Koki and Ayako with me at our farewell dinner
After our pottery district walk, Yoko and Tetsuya drove me and Koki to pick up our bags and catch our plane back to Tokyo. Kawashi and Hiromi came to see us off as well. Sachiho could not, and who could, after the marathon of festivals, performances and parties that she had just created? I could only imagine she was doing what I would have been doing: lying still and breathing.

A couple of days later, Koki took me to downtown Kamakura’s shopping district, where we paid our respects to Ayako’s grandmother in the cemetery of the gorgeous old Buddhist temple where she is interred, and bought the ingredients for a farewell dinner I would prepare for Koki and Ayako, Morio and his wife and daughter, for Miura-san and for Mayumi Hirai, who I hadn’t seen since we sailed back from Ohshima.

Miura-san, me, and Mayumi Hirai
I decided a Mediterranean menu would best suit the occasion, since it represents my heritage, and would consist of dishes my friends rarely were served. In the wok, I made a rich ratatouille, and I marinated chicken breasts overnight in a garlic vinaigrette to grill on the hibachi. I made a green salad with halved cherry tomatoes, chopped scallions, black olives, avocado, watercress and romaine, dressed with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. Koki barbequed the chicken while I labored over the ratatouille. Of all the ingredients, the most exotic and intriguing to the Japanese palate is balsamic vinegar.  Ayako was amazed to discover she could buy it at her corner grocery store.

Morio, his wife and daughter, and me
Japanese people do not heap large helpings of food on big plates as we do in the USA. They serve very modest portions on a cluster of small plates and bowls. So, even though I served the Mediterranean dinner “family style” in the wok and large bowls at the floor table in Koki and Ayako’s main room, the meal ended up looking Japanese, portioned into their beautiful dishes. And, in typical Japanese style, lots of small gifts were exchanged. But, in California style, which evidently had invaded Japan since I last visited in 1974, lots of hugs were exchanged, too.

The next day Koki and Ayako drove me to Narita Airport, an astonishing place when I think about every other airport I’ve traversed. Friendly airline employees actually HELP YOU move your luggage. And it includes restaurants you’d actually patronize even if they weren’t at an airport (sorry, Wolfgang Puck). After I checked in my bags, we had some excellent sushi at one of these establishments, another one with a conveyor belt from which you could choose, or you could call out to the sushi chef for a custom order (which Koki did on our behalf).

After lunch, we hugged goodbye for a good ten minutes and then I proceeded through the security check, and even THAT was friendly. As I was about to go down the escalator to immigration, I saw Koki and Ayako on the other side of the glass wall, waving goodbye. I kissed them goodbye through the glass, we all laughed, and then I was on my way back to Los Angeles.

Yoko and Tetsuya Nema took us (me, Koki and Hiromi) on a walking tour of Naha City’s pottery district, which lies adjacent to the Peace Street Market. We were joined by Tetsuya’s cousin, Keiko, who works in a ceramics studio, and her friend, a photographer.

Nearly every Okinawan house has a pair of shisa figurines attached to it as protectors against evil spirits. The shisa is neither dragon nor dog, but has the features of both. In each pair, one has an open mouth and one a closed mouth . Some shisa look intimidating, but many are comical, even cartoon-like. Since both residents and tourists buy shisa, the pottery district of Naha City fairly bulges with wide-eyed, toothy specimens.

We visited a factory where shisa are formed in ceramic molds and the details carved by hand.

We discovered that the feline residents of the pottery district are not the slightest bit intimidated by the shisa, and maybe even a little bored with them.

One of Yoko’s friends owns and runs this lovely shop without shisa, just elegant ceramics and textiles. I bought four unique placemats batiked with floral designs on natural indigo by a reknown Okinawan artist. I gave them to my mother, who liked them so much she has decided to frame them.

We stopped for tea at a pottery school with a ceramic dragon set into an exterior wall.

The teacher at the pottery school expertly turned out one perfect cup after another on the potter’s wheel.

We walked past a very old traditional Okinawan house whose roof is secured with fishnet against the ravages of typhoons. The house is not liveable, nor can it be restored without destroying it, but it’s a historic site, so it is not disturbed.

The street entrance to the compound of which the very old traditional Okinawan house is part.

Across the road from the old house stands an intriguing curved wall, set with scale-shaped ceramic tiles, reminding me of the snakeskin sanshin and the sea snake remedies.

I almost got run over by a bicycle photographing the Naha City man hole cover design to add to my collection. Who said blogging is for couch potatoes?

The next day after the Soul of Donto concert, Sachiho threw an informal goodbye party at Donto-in for the musicians who came from Tokyo (and Aso Mountain in Kiushu) to play in the show (and who had played in a much larger Soul of Donto concert in Tokyo last summer). She began by arranging flowers for the altar, unwrapping all the packages of cookies and candy that had been amassing as house gifts on the altar and placing them on plates, and then arranging drinks and plates of sashimi and vegetable dishes on the dining table.

She lighted the sconces and unveiled the White Tara thanka.

At sunset, people gathered on the front porch, at the dining table, and in the altar room and passed around the various bottles and plates of food. Nonoa and Song Matsui played a singing and hand slapping game with some of the adults. Auta Matsui and Nala Kudomi hung out together and laughed a lot.

Considering that I don’t speak Japanese (YET!), I had a wonderful time with these new friends. I helped Kameya Matsui (next to me) with her English homework (Koki said not to tell her the answers so she’d have to figure them out, but I couldn’t help it). Toward the end of the evening, Kawashi drove Koki and me up to Naha City, where we each had a free hotel room that came with our round trip tickets from Tokyo, and, since we planned to sightsee in Naha City the next day until our evening flight back to Tokyo, this proved to be very convenient. On the top floor of this brand new hotel were bathhouses for men and for women, so, as soon as I got my luggage into my room, I threw on a robe and went up in the elevator to have a long, hot soak. The next morning, I soaked again. My inner monkey was happy.

Having just coordinated, performed at numerous times, and taught hula at a two-day music festival, the amazing Sachiho is ready to rehearse, perform and be the spiritual center of a rock concert honoring her late husband Donto at a large theatre in Okinawa City. It’s an all-star cast backstage in the women’s dressing room before our rehearsal: First row, Sachiho Kojima, me, Sandii Manumele (hula teacher to 600 students in Tokyo, choreographer of the hula to Donto’s “Nami,” and singer of pop and Hawaiian music who can’t even remember how many CDs she’s recorded). Second row, Kuri (Sandii’s assistant, a fabulous hula dancer), Yoko Nema, Misako Koja (legendary Okinawan singer, who has also released some huge number of recordings, three of which she gave me. They are lovely!), Hiromi Kondo, and punk/rock/ska singer Yoko Utsumi.  Sandii invited me to visit her, and we traded CDs, too.

We rehearsed the entire show. My five minutes of fame came somewhere in the middle of the show, when the huge booming sounds of the rock bass, drums, electric guitar and screaming vocals stopped, and the only sound was me playing Hau’oli La Hanau on a four-string soprano ukulele and gently singing. On the second verse, Sachiho, Yoko and Hiromi’s trio, Amana, joined me vocally and instrumentally. I came out again for the grand finale, inwhich international pop star Miya (in sunglasses and white t-shirt; he’s got mega-hits in Latin America and southeast Asia, and pipes like an opera tenor) sang an Okinawan song in duet with Misako Koja, while all of us other women in the first photo sang backup, laughed and danced around. In this rehearsal shot, I’m the fifth one from the right, looking right at the camera. Donto’s original band, piano, bass and drum, performed, along with Donto’s son Lakita on electric guitar, Donto’s singer/rhythm guitarist/drummer friend Roku Matsui, and a couple more guys on accordion and washboard, and a famous rock lead guitarist from Tokyo.

Yes, OF COURSE there was a shrine at the theatre. Sachiho set it up backstage, with two photos of Donto, one in full Okinawan garb with sanshin (three stringed Okinawan banjo), and one as he looked in Hawaii just before being cremated at age 37. Donto was not Okinawan, but when he moved the family to Okinawa, he embraced it with the same enthusiasm with which he did everything else.

Other than my two moments on stage, I sat with Misako, her daughter and grandson, and watched the show from a tunnel to the left of the first rows. The show opened with Sandii chanting to Pele while Kuri danced hula kahiko. Later in the program, Sandii danced an ‘auana hula in her holoku. I loved the moment when Miya lifted up Lakita on his shoulders, football victory style, and Lakita laughed and continued to play his electric guitar. Donto would have done that. How do I know? Because, before the concert, we were treated to a documentary of Donto’s performances from the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. He dressed in super-creative semi-drag and danced like mad, whipping the crowds into a frenzy. He wrote his songs, he designed his costumes, he sang and played lead guitar. He was a rock god by anyone’s estimation. Sachiho met him when she interviewed him on her radio show, back in the days when she was leading Japan’s first all-girl punk band, Zelda. After they had two sons, they got into a more natural and spiritual bag, and moved to Okinawa.

Even seven years after his death, the soul of Donto brought the audience to its feet, waving their arms and singing along to his wonderful songs. Some of his tunes had English lyrics mixed in with Japanese, for example, his love song to Sachiho, “So precious, you are so precious, so precious…” And, as you would expect, the singers onstage pointed their mics to the audience to capture their singing for a couple of lines, the lighting guys then lit up the audience, and that’s how I got this photo without a flash.

After the show, everyone who had been on stage gathered backstage for a toast. The kewl dude with the hand jive and the tie-dyed Grateful Dead dancing bear shirt was Donto’s bass player. Under his arm he carries the fake leopard skin cowboy hat he wore on stage. I am clueless as to why he is wearing a huge star of David, but he’s not the only hip Japanese person I’ve seen wearing one.  I read that it is one of the magical symbols used in Japanese anime movies. The other guy is Roku Matsui, and I think the girl in the hat is his daughter, Kameya Matsui.

Amana’s manager, known by her surname, Kawashima, who had single-handedly produced the show, took all of us, performers and stage hands, out to dinner at a traditional Okinawan restaurant in Naha City that same evening. The English-speaking stage manager made me get my Pro Series Traveler Guitar out of Hiromi’s van and show it to all the stagehands, who loved it.

What is the first thing I thought when I woke up at Heaven Beach? You’re right if you guessed “Get in the ocean!” The warm, clear, blue water buoyed me as I glided along, feeling, “Yes. Yes. Yes. This is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. I love this. I really, really love this.”

Sachiho taught a group of people to hula to Donto’s famous song “Nami.” The cool-looking red and white building in the back is the beachfront bar, Heaven.

Later, I discovered that sumo wrestling is not just for obese persons. Skinny hippies like to wrestle, too. I even saw one round of girls wrestling.

For less athletically-inclined festival goers, there was plenty of shopping, too.

And those who had drummed and danced ‘til dawn the night before could always snooze away the afternoon on the hammock porch.

A couple of very creative young DJs at one of the picnic tables created electronic collages thoughout the afternoon, and their friends danced with poi balls, especially enchanting one very small boy.

Yoko Nema told me she’d wanted to talk with me so much when she came to Hawaii in 2002 that she’d been studying English since the last time we met. I was blown away; the wall between our two languages is formidable, and I’ve been intimidated by it for many years. I begged her to interpret for me during my performance that evening, and she very graciously obliged me.

One of the first acts of the afternoon: an all-girl rock band from Osaka.

Yu Soda, an amazing young musician from Tokyo, performed an entirely improvised set, masterfully playing an enormous variety of wind and percussion instruments against a recording of the sound of the wind.

At sunset, I played a set combining songs from all three of my CDs.

Next Amana played. Their sound joins Hiromi’s African rhythms and exotic instruments with Yoko’s harmonium and bhajans (holy chants in Sanskrit), and Sachiho’s lively bass guitar (she was the leader/bass player of Zelda, a famous all-girl punk band in Tokyo in the ‘80’s) and Steiner harp (a lap-held woodframe harp invented by Rudoph Steiner). Sometimes all three women play djembe (hand drums). They all sing, and they write and arrange songs together.

Sachiho called me up to play Hau’oli La Hanau, the opening song from my Hawaiian CD, Living in Hawaii Style, with Amana. We dedicated the song to Donto.

A ska band got the crowd dancing…

…and an even bigger ska band got them dancing even more.

The Matsui family rocked out, with Roku singing and playing guitar, and Kameya, age 15, playing bass guitar. They played some of Donto’s songs in his honor. Roku has been teaching his kids to play musical instruments from the time they are quite young. He also told me that all five were born at home, delivered using the directions from the birth page of Living on the Earth (!!!)

Auta Matsui, at age 12, played rock and roll trap drums better than lots of adult pros I’ve heard. Nala, Sachiho’s 12 year old son, blew away the crowd singing one of Donto’s songs with the Matsuis, but, alas, I missed the photo-op. As you can well imagine, the two boys are best friends.

The next morning, the tents and vans slowly disappeared, and the tipis came down. The organizers of the festival carried the altar objects from the tipi to the dragon rock at the end of the beach for a closing ceremony.

After the ceremony, Yu Soda carried the bamboo branches from the altar to the ocean and released them. Afterwards, he and his partner Saori walked with me up the beach for a while, and we vowed to meet again next year.

The next day Hiromi drove us up to Nago, in the northern part of Okinawa, to camp and make music at the Happy Flower Beach Party music festival, right on a white sand beach on a huge, very calm bay. Clouds gathered, but no rain fell on the freaks camped in tents, hammocks and vans all around a distinctly boho beachfront bar called Heaven. The encampment included a communal kitchen, and it’s even got a co-ed bathhouse.

We arrived just in time to see a tipi-raising, that is, a tipi on bamboo poles that had been hand-sewn by Tako Matsui, the mom of the five musical children with whom we’d been bunking at Donto-in.

And yes, of course there is a shrine at Happy Flower Beach Party. It’s inside one of Tako’s tipis.

Tako and Roku Matsui’s eldest child, Kameya (in pink), who plays electric bass guitar, was selling tickets, souvenirs, and CDs at the gate of the festival. Instead of stamping ink on your hand to prove right of entry, Kameya presented each celebrant with a necklace comprised of a Heaven Beach seashell strung on a piece of yarn made from recycled saris. It’s the yarn of choice for hipsters everywhere.

Down the beach from Heaven I saw a couple of divinely funky beach shacks made from shipping containers. Yes, I thought. I could get used to this.

Actually, I stayed both nights in a shabby chic little beach shack, which Sachiho rented for me as a gift.

Just like the parking lot vendors at Grateful Dead concerts, I thought when I saw cafes and craft shops opening under tents all over the beach, one offering o-den (a bliss-inducing Japanese soup), another offering Nepalese curry, another macrobiotic foods, and another an Okinawan stew. I had a fish taco the second night, and the vendors made the tortilla by hand while I watched.

At sundown, Rie and her husband opened the show with sweet spiritual songs.

The children of the Amana band have their own band. They all sing; Sachiho’s son Lakita at age 16 already has the makings of a rock star. Yoko’s daughter Seina has loads of style, wit and charisma. And Hiromi’s daughter Tapiwa is breathtakingly gorgeous, blending the grace and beauty of Japan and Zimbabwe in one form.

Hiromi’s African band, Dinkadunk, played a wild set that got everybody dancing. Toshi Arayama sang, yelped, played flute, and kept a spirited patter going; Masaha Tahara provided the texture with African electric guitar riffs, and Hiromi Kondo kept the whole thing perculating with hand drums, electrically amplified mbira and a mournful keyboard wind instrument called a pianica. With so many other instruments going, Hiromi had to get another woman to play the balaphone. Sachiho joined them on bass and I think they had a trap drummer, too. The band is in its fourteenth year, and just released the loveliest meditative music CD imaginable, called Dinkadunk 2.

The Beach Party really got happy dancing to Dinkadunk.

How do you follow an act like that? When punker Yoko Utsumi took the stage as a solo following Dinkadunk, I found out. You sing with a voice that shakes the heavens and bring the crowd to its knees.

Yoko will be singing with the late legendary rock star Donto’s former bandmates at the big Soul of Donto rock concert the night after tomorrow at a theatre in Okinawa City. We got a little taste of that, too, with Donto’s pianist and drummer, plus Donto’s wife Sachiho on bass, Donto’s son Lakita on lead guitar, and Donto’s buddy Roku Matsui singing with Yoko, Donto’s greatest hits. Donto and Sachiho created the first Happy Flower Beach Party ten years ago, and Sachiho has continued to coordinate them since his death in 2001.

After the show, happy people drummed and danced on the beach into the wee hours.

Hiromi leads us within the castle ruins on a hilltop in Tamagusuku, Okinawa. She explains that the castle was built of coral, like the island itself, but it looks a lot like the lava temple ruins (heiau) of Hawaii.

Everywhere I go in Japan, my friends stop and offer reverance at shrines, large and small, and I always join them. So, I am not surprised that, at the foot of the hill onwhich the castle ruins rest, we all stop to offer prayers at a small forest shrine.

The entrance to the castle looks out and down upon verdant countryside, including a wind farm.

View from the castle of the coastline, including Donto-in, which is the house closest to the ocean on the upper road around the hill.

More of the view from the castle ruins, of the ocean and Ou Island.

On one side of the castle, a deep and forested abyss.

Our next stop, Nakandakari Hiijaa, a spring developed as a communal water source, built of limestone in traditional Okinawan style in 1912-13. It includes men’s and women’s bathing areas, vegetable washing areas, laundry areas, and, of course, a shrine. Destroyed during the Battle of Okinawa in World War II, it was partially restored in the 1960’s and fully restored in 2004.

The wonderful old tree at the Nakandakari Hiijaa compound, with a birdsnest fern in its boughs.

Next Hiromi shows us a verdant path to Hyahuna Beach, another sacred place in Tamagusuku.

Rising from the ocean is a stone marking where the goddess who was the mother of the Okinawan people first came to shore. I am wearing a t-shirt that Rina Usuki hand printed, and a skirt that Mayumi Hirai made. I am coming ashore, too.

Coral and shells abound on the beaches of Okinawa.

Kitesurfers love Hyahuna beach.

Just inland from where the kitesurfers sail is an old shrine commemorating the bird who brought rice stalks to Okinawa, beginning rice cultivation in both Okinawa and Japan, and the wealth it created.

At sunset we drive around tiny Ou Island, a fishing village isle connectd to Tamagusuku by a bridge.

For our dinner we stop at Hiromi’s favorite tempura stand, the only one on Ou Island, where we had tempura sea vegetables, squid and fish. Tempura, it turns out, is an elegant Japanese adaptation of a recipe brought by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century, who prepared batter-fried fish for Lent.