It’s slightly embarrassing that after our first day in Japan the only words my mum and I had learnt, other than thank you (arigato), were beni imo — a purple sweet potato. But we were in Okinawa, the tropical island 900 miles southwest of Tokyo, and if you’ve been, you’ll understand.
Purple sweet potato is an Okinawan staple and comes in every imaginable form — roasted, baked in tarts and even blended into lilac KitKats. On Kokusaidori Street, a brilliantly colourful, tree-lined shopping avenue in Naha, Okinawa’s capital, adverts for beni imo far outnumber those for ramen joints and izakaya pubs. And so while my mum, Sarah, and I had expected to be blown away by the best sushi of our lives, we were more surprised to discover a taste for the purple stuff. Having tried everything from purple ice cream to purple-centred croquettes, we were starting to feel a little like Violet Beauregarde in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
As first-time visits to Japan go, ours was an unusual one, and not just because of this newfound appetite for purple sweet potato. We had skipped the mainland, as the country’s bigger islands are called, and gone to the island chain, about 400 miles off the south coast and closer to Taiwan than to Tokyo.
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Okinawa’s location in the East China Sea, three hours by air from Tokyo, means its tourism is largely domestic, with most international visitors coming from mainland China, Hong Kong and South Korea. But British travellers who make the journey will see why the archipelago, made up of 160 islands, is known as the “Hawaii of Japan”.
You may also get a sense of why it’s one of the world’s “blue zones” — geographic areas with lower rates of chronic diseases and longer life expectancy. Subtropical weather, beaches, a laid-back energy and Japanese food are part of Okinawa’s appeal, and why we had long wanted to visit.
Our Japanese island-hopping aspirations were finally realised in December on a five-night cruise on board Royal Caribbean’s Spectrum of the Seas, departing from Hong Kong. The cruise presented something of an Okinawa tasting menu with one day on the archipelago’s largest island, Okinawa, and another on Ishigaki, a greener isle known for its beaches, in between two days at sea.
Royal Caribbean’s Spectrum of the Seas
GRAHAM UDEN
At £95pp a day, including onboard meals, the sailing is a good-value way to see the islands, and a convenient one, with the added benefits of no internal flights and only having to unpack once.
But, both of us being cruise first-timers, I can’t deny the apprehension we felt on first seeing our home for the week. The gleaming white Spectrum of the Seas, which launched in 2019, looked dauntingly large with 16 decks and space for nearly 5,000 passengers. It was a far cry from the boutique hotels we had previously chosen for holidays together, but once we were on board, having settled into our stateroom, we began to understand the excitement that keeps cruise fans coming back for more.
We got our day’s exercise just by walking around this theme park at sea. With fairground-style dodgems, a surf simulator, a skydiving simulator, three swimming pools, 19 dining options, a 1,300-seat theatre, a casino and a waterpark, we were hardly short of choice.
The Spectrum of the Seas is like a fairground at sea
MICHEL VERDURE
During the two days at sea in between our island jaunts, I wish I could report that we spent our time furiously bashing each other’s dodgems, scaling the climbing wall and joining our fellow passengers in singing karaoke, but in truth we were far lazier. Our favourite activity was simply sitting on our balcony, chatting for hours with the sound of the waves as our backing track.
We didn’t need dodgems and towel-arrangement demonstrations when the biggest delight was each other’s company — and uninterrupted time together, mother and daughter, without the daily distractions of work and life. Room service, for which we had memorised the dial code by day two, was a bonus.
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That’s not to say we spent all day holed up in our cabin. We also flitted between the lovely adults-only, glass-domed pool area, the Solarium, and the Royal Esplanade shopping-centre hub of the ship where most of the restaurants — including a grand, multi-level dining room — are located. Cafés on board serve Starbucks coffee (deli-style the Café at Two70 was our favourite), and there are several bars, including the slightly gimmicky Bionic Bar, where a robot bartender mixes your margs. Note, though, cocktails and barista-made drinks aren’t included in the basic full-board structure — we had the “deluxe drinks package”, which gives you unlimited drinks for £43pp per day.
The on-board restaurant Teppanyaki has horseshoe-shaped chef’s tables
MICHEL VERDURE
For a £95-a-day cruise, you shouldn’t expect luxury, and you’ll want to curb your expectations if you stick to the included dining options. Vegetarians should also be aware that the menus are meat heavy, and we found the food to be hit or miss. At the all-day buffet restaurant Windjammer we were disappointed to find long queues at mealtimes for stations serving lukewarm pasta and oily veg. Lengthy queues, particularly when getting on and off the ship, were in fact our main grumble: very much a first-world problem when you’re being taken to subtropical Japanese islands in comfort, but irritating nonetheless.
However, the speciality restaurants, at an additional cost, were terrific. We loved Chops Grille (£52pp), an American-style steakhouse where we devoured juicy lamb chops and garlicky fries, and we had fun at eccentric Wonderland by Dadong (£48pp), an Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurant where you sit in kitsch silver thrones and use water-dipped paintbrushes to reveal the wording of your eight-course menu. Most dishes there were fabulous, such as the non-fatty roast duck and orange-peel ice cream, though some — such as the tangy, pickled pineapple salad — weren’t quite to our taste.
At Teppanyaki, a Japanese restaurant (£52pp), we sat around a horseshoe-shaped chef’s table as he cooked steaming egg-fried rice, chicken breast and delicious wagyu steak. Most of our fellow passengers on the cruise were couples or families from Hong Kong or mainland China, and at Teppanyaki we were the only Brits on a table of 12. Midway through chopping our salad starter the chef turned to me and Mum, a twinkle in his eye, and said: “I know your song.” He then proceeded to belt out London Bridge Is Falling Down, as we became increasingly red-faced and giggly under the gaze of our fellow diners.
The humiliation didn’t end there. Having chopped an omelette into bite-sized pieces, he instructed our neighbour to open his mouth. The neighbour obliged, catching the omelette on his tongue as we all clapped. And then, disaster: the chef turned to me. “Mouth open!” he instructed. I, too, obliged … and my shirt ended up catching most of the omelette.
You can spend many happy hours at Makishi market
ALAMY
To our relief, there was no food-catching required on land. Having decided to explore independently rather than book one of the shore excursions, Mum and I had plotted our itineraries ashore in advance. With only a day on each island, we had accepted that we wouldn’t be able to see everything, so we had sketched out a rough route on each. On Okinawa, our first stop, this included most of the island’s big hitters — Makishi market, Kokusaidori Street and Naminoue beach — each one a ten-minute taxi drive from the port.
We spent hours wandering happily from stall to stall in Makishi market, and we would have lingered for longer at Naminoue beach — an artificial cove with azure water, over which, bizarrely, stretches a highway bridge — had it not begun to rain. Subtropical shower aside, the most memorable moments here were also the most unexpected: getting caught up in a Pride parade on Kokusai Street, the best matcha ice cream I’ve ever eaten at Yokaze Ice, a tiny shop hidden down an alleyway, and our first taste of the earthy, mildly sweet beni imo in Makishi market.
At the sushi restaurant Kaito, where we stopped for dinner before catching a £5 taxi back to the port, we tried another Okinawan delicacy: taco rice, a relic from the American occupation after the Second World War, which is ground beef, lettuce and cheese served on a bed of sushi rice. It’s an unusual mishmash of flavours that’s worth trying, but next time we will be sticking to sushi.
Shuri Castle is a short drive from Makishi market in Naha, Okinawa
SHUTTERSTOCK
While Naha was a delightfully quirky city, it was not quite the “Hawaii of Japan” that we had envisaged. Fortunately, our long-awaited dose of Japanese island magic came the next day when we reached Ishigaki, which is 230 miles south of Okinawa. The Hawaii comparisons started to make sense as soon as we woke up and stepped on to our balcony, the ship having docked as we slept. Not only was the weather warmer than Okinawa (24C compared with 21C), but the sea was bluer, the beaches were whiter, and the island’s interior — much of which is made up of mangrove forests and mountains — greener.
We had used Uber taxis to get around Okinawa, but on Ishigaki there were no cab-hailing apps, just local taxis, most of which had been pre-booked by our more prescient fellow cruisers. Oops. So we decided to explore the old-fashioned way: on foot.
Claudia with her mum, Sarah, in Japan
This meant we would have to concentrate our sightseeing in the south of the island, close enough to the cruise port. But no matter: by the end of the day we had clocked up 20,000 steps and had walked all the way from Maesato beach, a stretch of clear sea and fine, white sand backing onto green jungle, to the chilled-out city centre. Here we stopped for strong matcha lattes at Klatch Coffee (£3; klatch-coffee.com) before exploring Euglena Mall, a sleepy shopping arcade that stocks — you guessed it — an impressive quantity of beni imo (as well as fresh seaweed, soba noodles and ceramics).
The only downside to seeing the Japanese islands as we did, with time of the essence, is that you will miss something. Our biggest regret was not seeing Kabira Bay, an aquamarine bay punctuated by craggy, green outcrops in the north of Ishigaki. Still, this oversight gave us something: an excuse to come back.
Claudia Rowan was a guest of Royal Caribbean, which has five nights’ full board from £480pp on Spectrum of the Seas, round-trip from Hong Kong (royalcaribbean.com). Fly to Hong Kong
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