Originally published at: Vice reporter attends a Japanese right-wing nationalist drinking party in Okinawa | Boing Boing
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I’ve always wanted to go there because they have a really good aquarium.
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What an interesting bunch of Japanese nazis.
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That’s a bullshit stereotype. Okinawa has no industry outside tourism (which is not exactly making the locals rich) because it’s too far from the mainland, was a de facto colony of the US until 1972 (during Japan’s economic miracle) and continues to have US military bases covering half the land area on the already small main island.
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Yeah I live in Okinawa and what that dude was saying absolutely did not jibe with my experience at all. Compared to the mainland there is a significant lack of opportunities and investment here. We have 1.5 million people and no real public transport, an absolutely pathetic highway system, and vacation rentals have driven the price of housing well beyond what many people can afford. Blaming the people or the local culture for poverty caused by systemic neglect is just absolute horseshit.
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Big sugar plant… Hog production.
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I found the bus system fabulous, and and of course the coral taxis. I’m not sure what you find pathetic about their freeway or roads. I lived in Okinawa for a total of eight years. My husband, ten.
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Thats not the big aquarium there.
This is:
They have a bunch of whale sharks.
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I love whale sharks!
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I’ve been working here for a decade off and on and living here for most of the last four years. Maybe the bus service was sufficient for your needs but when you compare it to the train and bus systems in the rest of Japan it’s terrible - long wait times, slow travel times, and poor coverage. Particularly for those of us in more rural areas of Okinawa it is all but impossible to live without a car, which is not true in the rest of the country.
The only major highway going up and down the island is the expressway, which is a toll road. It doesn’t actually connect easily to a lot of downtown, even, leaving you stuck on surface roads with a stoplight every fifty meters for a goodly chunk of most trips. Just as an example the travel time from my house to the airport is about an hour even with light traffic, and it’s only 32km away. That’s an average travel rate of about 20 mph. When there’s any traffic at all the rate is about half that, and when traffic is heavy I have spent almost three hours traveling that 32km.
Again it may have worked fine for where you lived and where you traveled regularly. For the rest of us it absolutely sucks, and when compared to the rest of Japan it really throws into sharp relief how neglected Okinawa is.
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The feeding time is awesome. They go vertical and make whirlpools on the surface of the tank.
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Well, it has been a while for us. Chuo, where most of the bases were had a bus rolling by every fifteen minutes or so. My husband says they changed the expressway to toll a while back. It took us about a half hour to get to Naha, but to Nago, about an hour. Now, the far training bases are about an hour away, but we mostly went to Naha for the “big city” jaunts. Great food all over Okinawa, unless you hate fish and rice. Or pork. Lots of stoplights, true.
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A big part of that is not just neglect, but the fact that a lot of the land on the main island is the property of the US Military. Even if it’s not part of a base, there are still huge chunks of land that are owned by the US, so they can’t build roads there at all.
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