Book Report: Okinawa (?)

On Sunday, I did something I really haven’t done in a while: I watched a couple of football games. And since the one was the Chicago Bears game, which they won not because they deserved to win it but because the Raiders deserved to lose it, I had the opportunity to flip through some art and touristy books between plays (which is most of the three hours of the televised football game).

The first book was the book on Okinawa that I picked up on Saturday because it was still on my desk (as are the swords).

As I mentioned, it’s a set of glossy photo pages bound with an iron comb and with a thin plastic front cover. It’s designed for tourists and dates probably from the 1990s (as one of the photos has the date 1992 attached to it).

English captions are really an afterthought, as the book is written probably primarily in Japanese, but looks to have two other alphabets in the mix (Mandarin and Korean?) Not all of the photos have English captions, so although I could look at the photos, I didn’t know where most of them were taken or what I was looking at–a lot of stone monuments and shrines, but little to explain them.

So this was a quick browser for sure, and it shows the wide variety of topography that Okinawa has. Including white sand beaches which were quite stained when my grandfather visited. I often mention, either because I want to bask in reflected glory or because I respect what the other men of my family did, that three generations–my grandfather, my father, and my brother–were stationed on Okinawa during their time in the Marine Corps. I was thinking about giving this book to my brother for Christmas, but I will probably keep it and stack it atop the precarious pile of art books atop a couple of my bookshelves in the common area.

So that must be some kind of record; I bought it on Saturday, and I browsed it on Sunday. Maybe not–I probably did that plenty when I watched multiple football games the day after book sales in the past. But I will likely not watch multiple games again.