3 cylinders, 65 horsepower and rocking AC/DC with the windows down

It has been a week since I drove with my GPS and realized how slow the speed limits on Okinawa truly are and I again had a laughable driving experience. Last night, I decided to drive to Camp Foster to pickup some dinner from the Macaroni Grill. When I plugged in my iPod for some reason AC/DC started pumping out of the little speakers in my car. It was odd because I hadn’t selected the group, I just pressed play.

It is interesting how the music that is playing while I’m driving can have a profound effect on how I drive. Certain songs or types of music just seem to make my right foot heavier than normal and soon my desire to pilot my car in and out of traffic takes over. To make matters worse, before I left my room I had been watching the Supercar Showdown by Jeremy Clarkson from the BBC’s hit show Top Gear.

Let me back up a moment. To really understand what was going on, I need to describe my car. Most cars on Okinawa fall into one of two categories, they are either brand new or they are what I would call beaters. Due to the relatively short periods of time that service members spend on Okinawa and the fact that you cannot bring your car from the states with you, cars on the island have a very hight turnover rate. Most cars are pretty inexpensive but new cars have prices comparable to those in the states. My car falls into the beater category. It is a 1996 Daihatsu Opti Classic that I acquired for $900. The paint is chipped and the seats are split but it runs okay and most importantly gets me away from Camp Kinser. The Opti handles like a go-cart and might have as much power as one, but I doubt it. The Opti has a 3 cylinder engine that when new was capable of producing a fearsome 65 horsepower. It weighs in at 690 kilograms or 1500 pounds, is billed as a mini-sedan and feels like one. I know for a fact that you can fit 5 grown men in the car, but you wouldn’t want to. Since power is something the Opti is short on anyway, I make it a habit of keeping the windows down and the air conditioning off. If I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t make it up most of the hills here.

Back to my dinner run story. There I was, in my fearsome Opti, AC/DC blaring though my 3 inch speakers at near blowout volume, windows down, with less than 65 horsepower under my right foot, ready to race through the streets of Okinawa at 35 miles per hour. After my third red light in less than a half a kilometer, I changed the music. Needless to say, the kill-joy aspects of this island just keep adding up. Life on a rock continues...

The fearsome Opti

Life in the land of the metric system — Passing them by at 35 mph

Okinawa is different from the United States for many reasons, but one of the first things that visitors will first notice is that in Okinawa they drive on the wrong...er...um...I mean, the left side of the road. That means the driver sits on the right side of the car and most of your vehicle controls are reversed. It’s easy to spot a new driver on Okinawa because every time they make a turn, the windshield wipers come on. I must admit that after months of driving on island, when I’m on autopilot and not really thinking about driving, I will still flip on my wipers when trying to use my turn signal. One of the other major but less obvious differences is that Okinawa operates on the metric system. It is less obvious because unlike most American automobiles, that have both miles per hour (mph) and kilometers per hour (kph) displayed on the the speedometers, most cars in Okinawa only show kph. Since all of the seed limits and speedometers both use kph, I hadn’t really thought about the conversion.

While driving back from Kadena AFB to Camp Kinser, where I live, I realized that there are major implications to using the metric system. I had just completed my Sunday ritual of going to Kadena to get coffee and a haircut. As I was getting ready to leave base I remembered that I had my handheld Garmin GPS with me. During the week, some of the guys I work with had been talking about the distances between the bases here, so I decided to use my GPS find the actual distance. I turned on my GPS and pulled up the dashboard page. This screen on the GPS displays the standard information that you would see on your car dashboard such as speedometer and odometer.

Okinawa’s main highway, 58, has a speed limit that varies between 50 and 60 kph. I’m not a big fan of speeding, but the traffic on Okinawa is so bad that when I see open road, I normally take advantage of it. The stretch of highway between Kadena and Kinser is three lanes in each direction with the right most lane being the fast lane. Like normal, I was in the right lane and was quickly passing the traffic in the two lanes to my left. I was in the 50 kph zone and when I looked down at my speedometer and saw that I was going 55 kph. Most drivers on Okinawa routinely drive at speed slower than the posted limit, so it didn’t really surprise me that I was quickly buzzing by the other cars despite the face that I was only speeding by 5 kph. I then looked down at my GPS and was shocked when I saw that I was only going 35 miles per hour. I instantly went from feeling like I was flying past the other traffic, to feeling like I was creeping along in the fast lane. For the rest of the drive, I kept glancing at the GPS and was continuously depressed by my the speed my GPS was showing.

Another feature of the GPS is that it computes my average speed over the course of a trip. By the time I reached my barracks my average moving speed was less than 30 mph and my total average speed (factoring in time stopped at red lights) was less than 22 mph.

Later I looked at the data from my GPS and realized that it is 6 miles from Camp Kinser, where I live, to Camp Foster, where the dive shop is located. On several occasions I went to the dive shop for evening classes after work. Thanks to the traffic, that six mile drive has taken me over an hour to complete. That means that I was averaging 6 miles per hour! Additionally shocking, was when I thought about kph to mph conversion and realized that the 20 kph school zone on base is actually a 12 mph zone.

Despite the ridiculously slow speed limits, most drivers here are utterly incapable of driving as fast as the posted limit. What Okinawa really needs, is a minimum speed limit and traffic cops that will enforce it. I can’t wait to return to the states and leave the land of the metric system behind.

Japanese speed limit sign

Stuck in the 1950s — Trash everywhere

Okay, I know I wasn’t alive in the 1950s but in my head I have formed an idea of what America was like in that era. I admit that my opinions are mostly based on information garnered from years of watching bad television, but the reality of the 1950s has nothing to do with this blog post.

In my mind, America in the 1950s was a land of happy go lucky times. In my version of the 50s people drove huge gas guzzling cars, lived in the suburbs and the idea that disposable products were the best thing ever, was just catching on. I imagine that at that time, corporations were blissfully dumping huge amounts of pollutants into local rivers and lakes and no one thought that was a bad idea. I think that after mom and dad took the kids to McDonald’s for lunch everyone happily tossed their wrappers out the window of their land yacht while cruising down the highway at 5 miles per gallon. I’m not sure if they had styrofoam in the 50s, but if they did, they were definitely throwing the non-biodegradable trays from their speeding global warming machine.

It wasn’t their fault though, there just wasn’t any environmental awareness at that point. No one had educated people that dumping their used motor oil down the storm drain was a bad idea, and certainly no one had volunteered to spend their Saturday painting the no dumping and fish symbols on all of the drains.

Fast forward a few decades in America and if you don’t recycle, you are very close to being a criminal. If you throw something out of the window of your sensible hybrid car you could face a $1,000 fine and maybe even go to jail. America’s consciousness has shifted and I’m pretty sure we would all agree that it is for the better. During my first few weeks on Okinawa, one of the major cultural differences that stood out was the amount of trash. There is trash everywhere. On the sides of roads, in front of stores and houses, and even in the ocean.

The green mentality that is so prevalent in American has not yet made it across the Pacific. In Okinawa, it is routine to see someone roll down their window and drop their trash as they are driving. The funny thing is that they do have litter laws here, they just aren’t enforced. Here, the environment just isn’t a priority. There are no emission standards. The majority of vehicles on the roads belch large black clouds of noxious fumes ever time they accelerate. It is so bad, that it has become habit to roll up my windows when stopped at an intersection in anticipation of the carbon monoxide plume that will emanate from the vehicles next to me as soon as the light turns green.

I can’t wait to return to the land of tree hugging hippies and smog checks.

My Drive to Kadena

This video is a series of photos that I took during my drive from Camp Kinser to Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa, Japan. I used a GPS to record my location and Aperture 3 link the location information from the GPS with the pictures. I know that the music isn't the best fit but it was my first time playing with the slideshow feature in Aperture. Enjoy.

Onigiri for dinner

(from my December 18 facebook post)

After five weeks (47 left to go) on island I have finally taken the culture plunge. I went to several shops out in town and decided to buy my dinner at one the very popular Laswson convenience stores (think 7-11 but way better). One of the items I selected was Onigiri (though I didn't know that's what it was at the time). It turns out that they are color coded, seaweed rapped, triangular "rice balls" (thank you google). The color denotes what's in the middle. I based my selection on logic, if they stock a lot and there are few left, it's probably a good one. Though I realized after the fact that my logic was based on the assumption that "good" to an Okinawan would taste good to me. Fortunately my guess paid off and I selected blue, which I was pleased to discover is tuna with mayo. I also had some kind of pizza filled dough ball, sponge cake rounds and a cherry flavored alcoholic drink.

Here is what my dinner looked like:

 

And of course I had to show a picture of the middle...

Here is the much sought after Onigiri decoder (thanks again google)

 

All things considered, my dinning adventure by way of the local corner store went well and I look forward to expanding my Okinawan cultural horizons further...but only for another 47 weeks.

Why?

I have been asked why I would want to start a blog. The answer is on one hand simple, and on the other quite complex. First, the simple answer is to keep a record of my experience and to share it with friends and family. Second is the complex answer, a blog gives me an unbiased, non-judgmental, unedited forum to post my thoughts feelings, and photos, of a simi-unique journey abroad, while hopefully sparking some form of intellectual reflection on the events that led to my time in Japan and the emotional roller-coaster ride taken us on. I am aware that that was one hell of a run on sentence, but that’s how it works. No letter grade means that I can say what I want. You don’t have to like it…hell; you don’t even have to read it. Agree or not, I would love for you to comment. I know that I am not going through this experience alone, and one of my goals is to have this be an interactive medium which allows all of you to share your part of the journey too. I would like to say that I would write something every day to post while I’m over here, but then I would already be over six weeks behind. Instead I will say that I will try to find the significant moments and experiences in what is a routine lifestyle and post my thoughts on those. It would be easy for me to logon everyday and say that I went to work and went to chow, but what fun would that be. Welcome to my life…Live from Calcatraz, Okinawa.

Calcatraz…

Cal⋅ca⋅traz   [kal-kuh-traz]

–noun

1.  a prison like location where calibrations are performed and calibrators are confined.

See also: Alcatraz, a small island in W California, in San Francisco Bay: site of a U.S. penitentiary 1933–63.

Origin:

2003–05; Coined during Operation Iraqi Freedom by an unknown Marine Corps calibrator deployed to Al Taqaddum Airbase, Iraq.

The Caveat

Let me be clear from the start, although people have told me that they enjoy my writing, I do not think of myself as a writer. I am writing this simply because I have a lot to say and hope to preserve a log of my time overseas. I am posting this for whoever would like to read it, but mostly for family and friends. I am going to write about life in the military during my year long deployment to Okinawa, Japan. I hope to continue my web log or blog if you must (I think it sounds dirty) the whole time I am deployed but we will see how long I can stay committed. I hope you enjoy my rant and leave some good comments, you know some good ones! (You have to say the last part in a Strongbad voice for it to make sense.)