A Million Miles from Nowhere   

I wasn’t sure what I’d find in Okinawa, but I didn’t expect a group of eager Jews

I didn’t expect to find an animated Jewish community at the ends of the earth, but it underscored how the pintele Yid isn’t constrained by borders

There are several places a frum American Jew might realistically expect to find a decades-old picture of his own grandfather.

Atop a pile of books being given away by a church congregation, in a military installation on a tiny island in the East China Sea, four hundred miles from nowhere… is not one of them.

But there it undoubtedly was, and there, as well, was I, staring at each other across 85 years and a thousand miles. The questions hanging heavy in the tropical island air between us were: Which of us had taken a more unlikely route to get here? And how had we both wound up at the same coordinates in the space-time matrix of this serendipitous universe?

Purim in Japan

I’d come to Okinawa, Japan, for Purim of 2024. Not as a Purim joke, or in pursuit of an elaborate costume or overblown mishloach manos theme, but for real: to arrange and lead the chag for the small but proud group of Jews living on the island. Setting out, I wasn’t sure what I would find — but a courageous small kehillah of Yidden absolutely thirsting for Torah definitely wasn’t it.

The trip from Lakewood to Okinawa took over 24 hours and included stops in Seattle, Anchorage, and Guam, before we finally landed at the largest of 160 islands in the Ryūkyū Archipelago, hundreds of miles from the nearest large land masses — Japan, China, and Taiwan. The Ryūkyū Islands stretch in an arc from the southern tip of the main Japanese islands, across the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean to Taiwan. Okinawa, the capital of this Japanese prefecture, is about 466 square miles with a population of 1.3 million.

Bleary-eyed and 14 time zones off-kilter, I was welcomed by two leering, grimacing monster faces, one twisted into something between a sneer and a smile, the other openmouthed and hungry.

Can you be delirious from exhaustion? Or was Japan really haunted by monsters?

Neither. They were Okinawan shisa dogs, twin statues that I quickly learned are the most common sight on the island. Locals have some superstition about them bringing good luck. They’re always set up in pairs — one with its mouth open and another closed.

To me, they’re just creepy.

As I stepped out of the terminal, I was greeted by a similarly perplexing scene. Streetlights here are a neon blue light, casting an eerie frosted glow over everything. This was going to take some getting used to.