Ryukyu King Shot In the Head With a Screw; Hunting for the Underground Navy Base

Well, landed in okinawa, specifically Naha City which is the main city in Okinawa prefecture and sort of far away from the US military bases that have caused so much controversey over the past 10 yrs. Actually, I was expecting a fair number of servicemen around but there weren`t any. in fact, there were almost no caucasians in general (or non-japanese tourists in general, for that matter) throughout my islands trip.
 
The weather was a lot worse than I was expecting - from talking to people and checking the weather on weather.com the past few weeks, I was expecting at least 70s to 80s F but it was more like 60s F to 70s F and there was a steady light rain for most of the day. later I discovered that a typhoon had hit the area the day before and the current bad weather was the equivalent of aftershocks for an earthquake, which was sort of a disappointment for my okinawa and yaeyama islands trip.
 
Naha is a pretty compact city and the best way to get around the main area is by this perfectly timed monorail system. if you stay in Naha, you definitely need to get the all day pass for the monorail which makes things so much more convenient. I totally used mine to the fullest.
 
A bit of history - Okinawa and the neighboring islands further south and west were only recently part of modern day Japan. Before then, it was called the Ryukyu kingdom and from the stuff i read, it was annexed around the meiji restoration a couple of hundred years ago (more recently governed by the US until the 1970s post WW2 and even in the early 1600s it had also been occupied by mainland japanese who did not allow them to bear weapons... spurring even greater learning of karate which had previously been exported from china).
 
in fact the ryukyu kingdom was sort of a cultural and economic crossroads between japan and china. for example, the ryukyu archictecture for roof tiles reminds me of chinese style houses. also the language is different and unique to the islands - which of course the occupying japanese forces tried to stamp out but some bits of the local language remain. there are even differences between okinawan and ishigaki languages in how they say certain expressions
 
I only had time to see 2 sights in naha, unfortunately, since i was there only for 24 hrs.
 
The first was the culturally iconic Shuri castle - seat of the ancient ryukyu kingdom. the interior was pretty nicely preserved and the throne room was elegant but the most interesting artifact was the king`s crown. besides being physically huge (and sorta looking like a huge beetle shell, personally), it looks like the king was shot thought the temples with a nail gun. a large caliber nail gun. i need to find out if there was some special symbolism there... the rain pretty much made the trip unpleasant, though
 
The second historically significant place I visited was the former underground naval HQ of the commander of the japanese forces at the battle of okinawa.  We went down to an underground bunker about 20 meters deep. besides the remnants of a few tables and explanatory exhibits, there wasn`t a whole lot left to see besides the tunnels themselves. However, the most interesting and somber things were the room where the commander, Rear Admiral Minoru Ota and several officers committed suicide by hand grenade when the battle was about to be lost. Very reminiscent of the scene in the movie Letters From Iwo Jima. You can see and feel the pockmarks in the wall where the shrapnel hit.  The other is a letter from Ota to his superiors describing the the hardships and sacrifice that the Okinawans have had to suffer and for the Japanese governmenent to give them special consideration in the future.
 
Interestingly, I was surprised that the exhibit was not very biased against the US forces (unlike Hiroshima which was more negatively charged against the US). From the exhibit, it seemed that it was more so from the perspective of the Okinawans, not from the mainland Japanese, and the fact that the Okinawans were often pressed into military service against their will to defend the empire prob didn`t sit well with them and they prob had as much hard feelings toward the mainland Japanese goverment as they did towards the US bombing them.
 
I also had a bit of an adventure trying to even find the place. Deciding not to pay the really expensive cab fare, I tried to follow a local publication`s　directions but it left a lot of gaps. The map I had was in japanese, of course, and no english and the place is pretty far from the last monorail stop.  Through lots of questions (and very patient monorail staff workers), I was able to figure out which bus to take from monorail stop, but it basically let me off at this park... and the park map didn`t have any obvious pictoral of a special monument. So i wound up clambering up what I think were some types of shrine in a hilly area. and at the top, I notice a bunch of people entering this high tech glass stucture leading downward. That was it, but apparently I had taken the back way and that made it a lot more difficult.
 
At night, I wandered around the main street of Naha, called Kokusai Dori, which had lots of izakayas and restaurants and the ever present outdoor arcade that you can get anything and everything... though of questionable quality sometimes. it was interesting to explore but the stores were closing down and I was concentrating on gifts/souvenirs.  
 
There were actually a lot of Japanese tourists - mainly school kids. They filled the airport and their teachers would be barking out commands like.. well... a commander to the army.  This was also where I made some observances of Japanese genders quirks that I mentioned in my last email.