渡名喜村 (Tonaki Island)

For those of you who haven't figured it out already (mom:-) you can see a bigger version of a picture by clicking on the tiny one.

Sunset over Tonaki Island from the top of one of its two mountains. It was a cloudy day, but a sudden break in the clouds gave us a glimpse of the sunset!


This past 3-day weekend I spent visiting "Tonaki Jon": a fellow JET who lives on the small island of Tonaki, a 2-hour ferry ride from the port in Naha on the main island. Despite the short distance, the contrast between Jon's island life and my own is severe.
Below, a shot of the inhabited area of Tonaki as well as the port, taken from the top of one of the island's 2 mountains.
Whereas Ginowan is basically a city that blurs into a giant metropol on either side, stretching from Naha to Okinawa city along highway 58, Tonaki has a population of (almost!) 500 people. Jon teaches at the only school on the island, where he has a total of 47 students, ages 5-15. When it comes time to go to high school, the kids have to seperate from their families and move to the mainland. Every MWF morning at 6.30 the citizens of Tonaki gather for community stretching and... sweeping. There are friendly barrels filled with straw brooms lining the islands dirt roads. Everyone knows Jon. Most of the obaachans (little old ladies) on the island are desperately worried about his immediate survival, in fact. It seems a man alone is not capable of living long in Japan. So every few days, Jon finds homemade meals sitting on his doorstep, left by the Good Fairies of Tonaki. Sometimes, he even finds his shoes (which, in a rush, he left in a disarray heaped before his door) nicely straighted upon his return.

Above and left: this is what the "main street" of Jon's island looks like... actually they all look identical except that the main street has cute little night-lights along the sides.

Jon has his own traditional Japanese style house, as well as a large garden with papaya trees and a hechima vineyard. Hechima is loofa: Okinawans eat this vegetable instead of washing themselves with it like we do. I think it's actually quite tasty, though Amy Sherman has some serious complaints about it. かめ- かめ-! Amy.


LEFT: Jon holds one of Tonaki's many butterflies for one of his young students to inspect. She is feeding it a flower (coming in from the left!)

Tonaki is a beautiful little island. There are deserted beaches, 2 mountains (both of which we hiked) and a lot of interesting flaura. The first day when we were out on the beach, we ran into 2 of Jon's students with their mother and baby sister. They immediately invited on their lunch-time outting to the top of mountain #1. As we rambled along, the mother gave us a detailed lesson on the wildlife of Tonaki (she was a true expert!) and told us stories of how she used to play in these very same spots when she was a girl. At the top of the mountain, she pointed out plants and explained how her grandmother had known how to eat the (poisonous) fruit... though young people are losing the knowledge nowadays. At the top of the mountain, she made us grass reed bracelets like she had done with her friends in her youth. Jon tried to teach his little student how to reproduce the bracelet... this failure was turned to success by becoming an engagement ring for the 2 year old.


If you are a gaijin and hungry on Tonaki, all you have to do is leave your house and wander around aimlessly. Within a very few minutes, some islander will approach you offering a free meal. This happened to us at least twice.

The most interesting part of my visit to Tonaki was the Nighttime Spear Fishing expedition. For a full review of this sport, please read the article on Jons blog. Jon had already told me about his underwater adventures before I came to Tonaki, and despite my intense fear of water, I was determined to venture forth and conquer! Just as I had suspected, the experience turned out to be the most terrifying thing Id ever done (with the exception of 24 hours in 2001 that I spent with Crazy Henriette, the German autobahn, the Dutch police, that seedy nighttime wharf and sleeping in our broken down car in the middle of crack-ville of Amesterdam... I can tell you more about that in person if you so desire). In the middle of the night, Jon donned wis wetsuit and I (lacking a wetsuit) donned several layers of clothing. We also donned snorkels and big flippers on our footsies. Jons extremely friendly teacher, Nigo-sensei, picked us up and drove us out to the furthest point of the island. We parked the car and walked up the rocky beach by moonlight. We waded out into the ocean. Each adventurer was armed with an underwater flashlight. Jon and Sensei were armed with harpoon-like fish spears as well (you could both hold and cock them using only one hand and a rubber device, leaving the other hand free for the flashlight). I had passed up on the spear, knowing full-well that I would be dedicating all of my attention to not completely freaking out under-water in a choral reef in the middle of the night. Not to mention figuring out how to use the snorkel, which I had never used before. In fact, it occurred to me and I watched Sensei give a wave goodbye, and contemplated with a heavy heart the significance of his last words of friendly advice (`dont touch the dangerous fish`) I hadnt really EVER swam with my head underwater... Id certainly never had my eyes open underwater... and the longest I had kept myself afloat at all in the last 6 years had probably been the 5 minute Swim Test that Id had to pass to graduate from college.

Here is a foto of an Okinawan coral reef... I didn't take it, nor is it the one where I was, but it's just to give you an idea, incase you've never been underwater like me!

Wow, underwater life sure is cool. Being a land dweller, I never think about what the underwater world is like. I imagine it being mucky gray water and some sand and that's about it. WROOOOONG. The Discovery Channel had it right on this one. Plants, coral, fish everywhere, bright colors, clear water. The thing that freaked me out the most was the perspective change... even though we never left waters in which I could stand, underwater it looked like it was about 15 ft deep! I didn't believe that I could touch the bottom if I wanted to so kept trying to reassure myself. Well, actually I had to stand up every 10 minutes or so to stop from completely freaking out and hyperventilating, just because I was underwater. Luckily staying afloat was no problem, since those flipper things basically turn you into a fish. Don't have to do any work at all!

It was about all I could do to trail around after Jon and his flashlight beam, as he darted around like a merman with his triton, jabbing at fish right and left. He kept pointing out really interesting things to me that were cool but mostly just freaked me out more... like this huge spikey purple critter stuff to the side of a rock, or this puffer fish that he found sleeping, and very kindly poked at for a good while so that it would puff up for me... he caught 2 fish. I was in charge of holding the dead fish bag, since I wasn't hunting myself. I couldn't make myself watch the little fishies die, though I knew we would eat them and they wouldn't go to waste. I wasn't a very good dead-fish-bag-holder, in the end. After an hour, it was starting to get really cold in the water, and I'd about reached my absolute no freakout limit with the water business. We headed home to warm showers! The next day, Nigo sensei brought us sashimi, made with the very fishies we'd caught, and I must say, it was delicious. I am on my way to becoming a fan of sashimi (raw fish), though I had quite a bit of trouble downing it when I first arrived here.

The next day, we hiked mountain number 2 with Nigo sensei and his family. This was a longer and more strenuous hike (since we'd actually cheated and drove up mountain #1 the day before). But it sure was worth it... at the end we saw a very nice view of Tonaki and even some sunset. We also played with Nigo sensei's children, who are cool lil chittins. I'll tell ya, those Tonaki kids sure know how to count to 10 in English. If there's one thing they can aaaaaaall do, it's count to 10. That evening, we decided to have another go at night fishing... this time without getting wet. We grabbed Jon's fishing pole and mosied down to the peer. Apparently fishing at night is really popular on small islands where there is nothing else to do. There were 5 fishing poles already set up on the peer (they attach these glow in the dark things to the ends of the stick at night so they can see them move if they're bitten). However, after a while we decided that the five poles all belonged to this one fellow who'd just laid down on the concrete and was happily snoring away, waiting for a fish to bite. We spent most of our fishing time discussing how the Tonakan would know if he caught a fish, and never got an answer. He didn't catch any and neither did we, but it was good fun all the same. Here is me fishing, another first!

Bye, Tonaki!