We are actually in Okinawa

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Saturday, March 22nd
In Naha, Okinawa today, so our first visit to Japan ever. Naha is the capital city of Okinawa Prefecture. The city was founded in May 1921. It is on the southern part of the Okinawa Island, the largest of the Ryukyu Islands. The city is developed around Shuri Castle, the palace of the Ryukyu kingdom. During the battle of Okinawa in WWII, Naha suffered extensive damage from attacks by US forces. The city center was rebuilt following the war.
We started our day at 6:30am so we could be ready for when they called our deck number. It never came. The started with deck 4 and then about an hour to an hour and a half later they called deck 10. We were neither of those decks and then they called for all people going on tour at 9:00am (that was us) to go down and get in line and was that ever a hassle have about half the ship in line. The line doubled back on itself, but was actually moving pretty fast. We were in line and then in the bus in about 25 minutes. Our tour was great. We had Yoko as our tour guide and she was great. She didn’t shy away from any subjects both would answer questions directly. Although not from Okinawa she knew the history and admitted she had to do some research for this trip. In fact she did quite a bit of research and had gone to some sites that we would not be able to go to on the tour; and then brought the photos she took to show us. Yoko will be flying to Nagasaki to be a guide at our next port. The weather was also great. Sunny but not too hot - about 68 degrees. On the tour we went to 3 different locations. We started by going to Himeyuri Peace Museum. This museum was built to honor the students and teachers who perished when they were trapped during the US siege. These students and teachers joined either the Army Hospital or other corps to help out and instead they were used essentially as slaves. They took care of the arriving injured, secured water and carried food in for the patients and hospital staff. This was in hideous working conditions because of the shelling from US forces, mainly ships just off the coast. All but 16 of the 240 survived as they were forced out of the caves by the Japanese soldiers, committed suicide and/ or were killed in the caves by US ground forces meeting Japanese resistance. The caves were a way for Japan to wage a “War of Attrition” trying to drag the battle out for even one day and force the US Army to delay it’s assault on the mainland.
After that we headed to the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum. Outside, at the museum, there were walls where the names of all those that had died during the Battle of Okinawa, including the Americans. This part was called The Cornerstone of Peace and is a place to remember and honor the more than 240,000 people killed in the battle. The Battle of Okinawa was the only ground fighting fought on Japanese soil and was also the largest-scale campaign of the Asia-Pacific War. Countless Okinawan civilians were mobilized - as we saw at the previous museum and the consequences. More than 100,000 civilians died - either by direct result of the war or by committing suicide.
Our last stop on the tour was to the Former Japanese Navy Underground Headquarters. The HQ was in a huge tunnel system dug by hand, 450 meters or over 1,300 feet. The underground headquarters contained code rooms, living quarters, medical room, and signal room. Massive shelling killed many of the soldiers both topside and in the cave. After heavy fighting the cave contained the bodies of 2,400 Japanese, many had committed suicide rather than be captured when the ammunition ran out. Forgot to mention that we had another excellent tour guide today! One more tour in Osaka, and we hope that all the Japanese tour guides are this good. We did arrange to travel with our table mates as we will be with them all the way to San Francisco, and then we all go to Denver but they are on an earlier flight so they can catch their 3rd flight of that day.

Sunday, March 23rd; Easter and Brittney Anne Cavit’s 13th Birthday!!!!
Happy Easter to everyone and Happy Birthday to Britt!
Today is a sea day and it began with a beautiful Mass. They had a string quartet and the orchestra leader playing the keyboard for entrance and exit Hymms. You just cannot get much better than that. Also tonight is the dessert extravaganza. Not getting ahead of myself but it was just beautiful. I even got a chocolate Easter egg so I must have been good all year (yes I mean 2008!).
Another positive - I won at Bingo again - hadn’t been able to play since the last day I won because of Holy Day Mass being the same time as Bingo. I would think it was against the law to have Mass and Bingo at the same time.
So it was a good day.

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