Junk Food!

I'm not really sure why, but there are vending machines everywhere in Okinawa, everywhere. And they all sell drinks or cigarettes:

I like the Georgia brand Vintage iced coffee (ice-u ko-hee)

but I've never tried the THORPEDO:


Crunky tastes like a Nestle Crunch bar

Glamatic and Whiteen are pretty okay. Much easier on your mouth than the Xylicious which a friend in Hawai'i described the intense mint flavor as, "having your tongue attacked by ten samurai." But, in Xylicious' favor I have to say having a gum that whitens your teeth that is black is pretty cool.

Shisa Dogs

The picture in the masthead I took when I first visited Okinawa in 2007 and I didn't really know much other than these lion/dogs were a traditional Okinawan decoration/amulet. They are everywhere:

at intersections

at bridges (this is leaving Ikei Island)

Entrances (this is from Ocean Expo Park)

this one is at the entrance to the Peace Park's Peace Museum.

The story of the shisa is a really interesting one and I suggest you read more at this wikipedia entry.

Coffee Jelly Frappuccino and the Meaning of Personhood in Japan

This is Starbucks Japan's newest product offering. It looks kinda like a Frappuccino, but there's something weird going on in the bottom, right?

According to their website it's, "a jelly-filled cup of Frappuccino fun." I worked for about 7 years at Starbucks before and during my college years and so I had to try this.

My initial hope was that it would be like a Frappuccino and bubble tea, y'know? I love Frappuccinos (that's how I ended up working at Starbucks, oh the magic of the Rhumba Frappuccino) and I love taro bubble tea - put the two together, it must be delicious, yeah?

Well, the jelly is exactly that. I was hoping this was an artifact of translation (since I've yet to learn what you call those "bubbles" or "pearls" in bubble tea in English) and was really not prepared for the coffee jelly. They scoop it into the drink and then add Frappuccino to it. The jelly is not very sweet, and that's a good thing because the Frappuccinos are terribly sweet.

For those of you wondering about Japanese cuisine, this drink is a great entry point. The Japanese love texture, seemingly above all else. That's why you can have a beautiful-looking meal and bite into it and realize it's cold (which is what happened one morning when I ordered the French breakfast at a lovely hotel here). The point is not that the flavors together enhance one another - unlike in Chinese cooking or in Italian sauce making - but that each ingredient really speak for itself and being brought together it is aesthetically-pleasing.

The site, then, of what is good and beautiful in Japanese food is not primarily in the mouth. Or maybe more true, the palate is not so simply localized and instead exists throughout the body in a manner that we simply don't understand as Westerners on first encounter (we've yet to develop our palate). This lack of refinement is already known when the Japanese deal with Westerners, that's why we can completely blunder our social interactions - they have the same attitude of permissiveness when they raise their children. But, at some point, just as with Japanese children, we will be expected to start behaving properly and demonstrating our cultivation of what it means to be Japanese, their mores, their language (verbal and nonverbal). This social sense of who we are, I would argue, is fundamentally more of an aesthetic ordering than what we in the West are expected to demonstrate as we become who we are.

Grafitti in Okinawa

in Takahara at the Kanahide/Toys R Us

The following are from a stroll through Chatan, south of America Village:






The above is from the parking lot of Jet City Burgers, which has to be my favorite place to eat so far because they always have interesting music and supremely nice folks working there; and it's on the freakin' beach!

Apologies for Radio Silence

Please accept my apologies for not having posted anything here for the last two weeks or so (and since my readership is largely family, I promise to get you a nice gift from Japan). I was asked to give a paper at the University of Hawai'i on April 12 as part of the Comparative Continental Philosophy Circle's celebration of Graham Parkes and this has kept me very busy over the past month. You can read the working paper here.
Today is a national holiday so I will churn out some posts I've been sitting on for the past month.

War Is Over if You Want It

Okinawa is an occupied island. And this can be read in two ways: the U.S. controls, what seems to be, most of the island (and so there are really large bases all over the place - in fact, you can't google maps the northern part of the island); but the Japanese also occupy Okinawa. The Okinawans are a distinctly different ethnic group and the Japanese are very quick to point out they aren't "really Japanese." But that's alright, ultimately, because teh Okinawans are a peace-loving people. They erect war memorials to all sides of the WWII conflicts and make concerted efforts to discuss peace making at all public venues. In the spirit of the Okinawans I present the following:

Here's a link to what seems to be the shortest war in history (38 long minutes)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War

Here's a link to a story about a french nuclear physicist that staged a one man invasion of the island of Sark in Britain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sark

I just thought you'd like to know that the world is big enough for these kinds of events.

From the above, we get this interesting legal device; maybe the Uchinanchu (Okinawans) could use it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clameur_de_haro

What happened to my music posting thingy? I'm listening to "Illinois" by Sufjan Stevens and I wish that I had some new music.