Okinawa 2012, pt. 1
On a trip to New York when I was ten years old, I once ate at a massive Chinese buffet in Queens where the only English was a sign on the table reading, “You waste food you pay extra.” I had barely graduated from dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets at the time, so I decided to play it safe by making myself a bowl of mashed peas. One heaping spoonful and an out-of-body experience later, I learned of wasabi. I still consider this my first hallucinogenic experience. Nine years later, I had my second: I landed in Okinawa.
Much like the encounter with wasabi, the discombobulation I felt arriving in Japan took me completely by surprise. I was used to being a fish out of water. Growing up in the military, I moved often enough to make me suspicious I was part of a secret government program to turn a child into a ballistic missile. But there is a difference between being the new kid on the block and the new kid on a planet. It’s the difference between playing charades for fun and playing charades to get a train conductor at a station closing for the night to give you directions to the nearest hotel so you don’t have to sleep on the platform; it’s the difference between eating mashed peas and eating wasabi.
Seeing my parents’ faces in the sea of people waiting at the arrival terminal was almost as jarring as the kerfuffle of customs: it was like a parallel universe. When I got in their car, the passenger seat was on the opposite side, and I kept having to remind myself I was not driving. We stopped by a McDonald’s where the employees wore immaculate uniforms with ties and did not look like they hated their lives. Stop lights only turned green or red and cars would keep going as long as they felt was appropriate. Motorcycles zoomed by everyone on all sides with no heed to lanes. Street signs, store fronts, and billboards were all incomprehensible—both the writing and the pictures. In short, a million things I did not realize I had taken for granted in life were turned on their heads, and that experience continued and continued and continued.
That night, I sat on a hill in my parents’ backyard overlooking the city of Chatan, envisioning the six weeks ahead of me. For the first time in my life, I saw from a traversable distance a hub for thousands of people whose lives I had never considered and could hardly imagine. It felt good. I felt small. I was on the dark side of the moon.