Okinawa

I thought I had brought my wallet with me. And I had. But I didn’t have it anymore.

I was in Okinawa. I double-checked when I got back to the apartment, then resigned myself to canceling credit cards and reconstructing my ID when I got back.

Telling my story at dinner, a family friend called the local police station. “They have it,” she told me. “You are lucky a Japanese person found it.”

At the local police station, three officers came out from a back room when we showed up. They had little to do. But the contents of the wallet had already been catalogued in detail, including a quite substantial sum in Japanese yen. I needed to fill out and sign three forms to confirm the contents and their return.

The police said it was customary to give the finder 10-20% of the cash recovered, and I was so grateful to have been spared what would otherwise have been a big dampener on a much-needed vacation, that I wound up giving him 100% of the cash.

The young man turned out to be an engineer working for Bell System. He had seen my wallet on the tarmac of the apartment parking lot, as he drove by. In Japanese, translated to me, he said, “It was laying open like a clam.”

I was in an orderly and safe society, where young children walked or bicycled home from school by themselves, people were exceedingly polite, and even warm, with each other, and lost items were returned to their owners. Our American society seemed in that contrasting light to be chaotic, nearly savage in its economic ethos, and, depending on where you were, risky.

So like the convenience stores. There are three competing chains, Lawson, Family Mart and now 7-11. They are seemingly everywhere. They all serve small, tasty, fresh sandwiches, triangular wraps of cooked rice wrapped in dried seaweed, and have fancy espresso machines. They are, I would say, spotless, have a clean restroom, including bidet, and waiting in line seems to serve as an existential challenge to the staff who walk quickly out from backrooms or elsewhere in the store to open a new register as soon as a person is waiting. Quick, efficient, friendly.

There is little point, it seems, in cooking at home. Small restaurants abound and, in my case, close to the apartment was a take-out place called Hotto Motto that served tasty Japanese dishes, while the local supermarket, a ten-minute walk away, carries a range of fresh sushi and vegetable dishes.

At first, Okinawa, and in particular the area I was in called Chatan, seems like a concrete jumble of buildings beaten up by the ocean weather. But I realized this time that life in that jumble was quite pleasant.

My day would start with a short walk to a nearby park that ran along the ocean. The cool, clear, light-blue water, high in salt content, was immediately soothing to the skin when I started on a long swim. On the way back, I would stop at the Maybe Bakery, where the owner and chef sold French bread and pastries baked there that morning, and poured take-out cups of café-au-lait.

From there back to the apartment on the ninth floor of a building that had the USMC Camp Foster on the back side and a view of the East China Sea on the front side. I would catch up on emails from the U.S. while all our lawyers were fast asleep, and go back to the park for another swim in the late afternoon. 

Especially on the first few days, I would sit on these huge concrete steps that descend from the park’s promenade down to the white sand beach, where bridal couples were having their photos taken nearly every day, and feel the breeze coming off the sea, and sit there for a good while, almost dozing, recovering from weeks of pushing myself and our news service forward, while battling state court clerks all over America.

But it was in the evening that I realized how different the rhythm was here.

After, say, dinner from Hotto Motto and a local light beer and then some Awamori, a drink distilled from long-grain rice and indigenous to Okinawa, I would look out of the floor-to-ceiling opening in the sliding glass windows facing the ocean, see the lights of the other buildings, the darkness of the ocean beyond, the dramatic, low clouds that moved in from the sea almost every night, and the warren of streets below.

Taps is played at nine o’clock, the notes metallic and slightly echoing, as they are broadcast through community loudspeakers. Commercial neon, red and bright green, lights up a few store fronts. An occasional car moves slowly in the side streets. On the boulevard that runs along the seafront, only a few cars pass. Once in a long while, along the boulevard, a police car runs with its lights flashing. The salty, cool breeze comes in from the dark ocean. In all of it, there is a deep peace.

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