Kenneth Whiting (AV 14) - Naval Cruise Book

Page 41 text:

WE SAW... The grace, charm and beauty of the Hawaiian girl is best expressed in the dance which has become famous the world the hula! ftifc : ivSir- AND TOURED We toured the green island of Oahu, seeing the tall palms, the mighty thrust of Diamond Head, and miles and miles of sand and sea. . . We ate exotic food and sipped drinks no less powerful than their name implies — Fog-cutters, H-Bombs, Ban- yan Punch, Black Widow . . .

Page 40 text:

SAND AND SURF... Waikiki — known the world over . . . and for these few days we made it our own;Royal Hawaiian, Moana, Banyan Tree, Trader Vic ' s, Waikiki Tavern, Don the Beachcomber. . , But endurance and money can ' t last forever. . . .-w-:- ' - m

Page 42 text:

OKINAWA THE KEYSTONE OF THE PACIFIC A TYPICAL VILLAGE , . . Like many en ihe southern nji: ci number lo Americans. Fifty years hence it will not have changed. Our first sight of Okinawa was prob- ably the same as those who proceeded us and saw the island for the first time. And like them — not knowing what to ex- pect — we were pleasantly surprised by a hilly, green coastline. It looked mighty good after ten days of nothing but sky and water. Okinawa — a word that has become a regular part of the American vocabu- lary — was unknown to most of us in the Western World until the spring of 1945. Prior to that time it was only a dot on the map — a lonely, sub-tropical island no one cared about, that is, until the Japanese converted it into a mighty bastion guard- ing the approaches to their homeland. Today it ' s a different story. We have come to recognize Okinawa as the Key- stone of the Pacific. It is no longer the Reck, the bleak and lonely island that lacked any of the comforts of home. For the military it now has facilities that com- pare favorably with those found at U. S. installations. Between our in again, out again stays in Buckner Bay, we all soon missed the wide open spaces of America. There just wasn ' t enough room to move around in on an island 7 miles long and 3 to 12 miles wide! Everything we saw — the farms, the houses, the people — were smaller. And we noticed that the 600,000 Ryukyuans of Okinawa had, through necessity, terraced and were tilling every inch of land. There were no hundred-acre pastures lying dormant. The size of the people was the most noticeable. At first most of us had the feeling of being in a country peopled by no one larger than young American teen- agers. But we remembered that it also took the Ryukyuans a while to get used to the size of the Americans that now are so prevalent in their homeland. The Ryukyuans are a devout people, though their religion is entirely different from anything we have known. The faith which most influenced the religious life of the people on Okinawa is Taoism. 38