Kabuki

Yuka came again this weekend and we spent the entire time in Naha, Okinawa's capital. On Saturday, we went to see our first Kabuki play. The audience consisted mostly of old people and one huge group of US military wives. It lasted for about 2 hours, with the first hour being a humorous introduction to kabuki, and the second half being the actual production. From what I could get from it, the story was about a woman who was really a fox, marries a man, they have a kid, and then she has to run away for some reason. I couldn't really ask Yuka what was going on because 1) she slept through half of it, and 2) Kabuki dialogue is like trying to follow Sylvester Stallone perform Shakespeare.

The coolest part were the costumes and special effects. A lot of the effects had men dressed all in black (to "hide" themselves on stage) move set pieces, or, for example, when the fox lady returned to the forest, they would carry candles to give the image of the candles floating by themselves. You have to suspend belief and pretend you don't see them.

For an excellent example of this, I highly recommend watching the Matrix Ping Pong video.

Afterwards, we went to Itoman, south of Naha, to the Okinawa Peace Memorial Park. Walked around, took pictures, and ate ice cream...like any good tourist visiting a park that is a memorial to the 200,000 people that died in the Battle of Okinawa. On the way back to Naha, we found an awesome second-hand video game shop. I bought a Super Famicon, Chrono Trigger, and Street Fighter 2 for $40.

A break-down of old school Nintendo systems and their Japanese names.

Nintendo = Famicon (short for Family Computer)
Super Nintendo = Super Famicon
Nintendo 64 = Nintendo

Then we went out and had awesome yakiniku!