stop to watch.

Stringed instruments, perfumes,
winecups, lips, long hairs, eyes - mere toys
that are destroyed by time, toys! Frugality, loneliness,
labour, meditation, prayer and renunciation,
ash that time will blow away,
mere ash!

It really was a spectacular sunset.

We then play from 8:00 to 2:00.  

What fun! These Okinawans really go for it.

Hooray for early christian saints

Let me introduce to you

How all occasions do inform against me to speed/spur? my dull colonoscopy.  People have been telling me to have one for years but I never got around to it.  Today I did.

The preparation start the night before when you swallow a huge dose of Japanese laxative, which comes in a bottle that looks as if it is for eye drops. You awake with only one thing on your mind. You then mix up 2 litres of slimy liquid and drink it. This keeps you very near the toilet all morning.

Lubricant

Off I go to the clinic place and get dressed up in charming Japanese robes which feature shorts with an un-laceable slit at the derriere. “No anesthetic!” I cry because I prefer pain to the hassle of getting someone to drive me home.

I lie on my side as a charming doctor inserts a Nikon D90 into my rectum and manipulates it around my colon until it reaches the entrance to the small intestine. In front of me is a screen on which I can follow the camera’s progress in real time.

It looks just like this.

Hai!

No pain – just a feeling of unusuality.

The movie is worth the money.

Clinic in Okinawa at 4:00. Notice the queues.

Sunday turns out to be cold windy and just perfect for doing nothing. When I say doing nothing this is actually far from the truth. Just nothing that is usually acknowledged as doing something.

The first thing I do is read. Reading is now a difficult thing to do. There is a sense of guilt that accompanies sitting on the sofa in the morning and reading. Shouldn’t I be riding my bike, diving, gardening, working? No I read. It is wonderful.

I also snack on Sashimi

The book records the opinion of 19th century western visitors, ” The visitor was invariably struck by the absence of arms or incidents of violence, by the unfailing courtesy and friendliness of all classes, by the intelligence of the gentry, and by the absence of thievery among the common people.” Holds true today.

At 2:61 I stop everything and maintain a minute’s silence in memory of the Great Eastern Earthquake. A year ago.

I watch “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”

The fall will kill us

I eat lunch.

Sagata!

I clean the dearest thing to my heart – a flute made by Willis and Goodlad between 1826 and 1830.

I like cleaning things

Silvo is the best silver cleaner

History and footjoint

God bless cold, windy, Sundays

As you all know Okinawa was essentially an American colony from 1945 – 1974 when it was handed back to  Japan. During that period a lifestyle evolved that reminds me of the ‘pied noir’ culture in Algeria – ruling rich minority established by guns in idyllic situation of beach and sun some long way away from the mother culture. Hedonism, style, enjoyment, self belief whilst encircled by an alien civilization.

The traces of that period are still evident in Okinawa. Drive in restaurants, old film posters, beach bars, archaic ads.

Hail the Chief

Wampum

The Coconut Moon - still going after all these years

Check out excellent article in the NYT on the same theme, sent to me by Arnoux sensei.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/world/asia/in-okinawa-some-still-toast-era-of-us-control.html?_r=1&hp

World Famous Photographer Satoru san comes to stay. We go to a fantastic restaurant.

This is the Restaurant's card. I am told that the kanji means "From the sweat of my hand" thus we care.

We sit on the floor and to my growing amazement I can now do this pretty well.  Misa san comes too. The food is truly wonderful. Each delicacy is served in a hand made pottery bowl. The staff are smiling and natural and as only Okinawans can be. The restaurant is an old wooden house on the sea. They give us rum distilled on Ie Jima. Never tasted rum before on Okinawa but it makes sense as there is so much sugar cane.

Sartoru san

Sashimi, Sea Grapes, Fish

What I eat - look at the bowls

Misa san

http://thi-anda.com

Here is a nice article in a nice and very influential publication.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Science-Institute-in-Okinawa/131025/?key=SW17KFdhMXZAZ3pkNDdAYTcAOCc7YhpyZCYaOiwnblFQFg%3D%3D

The old wolf has not yet missed his buck.

Highland Summer

A learned colleague has a enviable collection of fossilized shells in his office. He tells me where to go to find them. It sounds very easy. You go to a certain beach on a remote island on the East coast of Okinawa and there in grey muddy cliffs you find the fossils.

Barely recovered from the morning dive I mount Big Red and off we go. The first thing we stumble upon is a party. Not sure what was going on but great dancing. Spring is here.

King Billy

I bike across long bridges spanning turquoise lagoons, stopping to admire birdlife.

Dudes! Eurasian Curlew

The big ones are Greater Sand Plovers and the little ones are Ruddy Turnstones. Happy happy joy joy. Click on the photo for close up.

Rock with shrine

I get to the island and meander.

The shrine on the hill

Inside. There are a lot of signs that I cannot read. But this place is clearly heavy duty.

Old Ryukyu fishing boat

But I have seen,

Pointing her shapely shadows from the dawn,

An image tumbled on a rose-swept bay,

A drowsy ship of some yet older day;

And, wonder’s breath indrawn,

Thought I – who knows – who knows – but in that same

(Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new

– Stern painted brighter blue -)

That talkative, bald-headed seaman came

(Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar)

From Troy’s doom-crimson shore,

And with great lies about his wooden horse

Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course.

Another. Very long, very narrow. I have been told that this length corresponds to the usual swell.

I buy freshly harvested garlic and tomatoes. It is the 4th March.

I find the beach.

On the Beach

This is how to find it:

http://maps.google.com/maps/myplaces?hl=en&ll=26.318883,127.964458&spn=0.012155,0.023303&ctz=-540&t=h&z=16

I ferret

I try hard

I find one tiny shell

Who cares! What a great day. I ride back into the sunset thinking about the evening’s meal which will be fish soup with salad.

Oichi

So, today is a very springlike day. After weeks of  general grey and weather that is best described as Argyll August, the sun has returned, spreading blue all over the sea.

Noon today

This one bit me

I go diving with my new mask with prescription lenses. I can see. It makes an amazing difference as previously I could only guess and fear what was out there whereas I can now gaze  stout Cortez-like with wild surmise.  Thanks James.