Naha, Okinawa

Everyone pulls a rope two hundred meters long. In Naha, Okinawa, the Great Tug-of-War uses the largest straw rope in the world, certified by Guinness, weighing forty tons. The crowd divides into east and west and pulls. Anyone may join, visitor or local, and at the starting signal tens of thousands seize the rope at once. There is a winner, but something matters more than winning. Afterward, people cut off pieces of the rope to take home; displayed in the house, they promise health and the prosperity of descendants, the rope becoming a charm. The tradition dates to the Ryukyu Kingdom nearly five hundred years ago, a royal rite in which districts tested their strength. War once severed it, but it revived afterward. Tens of thousands of hands grip a single rope, and for one day Okinawa becomes one.

Yachimun is the Okinawan word for pottery, and Tsuboya is where it has been made for three hundred years. The district survives as a working potter's quarter in the middle of Naha — kilns still firing, clay still being worked, the thick-walled earthenware that absorbs the island's colors available directly from the people who made it.

The street itself is the market: workshop fronts open to the pavement, shisa guardian dogs watching from shelves, the slow accumulation of an afternoon spent comparing glaze colors and the weight of cups in the hand. The vendors are the makers. This is not always true in craft markets, and it changes the nature of the transaction.

Tsuboya is a short walk from Naha's Kokusai-dori shopping street, where Okinawan pottery is also sold, expensively, in souvenir shops. The contrast is instructive. In Tsuboya, the prices reflect what the objects actually cost to make; the conversation reflects the knowledge of someone who spent years learning to make them. The pottery district is the reason to spend an afternoon in Naha that nobody mentions.

Fire falls on a southern sea. Naha was once the capital of the Ryukyu Kingdom—an independent island nation with its own kings, its own language, its own trade across the seas of Southeast Asia—and over the water at Naminoue Beach, the fireworks reflect in a subtropical night unlike any on the mainland.

Here the shells rise in seasons still warm enough for shorts and sandals, the crowd watching in beachwear under a sky that holds its heat. Okinawa's climate runs to its own calendar, and so do its celebrations—the fireworks can open in autumn or even winter, when the rest of Japan has long since packed away its summer.

The music is Ryukyuan, the dances are the islands', and the fireworks fall over a sea that carried the kingdom's ships to China and Siam centuries ago. Okinawa keeps a different time from Yamato—the name for mainland Japan—a slower, warmer, more outward-facing rhythm shaped by its own long history. And so even its fireworks feel distinct: a different fire, opening over a different sea, above an island that was once its own country.

These are the vivid colors of a southern island. Bingata is the brilliant dyeing tradition born of the Ryukyu Kingdom—yellows like the tropical sun, blues like the surrounding sea, reds like the hibiscus that blooms along every Okinawan wall. Nothing in mainland Japanese dyeing matches its boldness.

You set the stencil and rub the pigment in, layering color over color, working in the gradations that give bingata its depth. The technique is fearless in a way the more restrained mainland traditions are not—high contrast, saturated hue, a brightness that belongs unmistakably to the south.

Once, this cloth was worn only by royalty and the noble class, a marked privilege of the Ryukyu court. Its colors were reserved for the few. Now you can take up the stencil yourself and dye the strong, sun-loving hues that catch the subtropical light—and in doing so, dye something of the island's very nature: the openness, the warmth, the unembarrassed brightness of Okinawa itself.

In Okinawa, a market is called a machigwaa.
Step inside, and the fish on the counters are colors you won't find on the mainland — the vivid, improbable blues and reds of tropical reef species. Alongside them: pork in every conceivable form, because Okinawan cooking uses everything the animal provides, including the face, the feet, and the organs. Island vegetables, island tofu, pickled things in jars. This is not like other Japanese markets.
The market opened in 1950, grown from the black markets that kept people fed in the ruins of postwar Naha. The building was rebuilt in 2023, but the atmosphere — the sellers, the noise, the smell of the sea — has not changed in any way that matters.
There is a custom here called mochi-age: bring it upstairs. You choose your fish or meat on the first floor, pay for it, carry it up the stairs, and hand it to one of the restaurant cooks on the second floor, who will prepare it for you — grilled, simmered, fried, however you like — for a small fee. The market and the meal are one transaction, separated only by a flight of stairs.