I made it back to the island on New Year’s Eve. It was excellent to be back and see everyone again, and there was much music, dancing, and being merry. In the morning of the 1st I climbed the tallest hill on the island to watch the sun rise over the Okinawan mainland, and later in the day I played with the taiko drumming group at the seijinshiki (big coming of age party for those who turned 20 in the previous year) of one of my favourite classes.

Alas, today I have run out of time to write more, so here is a photo instead:

I arrived in Naha, Okinawa this afternoon, and after checking into my hotel went out to have dinner with T-sensei, who was my favourite of all the teachers I taught with. It was lovely to see her again, but since arriving I’ve been haunted by the slightly uncanny feeling that almost no time has elapsed since the last time I was here. I had exactly the same sensation – something a little like deja vu – the first time I went back to Edinburgh after coming back from Japan.

After saying goodbye to T, I went for a walk around the city – it seemed a shame to waste any time here, and I knew my body clock wouldn’t allow me to sleep if I went back to my hotel anyway – to see which of my old haunts are still the same, and which have changed. Walking around Naha now, like Edinburgh then, the city felt slightly unreal, probably because it now consists of about two parts memory to one of stone.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to get my old phone reactivated. Then I will be unstoppable.

Ps. Writing this from my room in a great newish hostel called Burney’s Breakfast, which I would totally recommend to anyone going to Naha: for ¥2,800 (£19 at the current exchange rate…) I’ve got a room with a double bed, a PC with unlimited free internet, and as much free coffee – proper filter coffee – as I can drink.

I stopped writing here because this was really only ever meant to be a travel journal, and when my travels ended it didn’t feel like there was much left to do. However, since I’m about to go back to Japan for the first time since I left three and a half years ago, to see in the beginning of the new decade on the small Okinawan island where I spent two of the most interesting years of the previous one, it would seem a waste not to reactivate and continue this journal, if only temporarily.

Whether in practice I’ll get much time to update it is hard to say, but the intention is there. I’ll try to put up some photos at the very least. I’ve missed writing – missed having something specific to write about – and it’s nice to have an excuse to start again.

Now I really must go and pack.

A few months ago, in an all-night café near Liverpool St. station, I ended up talking to a small group of people in interesting hats who were sitting at the next table. When they left, they gave me a flyer for their monthly cabaret, Stranger Than Paradise.

I’ve been a couple of times now and it’s among the best things I know of. Thank goodness for chance meetings in 24 hour cafés. The couple I’ve been to have featured fire-eating, harmonica beat-boxing, puppetry, burlesquery, contortionism, and a beautiful lady from the 1940s playing startling and brilliant covers of 90s rock songs, including “Creep” by Radiohead and Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box”, on the ukelele. Next Sunday it happens again, and I am already much looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, my memories of the last one were seriously marred by the fact that as we walked to get a bus in the wee small hours of Sunday morning, in the vicinity of London Bridge station, a young well-dressed, hair-gelled city type ran up to us, punched the friend I was with full-on in the face, breaking his nose, and then jogged off casually, without looking back or once uttering a single word. It was the most creepily inhuman thing I’ve ever seen a human being do, and I’m still completely at a loss when I think about it. Beware of People, is the only lesson I can draw from it.

A couple more photos here.

The other week I had a roll of film from my old Russian box camera cross-processed, which essentially means ‘deliberately processed in the wrong chemicals’ (in this case, I asked the shop to process my normal negative film in slide film chemicals). Consequently, the colours are all wrong in a strangely pleasing way. A couple of my favourites are above, and there are some more here.