The author, once deeply captivated by the beauty of Okinawa’s sea, writes of his profound disappointment with the island’s present social and political condition, to the point that even its beauty now seems superficial.
Through severe criticism of discourse that appears aligned with China and the Korean Peninsula, the dominance of local newspapers, and the mindset of part of the Okinawan population, this piece questions the moral and spiritual condition of Japanese regional society.
It expresses the author’s belief that natural beauty and the spirit of the people are inseparable, and that this has led him to abandon Okinawa.

2019-03-06
I would never go to Okinawa again as it is now.
That is because the sea of a region where about half the residents live amid “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies” cannot possibly be truly beautiful.

About Okinawa.

As long as China and South Korea remain as they are now.
That is to say, I will never in my life travel to either of those two countries.
As those around me and my readers know, I was once a man who loved the sea of Hawaii and golf there to a degree ordinary people would scarcely believe.

At a certain time long ago, I went to Okinawa for the first time.
The reason I had never gone before that was that, as a subscriber to The Asahi Shimbun and without realizing it, I had been viewing Okinawa as a pseudo-moralist.
But when I had come to love snorkeling, I read an article about the Kerama Islands on the flight back from Hawaii, and setting aside pseudo-moralism, I went to Okinawa.

At that time, there was a company very near our own that operated Renaissance Okinawa, and through work I had become deeply close with one of its managing directors.
The following summer, I suddenly decided to go to Okinawa.
That managing director specially arranged the best room in the hotel for me.
I even thought that the beauty of Okinawa’s sea surpassed Hawaii’s.
But now I do not think so at all.

Japan is beautiful because the hearts of the Japanese are beautiful.
Masayuki Takayama, who is also the sharpest critic of our age, once wrote a severe passage about the people of Okinawa.
When the U.S. military occupied Okinawa, at a time when a man of noble character was serving as High Commissioner, the uniquely American goodwill shown for Okinawa was all diverted elsewhere or continually exploited for the selfish desires of certain influential people, and in the end he gave up on the Okinawan people.
To put it in extreme terms, just as around 1900 President Wilson is said to have withdrawn the consulate from the Korean Peninsula, declaring that “this country does not constitute a state,” and that “there is nothing for it but Japan to take care of it.”
There is an essay that wrote of how he abandoned the Okinawan people in that way.

I also discovered on the Internet that a great Okinawan figure of the Meiji era had written.
“The defect of the Okinawan people is their ingratitude.
There are even those among them who seem to forget that they possess the DNA of the Japanese people…”

Now Okinawa is controlled by two outrageous newspaper companies, and around 40 percent of the prefecture’s residents support people like the Onaga faction, without even realizing that they are under the influence operations of countries like China and the Korean Peninsula.
That is to say, now that they are in step with countries of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
It goes without saying that this is tantamount to saying that they themselves are the same.

That is why I sometimes say this.
If Communist Party one-party dictatorship China is truly so wonderful, then go ahead.
But in that case, Japan as a nation would sell Okinawa over to China only on three absolute conditions.

Those who now go happily to Okinawa are probably only young people who do not know the first letter of politics, who have never thought about it, and who simply go there while carrying shallow ideas of their own.
I would never go to Okinawa again as it is now.
That is because the sea of a region where about half the residents live amid “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies” cannot possibly be truly beautiful.
It is nothing more than an appearance of beauty.