O-daiko and Electronics Junk

 I finally got a chance to get out and go for a run! Okinawa was 100% humidity every day with highs in the 80's, and heatstroke didn't sound like a good way to spend my vacation. But with the sun up at 4:30, I was up and out by 5:30, walking for a bit to map out the route, then a nice, easy 3 mile run up and down the Sumidagawa, starting at Sensouji

Kaminarimon is very peaceful at 5:30am

All the jet-lagged tourists, and runners. I wasn't alone out there

I got back and showered, then Sumi and I walked the mile to Ueno and had a real breakfast for the first time since coming to Japan. 

The cheese pesto buns are fantastic.

With a little time to kill before our lesson, we walked down Ameyocho (American Alley) to the Hard Off/Hobby Off store (second hand electronics, clothes, and toys for those just joining the blog) to browse. They had a bunch of pretty cool old stuff.

A Famicom (NES in the US) with an added disk drive.

Vintage Sega consoles

A Neo-Geo in the wild! And an N64 VRS!

These things, if you were a collector or retro game enthusiast, would be impossible to find in the US, and here they are and not stupidly overpriced. The VRS (Voice Recognition System) is an early voice-activation input device for the N64. Quite rare. It was a yellow ball(microphone) that attached to your controller and was supported for exactly two games: Hey You, Pikachu! (pictured here) and Densha de Go! 2 Kōsoku-hen, a...train simulator. You can see why this never caught on in the States.

There was also a lot of Junk there.

That's what they call miscellaneous electronics stuff, like cords, controllers, etc. And they had a ton.

NES TurboTap anyone?

Forty or fifty bins full of stuff like this. If you ever need some bizarre proprietary electronic thing in Japan, Hard Off will likely have it.

After browsing and stopping at Book Off (I found some Zelda "Ultimania" books!) we headed up to Miyamoto Unosuke, the fancy taiko center in Asakusa for our lesson. We thought. Turns out they have a practice studio about a mile from the shop. We were at the wrong place with only a few minutes before our lesson was supposed to start. The nice people at the shop called the studio to let them know we were going to be a little late and got us a taxi and we were only about 10 minutes late. Sho, our instructor for the day, was very good and gave us some concrete techniques to work on in the limited time he had and was a lot of fun!

After the lesson we returned to the shop and made some purchases: a fue for one of our Hibiki members, and....

TimbreTaiko! A combination sound bank and MIDI controller with very nice taiko samples. I looked at one previously, but it was close to $500 with tax and shipping. Well...with the ridiculous exchange rate, no tax, and no shipping, it was about $330 here. It is a standalone practice pad and sounds or hooked up to a DAW it's a taiko sound bank and drum controller. I'm looking forward to using this when writing stuff as well as practicing on the road.

After spending way too much on Taiko stuff, we walked back to Sensouji and sought out some of the best sweets you can find. There is a stand in the shopping street of the temple that sells various fruit related sweets and daifuku.

Mine is strawberries, bananas, and chocolate. Sumi's is strawberry ice cream.

Sumi got VERY offended when a tourist, trying daifuku for the first time and said it was "like marshmallows" They, for the record, taste nothing like marshmallows. The consistency is fluffy and both are sweet and that's about all they have in common. I thought she was going to take the daifuku away from him, because he clearly didn't appreciate how good it was. In any case, their desserts are all real fruit and very good.

After that, we took a pilgrimage to a place very sacred to Sumi.

Kinda hard to miss. This is on Orange Road in Asakusa.

Signs everywhere NOT to take pictures in the store. Good thing no one reads this blog.

Feeling good, full (did I mention Sumi wanted Ichiran again today. I did not complain), and comfortably at home in Tokyo, we retired for the evening. Tomorrow we'll be checking out some interesting limited time events in the city.

Just the kind of thing you see at random spots in Asakusa

Ueno and their pandas

Their very spoiled pandas

In front of a new local burger joint

Traveling Back To Asakusa

 Today was a large amount of travel and...not much else, to be honest. We checked out of the hotel at 10 and took the train to the airport, where we grabbed all of our luggage, did some repacking, and checked most of it in for our flight to Haneda. Japanese domestic air travel is so much nicer than US domestic it's not even funny. Every step of the way is how we should be doing it. I won't go on a rant about security theater and our general paranoia, but this was smooth and relaxing, security was thorough but easy, boarding was easy. We were lucky to have an empty seat between us, so we could even spread out a bit.

Arriving at Haneda, we brought our big suitcase with all the snorkeling gear to the baggage storage desk (this is a more recent thing. You can pay to have them store your large luggage while you travel in the country), then took the monorail to Hamamatsucho, then the Yamanote line to Ueno and felt like we were home finally! Stowing our bags in a locker, we set about on some very important business.

Ichiran ramen. Extra garlic and green onions, Heaven

It's funny reading Japanophiles try to knock Ichiranm, saying it's not all that good, overrated, blah, blah. Not only are they stupid and wrong and even more stupid, here's my take on it: It is NOT the best ramen I have ever had. That was in Kyuushuu. But it is a) very good ramen, b) VERY consistent ramen, c) tonkotsu ramen that I can be sure I can eat it without issues (practically all other ramen has fish, at least dashi), d) even with inflation it is still a very cheap meal that serves as lunch and dinner. I actively miss Ichiran ramen when we are home. American ramen places have been a gigantic disappointment to me since traveling in Japan. They are really bad, too heavy, the pork is a slab of meat rather than a thin slice (I actually get mine without the pork) and they manage to somehow make it oily and think everything "Japanese" needs seaweed. 

So I didn't rant about US domestic air travel, I ranted about ramen. But MAN it was good. And after a week of barely anything satisfying, having curry and ramen back to back days has really hit the spot. But enough about food. We rented an apartment for this trip!

"Urban Heights Tawaramachi"

It's a small studio apartment with everything we need: washing machine (no dryer, typical in Japan), refrigerator, sink and hot plate if we wanted to burn the place down. Larger than a hotel room with more amenities and more privacy and less than many hotels. We're very pleased with it. It's right off the Ginza subway line (2 blocks) and half a mile from Sensouji Temple. Far enough from the tourists (because we, of course, are NOT tourists...) but still close to many things to do.

Tomorrow, we're going to do another taiko workshop, this one an O-daiko lesson from a former Kodo member!

Buses, Taiko, and More Buses

 We spent about 6 hours on buses today so we could take a 1 hour Okinawan (Eisa) taiko lesson. Sounds fair to me.

We left the Chunaumi area at 6:30 this morning and got to the airport around 9:15. Why the airport? Well, we needed to take a local bus for about 90 minutes to the Koza area where there is an Eisa museum and we couldn't drag our luggage with us and needed to transfer buses anyway, so we grabbed some coin lockers and got back on another bus, finally getting to Koza at about 11:15.

Very long story short, Koza is where American troops were staged before deploying to Vietnam in the 60's and 70's and the whole area looks like it. The entire main road north of the museum building is various "gentlemens" clubs and other clubs that would look normal in L.A. but not Japan. Also quite possibly the first pizza restaurant I would consider eating at. It is still near a US Navy base and likely where a lot of them hang out. It was an interesting cultural juxtaposition, but all in all, looked kind of trashy.

The Koza Music Center, on the other hand, is a three story building with the Eisa museum, a radio station, a karaoke club, a recording studio and one of the premier concert venues in Okinawa, a modern 1100 seat theater.

Eisa is kind of all over the place here

Manhole covers

Buses

Statues

Umm...

Eisa is an Okinawan form of drumming and dancing tied closely to the O-Bon odori and stems from a different Buddhist branch than what is seen on the Japanese mainland. It is largely dancing while hitting the drum, with unique techniques and an extensive history and cultural significance to the Okinawan people. They have been holding Eisa competitions annually since 1946 and it has grown into an art form in its own right.

So, we spent an hour stumbling around, trying to hit the drum and move our feet at the same time. And it was a blast!

Ha-i-wa!

It really was fun. We learned just enough to know we don't know anything, but have more of an appreciation of the art form and how they play. Our instructor was excellent. He spoke only Japanese, which wasn't a problem for us, but he was able to speak slowly and clearly so we could understand right away while still conveying his lesson. He made it fun, and because we were the only two taking the class this afternoon, we got to go over the introductory song a number of times and actually start to learn it.

After the lesson, we hopped back on ANOTHER bus and, with a brief monorail transfer, got back to the airport, got our stuff, got BACK on the monorail a few stops to our hotel. We checked in, dropped our stuff off, walked about a quarter mile,

AND THEN!!!!!

Shiawase da

hontou ni shiawase da ne

After over a week with only two actual meal, this was like heaven. Real vegetables! Cooked food! We thoroughly enjoyed our first CoCo Curry experience of 2026. It's been pretty ridiculous with how few food options we have had this past week. But after a plate of curry, all is right with the world. Well, at least in the Y's Inn Naha Oroku Ekimae. Tomorrow, we bid adieu to Okinawa and take a flight back to Tokyo, where we'll bum around for several days and very likely, most probably, will have slightly better food choices.

Kinen Koen

 The whole reason we spent half a day getting to the northern part of the island was to visit Kinen Koen (Ocean Expo Park). It's an indoor/outdoor set of exhibits that spans a few miles and includes the Churaumi Aquarium, a botanical garden, a traditional Okinawan village, and the like. It is also directly next door to our hotel (good planning, Sumi! We'll forget all about the "no food" thing!)

Speaking of no food, our hotel "almost" had breakfast. For ¥500 (about $3.50) they did offer a "breakfast bento" which was basically a very stripped down buffet of mostly carbohydrates. Small waffles, small croissants, small muffins, small...you get the idea. They also had the automatic pancake maker.

90 seconds and you, too, can have a silver dollar pancake

It was not the most underwhelming breakfast I have ever had.

If I let her, there would be about 300 of Sumi's fish pictures from this visit, but I must say the Churaumi Aquarium is one of the best I have ever seen. There are cutting edge researchers there that travel the world with some of their custom made equipment, learning more about a variety of marine animals. They appear to be the only place in the world that has bred a manta ray in captivity, using a special handheld underwater scanner to monitor gestation (they published several papers on this) and so on. They have done this with several species and are currently working on Moray Eels and researching whale shark gestation.

Speaking of whale sharks

Close to 10m long and weighing about 6 tons, he was amazing. It's really hard to get a sense of how big he was without seeing him swim by you, just a few feet away. The giant manta rays in the very large tank with him are 6m across and looked small next to him.

Very quiet and slow to move. We were fortunate enough to get to see him eat. When they do, sometimes they will go vertical, staying in one place and feeding. It was really cool to see. We have a picture from lunch where you can see him in the background.

The exhibits were excellent, both the large fish like the whale shark and manta rays, and the smaller exhibits. The facilities were top notch and other than far too many children whining and crying far too much, it was a really pleasant few hours. Here's a SMALL sample of Sumi's photo collection

They had a "restaurant" in the basement of the aquarium that had tables set up at small viewing stations of the big tank, so you could (for a small ¥1000 fee) reserve a table right next to the tank and watch the fish while you ate.

Yes, we totally did, You can see the whale shark "standing up" in the background

The "restaurant" food.

OK, so mine was a "margarita pizza" that looked like a calzone and tasted like high school hot lunch. Sumi has some explaining to do to the creatures we'd been watching all morning, as she ordered fish and chips. Whose cousin were you eating, hmmm?

After lunch we walked up the Ocean Park and took a look at some of the other exhibits. There was a lot of interesting topiary along the 7.5km route

The old Okinawan village had a lot of recreations of what buildings were like before Okinawa was subsumed into the Japanese empire during the Showa era.

Those are vintage Okinawan cinder blocks...

Lots of nice walkways and flowers all over the place

    

And shuttle buses to take people to the different exhibits.

Cute as they were, we just walked. The final stop was for ice cream. I mean, you SAW the lunch, right?

Pineapple on the left, some odd Acerola and Shikuwasa mix on the right

Back at the hotel, the school still had control of the restaurant, but the lobby was nice...

Tomorrow we are up early to catch a slow bus back down to Naha and then go visit the Eisa Museum and take some Okinawan Taiko lessons!

But before I go, I think more restaurants should advertise with a giant fish head

Traveling up to Motobu

 Today was largely taken up by sitting on boats and buses. We stopped at the tourist center before catching the morning Queen Zamami back to Tomari port. When we arrived, we found this well-mannered gentleman there.

He didn't go in. He just looked in longingly.

Sumi of course couldn't resist petting him. This was his response.

The "feral" cats of Zamami

From there, we boarded a highway bus to take us the 50 miles up to Motobu to the Royal View Chunaumi Resort. It's a fancy name for the hotel we're staying at. In Okinawa, there is no such thing as fast transit. The 50 mile trip was a 2.5 hour bus ride, mostly through urban sprawl. Not the most scenic trip, but it was much better than renting a car. It would have taken even longer unless we also paid for all the tolls along the way, at which point you are just paying 5 times the money for more stress and no real time savings.

So we get to the hotel, and it's quite nice

Open lounge with free soft drinks and popcorn. We spent the better part of an hour looking for where to go eat dinner. It turns out in the off season on a Sunday night up in this mostly tourist area, that's not really an option. I think they must expect you to eat at your hotel. So we tried that. But it turns out that some school had rented out the entire dining hall and many of the common spaces for some school trip. So what we could do was sit in the lounge and smell the food and hear them having a good time.

So for what feels like the 75th time this trip, we found ourselves at a convenience store (a Lawson, this time) searching for something not terribly unhealthy. We ended up with our usual selections of yogurt, bread, ham, cheese, etc. I was sorely tempted when I saw a VERY rare sight in Japan

That, my friends, is peanut butter.

The only thing that stopped me from getting it was the fact that I'm going to be on the road for two weeks as soon as we get back, and will likely be living on PB&J (by choice! Not by necessity), so I passed, but that was the first time I have ever seen it on display.

We ended our day by playing some table tennis in the rec room until the school kids took over for some organized presentation with microphones and slides or something. Either that or the world's most boring karaoke, I couldn't really tell.

Hiking around Zamami Island and Furuzamami Beach

 The rain continued on and off over the night and the wind picked up, making today not a great snorkeling day. But as the rain let up, it looked like a good day to hike up the small mountains and see more of the larger island. We slathered ourselves in sunscreen as the rays come through even on cloudy days like today, and started our hike up Mt. Takatsuki.

The small mountain waas only about 120m tall, so it was mostly one steep climb and a lot of uphill walking. The road reminded us of our bike trips: steep, wet, and us walking up them. It gave us the opportunity to see some other wildlife, including a wide variety of butterflies that never stayed still long enough for a picture, but I have some stock pictures to show what we were seeing.

A typical Japanese mountain road

Impressive

These guys were around a lot.

About halfway up the first peak, we unexpectedly came across the "Tower of Peace", a monument to the lives lost when the Allied forces first landed in Okinawa. Zamami was the first landing zone, right behind Aka.

There were several observation areas on top of Mt. Takatsuki, with nice vistas, even with the clouds and rain.

Not used to such short trips, we decided to walk across the island to Mt. Inazaki and check out that view.

Walking down the mountain on the west side of the island, we came across a goat farm, an evacuation path, some trees with huge fruits, and a small resort that sold local ice cream.

Pandanus fruit from the Screwpine tree (I am not making that name up)

Ama beach. Very quiet today

Blue Seal is like the Ben & Jerry's of Okinawa. They have full scale Blue Seal restaurants.

On the way back to the pension house to shower after hiking in 80 degrees and 100% humidity for three hours, we found Marilyn, Shiro's friend!

With still half a day left and Sumi not being able to stand not snorkeling if there wasn't a typhoon or other major catastrophe, we walked to Furuzamami Beach. This is one of those tourist beaches that is crawling with people during vacation season. White sand, clear water, small coral reef. Fortunately? for us, it was off season and actively raining. Sumi dove in while I walked the beach.

Influencers posing and taking photos. For the entire two plus hours we were there.

The beach was gorgeous, the sand a mixture of old ground up coral (i.e. fish poop) and the remains of tiny aquatic creatures, which is what nearly all white sand beaches in the tropics are made of. It was deep sand and difficult to wade through. Large bluffs were found on either side, and it was sheltered from the wind and currents pretty well.

A rare wild Sumi spotted in her natural habitat

It was a relaxing way to end the day. Sumi got yet more fish pictures, I got to walk on the beach and enjoy some silence (our pension house is many things, but quiet is not one of them).

Cuttlefish. One of the oddest creatures in the sea.

Thus ends our self-exile in the Kerama islands, where the water is clear and the food is scarce. We tried to go to two different restaurants tonight. Both of them closed this evening. That part of me cannot wait to get back to the main island. Tomorrow will be a long travel day to northern Okinawa island.