Okinawa Photos #1: Beaches

This super-blue ocean-- I will remember this scenery for the rest of my life.

In the last several years, since I started taking my career as a researcher seriously, I had been longing for traveling (preferably a road trip) in a rural area in Japan. That's what I used to do, by myself or with my friends, when I was an undergrad. However, during the period that I was a grad student, I could only make once or twice 2-weeks-stay in Japan every year, and those few weeks were fully dedicated to meet my family and friends in the Tokyo area. Therefore, I simply didn't have time to explore outside of the Tokyo for long time. This summer, I made a decision to leave my grad school and move to industry in the US, and the reason that I asked my hiring manager to postpone my start day of work for a month was to do things that I had been missing in Japan in the last several years, staying overseas.  I had a several plans to do in my mind, but as the result I spent two weeks in Europe to visit my sister who have just started her M.S. in Spain, and the rest in Japan. I decided to spend 5-days in Okinawa where one of my high school friends lives with her husband. She let me experience mipaku (as I describe in the earlier post) and drove me around to see the area-- and that's what I'd been waiting for many years!

In the next few posts I am going to show you the awesomely beautiful photos of nature in the northern port of Okinawa's main island (Nago city), to make you feel jealous and want to visit there as well :D 

Overlooking the stunningly blue ocean of Ooura gulf from a ruin of a lighthouse. Can you see the winding rope (?) floating on the water? That's the borderline to separate the sea area controlled by the US military and others. How about a boat swimming around it? That's a former-fishing boat-- now is a patrol boat to keep an eye on the activists who are against the build of a new military runway over the gulf. I heard that fishermen who used to own these boats don't need to work anymore since the Japanese government gift some benefits to the local people (including the fishermen) as the compensation for the development of the US's military base. Oh god.