Have Cheap Luggage, Will Travel

Lessons from Okinawa and Nichole

After spending the last 9 days in Okinawa, Japan (a small island south of the mainland), I have so many blogs that are rolling around in my head but I will try to consolidate them to a collection of concise thoughts for now.

What I learned about Okinawans:

They pave their road in asphalt made of sea shells - They are surrounded by one of the largest coral reefs in the world and have a ton of it lying around. The Japanese know how to be efficient that is for sure.

They take a 2 hour naps in the afternoon – The crazy thing about their napping is that if they are working outside, they just lay down on the ground right there.

America nearly killed everyone on the island once – Being in Okinawa was really embarrassing for me most of the time I was in town because I was an American. First off, my brother-in-law is a Marine and is stationed there. 75% of our military presence in Japan is on the island of Okinawa and Okinawa constitutes less than 1/10 of the land mass for Japan. So basically, Americans have over run the island which is only 65 miles long. The worst part of this is why we are even there in the first place.

In the battle for the Pacific during WWII, we bombed the crap out of that island in order to get a foothold to attack. When I say that I really mean it. In the first 24 hours of the Battle of Okinawa, we dropped almost 4,000 tons of artillery shells on the island. More than 1/3 of the civilian population of Okinawa lost their lives. To be sure they took many of our soldiers with them, but it was still daunting to see.

I visited the underground tunnels where the Okinawan military made its last stand. They had a museum there that had pictures of the villagers that were maimed by the bombing. There were a lot of kids. Most of the 4,000 soldiers that made their last stand in those tunnels committed suicide over their defeat. I put my fingers in holes blasted in the tunnel walls from grenades that helped with those suicides. I felt a little bit like a Nazi visiting a Holocaust museum.

What I learned about me:

I want to be a mom worse than I knew - My sister has a 6 month girl and 4 year old boy. Sometimes when we would be running around, I would have my niece on my hip with my nephew’s hand in mine and I loved it. While I was there, I changed poopy diapers, kissed scrapes, made food. I tell my friends all the time about how I can’t wait to be a mom but that feeling just multiplied by a million.

I love my sister more than I knew – On the plane back home I felt what can only be described as intense sadness. I missed her and her family so bad that I wouldn’t let myself think about them for fear of bursting into tears. More than once while I was there, I considered what I would have to do to just stay over there. Running through scenarios of how I could dump my life in exchange for a life with them made me realize how bad I want her to live by me.

There is more to come but this is the stuff I needed to get off my chest right away.