TRAVEL // Oceans & Islands (2006)

In the twists and turns of our life's journey, we sometimes take different paths from those that we might expect to take.

As a result of a couple of trips down to the Japanese subtropical archipelago of Okinawa back in 2004, I had it in mind that my future led me to become a reporter down there, zipping about in the heat in a jeep and interviewing people about fishing yields and the incursions of US military bases. It was a dream prompted by an offer from the publisher of 'Okinawa Index', a guide book I once wrote for.

Ultimately, it was not to be and in time I bedded down in Tokyo and got used to life in the big city, finding plenty of ways to keep myself amused and busy. I ended up producing what I believe to have been the first collection of modern Japanese protest music, which was not an easy task!

I lost touch with the publisher and assumed that I'd never hear from her again. To my surprise, I got a call out of the blue at around the time that the CD was due to be released. She was in town for a party and did I want to hook up again? 'Why not?' I thought, 'you never know where these things can end up.'

At the party and later over dinner, she told me that she was planning another guide book and would I like to contribute again? Although I hadn't been back down there since the last trip, I agreed pretty much straight away.

Grabbing moments in lunch breaks (often how I write in Tokyo), I pieced together an overview of my previous two visits, spiced it up with some of the trips I'd managed after the taste for travel I'd developed since Okinawa, and wrapped it up with my desire to return there.

Once again, even after submitting the piece, I didn't hear from the publisher again. To my knowledge, the guide book was never made, and so the article was never published.

Instead, it makes its debut here and is titled 'Oceans & Islands'.

All photos by Dom Pates.

Oceans and Islands

The ocean has had me under its spell ever since I first laid eyes on it. I was born within five minutes walk from the sea, in the coastal resort of Brighton. It's a little like an English San Francisco - a hilly and cosmopolitan seaside city, full of creative types and tech companies. There is always some sort of a buzz going on but perhaps most impressive is the ocean location. Gazing out to sea always makes your troubles feel much smaller.

A few years ago, tired of England and in need of a little more adventure in my life, I decided to pack up and go to the other side of the world. In a rather bold move and used to a more relaxed way of life, I threw myself into one of the biggest and busiest cities on Earth - Tokyo - to see if I sank or swam. Once I found the water was warm enough, I began to explore the group of islands that I'd landed in.


I'd never lived in such a big city before, so often found need to seek out a little peace, away from the bubbling torrents of the metropolis. A trip to Okinawa needed no passport and was only a couple of hours flight from Tokyo. A little slice of the subtropics to get the skyscrapers out of my hair for a while.

To my grandparents' generation, it might as well have been the moon. They first heard about the place as some exotic location on the other side of the planet where the last land battle of WWII occurred. I, however, spotted it in my guidebook and thought it would be a nice place to visit.

Immediate first impressions were mixed. It was warmer than where I'd come from but seemed old and fading. Then I began to explore and got a little more under Naha's skin; the vibrancy of Kokusai-dori, the traditional treats and gems in the maze of the old market, and the unexpected surprises you can only come across when wandering round a city and following your nose.


One such surprise was the Baobab Bar. Designed inside and out to look like the sacred African tree, I was drawn in. I made a new friend there with whom I set off on an adventure the next day. Our voyage of discovery took us to the tiny island of Kudaka that, unbeknownst to us, was celebrating their New Year that very day.

I experienced things to tell the grandchildren about - drinking, eating and dancing with the villagers, scenes of island life unchanged for many generations, playing sanshin at the house of a stranger who invited me in. I had become an adventurer, with tales to tell of it.


My second visit was at the request of Okinawa Index, after a chance meeting on Kudaka. This time, I got even deeper under the skin of the place and it got deeper under mine too.

The visit came with a packed itinerary too. I tried my hand at glass blowing at the Onna Glass Factory. At Ryukyu Mura, I watched a water buffalo pressing sugar cane and sat at a weaving loom. There was a scenic photo shoot to take in, along a rugged and beautiful coastline that took my breath away. I even squeezed in a visit to the Peace Park that commemorates the battle that caused my grandparents to hear of Okinawa over on the other side of the world.


Since my first forays into the former Ryukyu kingdom, I've become a travelling man. I've seen the Great Wall of China and the Olympic transformation of Beijing; been to the DMZ that straddles the Korean peninsula, one of the most heavily landmined places in the world; glimpsed at the Himalayas from the Kathmandu Valley, during the Festival of Light; taken in an Arabian sunset in a desert just outside Dubai; and lived a month in East Africa, with its safari wildernesses and the splendours of the Swahili Coast. Despite all this, Okinawa sticks in my mind like a limpet to a rock.

After my second visit, I picked up a new project. Following a request for help from a UK-based organisation, I set up Peace Not War Japan. The UK group raises consciousness and funding for the international peace movement by releasing CDs of contemporary pro-peace music, and I started a similar venture in Japan. We released our first CD of Japanese pro-peace music in the summer of 2006. The music comes from across the country and covers a range of genres. Okinawa's influence is felt strongly too. Ryukyu Underground donated a track, a version of the island standard 'Hana'. We also have songs from Soul Flower Union and Kotobuki, two groups very influenced by Okinawan songs and stories.


Proceeds from the sale of these CDs will be donated to Japanese peace groups, so it is a chance for me to give something back and contribute to the growth of peace in Japan.

For the sake of balance, when you take something, it is very important to also give in return. These beautiful islands have given me so, so much already - perhaps it's my turn to give now.

TRAVEL // In Hiroshima - Meditations on Peace and Humanity (2004)

As a child of about 10 years old, I remember having a great fear of nuclear war destroying the Earth. This was during the early days of the Reagan/Thatcher era and a time of Cold War nuclear posturing between the two World Superpowers - the US and the USSR.

I went on an anti-nuclear march in London with my parents, that ended up in Hyde Park. At midday, a klaxon sounded and everybody lay down on the ground, as if to simulate what would happen in the event of a nuclear strike. Somewhere near me, the then-leader of the Labour Party Michael Foot (a committed believer in unilateral disarmament, with whom I would share a train carriage and an hour of conversation on a train back from the Glastonbury Festival many years later), lay down with the marchers.

The march left a deep impression on me and a few of years later, I created a collage of an anti-nuclear protest march in my school art class. Some of the banners in my creation included the phrase I remembered so clearly as having seen at the march - 'No More Hiroshimas!'

As soon as I got my first three day weekend off from work after arriving in Tokyo (about 10 weeks on from my arrival in Japan), I took my first trip outside of the capital. There could be no other place to go for a first trip than Hiroshima.

The piece found below was initially written up in my diary as I sat in the Peace Park (where the epicentre of the bomb's strike was), immersed in my thoughts. I later twisted it around a little and got it published in my trusty outlet, Tokyo Notice Board. Wasn't sure whether they'd take something of such a heavy nature as they mostly published slightly more frivolous articles along the lines of 'Isn't Tokyo funny?' or 'What's different between Japan and my home country'. However, publish it they did.

That visit also laid the foundations for the peace work (Peace Not War Japan) that I later started here too. Personally, I'd recommend that everyone should visit Hiroshima at some point in their life. It shows what people are capable of doing to each other and provides deep grounds for thought and reflection on the nature of war and peace.

All photos shown here are taken from that visit.

In Hiroshima – Meditations on Peace and Humanity

Outside the Park, the city goes about its daily business, the wheel still turning as if it had never been stopped. Modern day Hiroshima looks as if it were constructed from flat-packs, neatly yet hastily reassembled with little serious artisanship. Yet it is testament to the incredible rejuvenative powers that humans possess, the power to rebuild, to start afresh where once there was nothing. Inside the Park, an appropriate oasis of calm in a city with admittedly less of the eye-popping bustle than Tokyo, hordes of schoolchildren pass through. Some draw pictures or recite poems. Others lay wreaths at the Cenotaph. All feel the effects, the traces or the memories left by the fates that befell their ancestral countrymen, women and children.


It could have been any group of people that it was dropped on. Potentially, it could have been any nation that dropped it. Historical circumstances just so conspired that it was America that dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan. It didn’t cause the greatest number of deaths within that section of that period of conflict. The Americans killed tens of thousands in the bombings of Tokyo. The Japanese themselves, during the Rape of Nanking, brutalised the Chinese in greater numbers than the combined mortals effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hitler’s concentration camps. Stalin’s Gulag. Leningrad. Millions were slaughtered in the name of the growth and eventual decline of the British Empire. But there is just something about Hiroshima, having been victim to the first bomb thus more so than Nagasaki, that represents the sheers horrors and inhumanity of such brazen and naked warfaring.

In the distance, another child chimes the Peace Bell.


Is any one of these children capable of growing up and taking the decision to wipe out such a vast number of his fellow species in one fell swoop (the gene surely cannot be that selfish)? Potentially, although one would certainly hope that a childhood visit to a place like this would leave enough of an impression to last long into later days, and bequeath an understanding of an unknown individual’s right to life. Japan seems quite at ease with its humiliation becoming a focus for tourism. Maybe it goes well beyond such things. It just happened to be Japan that it fell on. Japan therefore has a duty to hold a mirror up to the potentials for human folly.

It rather takes your breath away to walk around the place and think about quite how immediately levelled everything once was.

Then there’s the museum itself, set in the grounds of the Memorial Peace Park, to further knock the breath from your body. It includes an exhibited replica of ‘Little Boy’, the actual A-Bomb that exploded over the city at 8.15AM, August 6th 1945. It’s not much bigger than a Western style bathtub and almost looks like something from a cartoon, an ACME-stamped, Wile-E Coyote number. You just imagine that something that could completely level a city would be a little bigger than that.


What beasts we are. What barbarities against ourselves we are capable of. How tragic that, despite cries of ‘Never again!’ almost sixty years ago, we continue to perpetuate the cycles of violence that deny others the right to live in peace with one another. How right for so many the world over to have protested against last years war, that which we could not stop and it now developing into a struggle for liberation against occupation. How suitably appropriate to have personally bookended 2003 with the march in London and a visit to Hiroshima. Will we ever learn?