Tonight 3 of my friends from Kansaigaidai University are joining me so I have spent most of the day wandering in the city to find nice and cheap places to drink. The first thing I did is to leave my heavy bag in a coin locker in one of the monorail stations. Naha is a city of about 300,000 inhabitants, but has characteristics of a big city: fairly developed bus and train system, a surprising amount of homelessness and high prices. It gave me the impression that it is a very capitalist city and the disparities between rich and poor is high.
Guided by my lonely planet Japan book, I was looking for the entertainment district of Naha, which is deemed to be the redlight. It was very difficult to find and I first ended up seeing a shrine called Naminoue with a pitiful beach right next to it, with the view destroyed by the highway. There was though a nice park next to it.
On my way back, I decided to turn on one of the narrower streets, and that is how I found the entertainment district. Basically it stretches over 5 blocks and has a handful of lovehotels, pachinko houses and "massage parlors". One man approached me and invited me in his establishment, he was very forceful. I told him I was looking for a good place to drink for tonight when my friends will arrive, and at that point he gave me his business card and asked me to return that night. Only one business beside an old woman was inviting me in her parlor telling me that she had cute girls for 10,000 YEN (around 100$ US). I felt really awkward and kind of sad for the girls being exploited. I heard that most of the woman are Filipino woman used as sex slaves. Again, for a city of 300,000 , there are many traits from a large city. Maybe tourism and large military population has something to do with it.
I definitely can say that there are some sad things about Okinawa and today I noticed some of them. I did went out of my way to find this place and get out of the tourist areas, which is always a learning experience for me.
Shortly after my friends arrived we decided to buy local beer in a nearby supermarket and drink it in a secluded staircase. This is typically not legal, but seemingly not enforced. However, I feel bad because an aged woman wanted to go up the stairs at some point and we never noticed her and after as long as 30 minutes her son came down the stairs to come pick her up. She must have been intimidated and scared of us. She probably concluded that foreigners drinking beer would not care much of an old lady and could actually become violent. Understandingly, some Okinawans must have prejudices on foreigners. I have to admit we were not portraying a good image of foreigners with this kind of activity.
We later headed to a billard place where the bar tender was sleeping on the job; one example of how Okinawans are more laid back. Mainland Japanese also think that relationships are more genuine and intimate in Okinawa and that life is less stressful. In fact, most of the time I talked to locals, they did not have any dialect and I understood them perfectly, but that is only because many come from the Kanto region where standard Japanese is spoken. Native Okinawans are unintelligible from Japanese. This also reminds me that yesterday night around midnight I saw many persons walking drunk on the streets, which is not a common scene in mainland Japan. (except for the drunk salarymen on the trains).
After playing pool and having a few drinks we continued on are intoxication-themed night by going to a Izakaya (Japanese style pub) that clearly advertised 100 yen a beer, but once inside we found out that it was only applicable on certain days of the week (not adverstised). As any major tourist destinations, we had to expect that there would be some mechanisms to draw in tourists and have the trap snap their necks once inside.
Once we were hammered and tired we went back to the hostel and everyone slept their best sleep since being in Japan. We were appeased by the relaxing and laid-back atmosphere of Okinawa.
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