JAWing On – Life on Okinawa

A look at some of the neighborhood greenery after Typhoon Man-Yi…

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View the latest Island Sights & Sounds video here.

A look as one of the wind gusts blows the rain around…

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View video with further details here.

A look at what some local residents do after a typhoon blows by…

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When the daytime outdoor clean-up is done, some people on island like to kick back and listen to the rock music at Bar JET.

I just ran across this on the Tube and thought it had a really nice vocal…

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This snapshot of one of the lizards in our neighborhood is from the latest video of Island Sights & Sounds – which includes this guy, who decided to take on our vehicle.

I just upgraded to the new WordPress 2.2.1 . If you run into any problems or bugs please let me know. Thank you.

Also, it’s that time of year again. Although it’s hard to believe that 24 years have passed since I attended that first outdoor Rockfest concert on the weed-whacked hill up north (an area now in the vicinity of a golf coarse), the 25th annual RockFest is to be held on July 7 and 8 (Saturday and Sunday), 2007. This year it’s being billed as the pre-celebration to the long-awaited for (10 years in the making) MusicTown project. Among some of the venues MusicTown will house (from what I’ve been told) are an entertainment training facility for both management and artists, various independent vendor facitlites, and a standing-only live concert hall for visiting national “big name” concerts (unlike the parallel street’s Korinza entertainment facility, which houses a sit-down theater-style hall). Another aspect that seperates MusicTown is that it is a government-sponsored facility, unlike most of the other live music venues (about a dozen or so) in the area, which are independently-owned private facilties, each having its own style and characteristics. With the RockFest, comes that annual influx of tourists in the area. So…expect many of your regular neighborhood haunts to be a bit more crowded and busier than usual during the festivities.

Back in January I posted a notice that this site is part of “Just A Wife creations … projects consisting of material mainly created and accumulated by an unsigned independent artist (myself) who is not associated or affiliated with any official organization. These original creations chronicle the varying aspects of my life on the island.”

This still remains true, including any time spent at Bar JET. For some unexplicable reason, another NHK (from what I’m being told) film crew is coming to the bar again this weekend. This makes an untold number of times the company has deemed it necessary to obtain footage of the bar, both with and without previous agreement from the owner of the facility. How much footage does one company need of a fifty-seater facility, and why?

UPDATE: Seems the answer was that the crew wanted to bring in a group of about ten females to pose as customers in order to “produce” (instead of document the actual scene) a desired image for footage to be used in an unknown manner. That’s show biz…. as most people who frequent the facility already know, Bar JET customers consist of a mix of all persons who reside on island.

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Okay, it’s been a bit hectic lately between house painting, club inspection, birthdays, anniversaries, etc… somehow in the midst of all the craziness, I was able to create this latest video featuring the boys. Hope you enjoy it.

Hi, I’m Just A Wife (JAW) and originally arrived on Okinawa in June 1973. Around a year later I met and married, after a very brief courtship, my husband, who is a native of the island. Since then, most of our time has been spent on Okinawa. This blog covers some of the aspects of my daily life on the island.

One aspect of daily life that gives me great pleasure is being able to combine learning new things with the creative aspect of my character and developing new projects from that marriage. Some of the creative projects that I’ve been able to work on over the years are writing lyrics, learning about computers and websites (this blog for example), experimenting in the culinary arts, and more recently, creating videos and delving into the audio aspects of the web with original tunes- such as this site’s theme melody Ryukyu Nights.

Other aspects that occupy my daily life on island are our dogs and barkeeping at my husband’s live music bar on the weekends.