Naha: Shuri Castle and the Ryukyu soul

The Shuri Castle, a UNESCO site for its coral-stone foundations and walls, lost its main structures in a 2019 fire, the latest in a long series that has struck the structure repeatedly over centuries—but the park remains open with reconstruction of wooden buildings underway.

Kokusai Dori, the city's main avenue stretching nearly two kilometers, gathers souvenir shops, Okinawan-cuisine restaurants, and venues for folk music performed on the local three-stringed shamisen.

The Tsuboya neighborhood, a traditional Okinawan pottery-production zone since the 1600s, still preserves functioning wood-fired kilns among shops selling the celebrated terracotta shisa guardian lions.

The Makishi Public Market, rebuilt after the war and still today the city's food heart, sells freshly caught tropical fish on the ground floor that restaurants on the upper floor cook to order.

Shuri Castle, rebuilt three times in the last century, tells better than any other monument the story of an island bombed, reconstructed, and then struck by fire again.

The shisa lions of Tsuboya, traditionally placed on house roofs to ward off evil spirits, seem to watch over precisely this capacity to start again.