JAWing On – Life on Okinawa

A pic of the Autumn Equinox celebratory fireworks display as viewed from our neighborhood street…

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View a time laspe video here…

One of the local critters on a voyage …

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View more on this month’s Island Sights & Sounds video.

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.

As any sociologist will confirm, being the “odd ball” in any environment can prove to be a major challenge. Given that I am in a very exclusive minority in this environment, I have had my fair share of less than pleasant situations. Somehow, I have always been able to overcome (even while confronting a major illness that affects only 1% of the world’s population) those challenges without physical aggression, threating physical aggression, mobbing (the adult term of bullying someone), or impeding on other people’s property. That ability to meet challenges while following these basic guidelines has been a great inner strength for me.

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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A shot of one of the critters in the latest @ Home With – Island Sights & Sounds video.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any of the local bird song, so…

Click Here if you can’t access the video above.

I found this great vid on the Tube, hopefully the hiccups the site has been facing will dissipate soon. (I haven’t been able to get the comments, favorites, or playlists to work correctly.) But don’t let that distract you from this challenge to a common image:

Seems Okinawans aren’t the only ones who remain active in the 4th quarter. Speaking of which, here’s a chance for you to express and give insight to others on how you view norms (and dispel some of the barriers of understanding images) :