Thanks to the Internet, I keep finding magazine and newspaper articles I wrote before the Internet was either born or before publications additionally published online. That’s fun, because those old clippings are now yellow and worn, slowly changing to dust.
Kobe Reborn, published in The Rotarian in 2003 in advance of the Rotarian convention in Osaka, describes how Kobe had changed and grown since its horrific 1995 earthquake in which more than 5,000 people lost their lives.
Japanese Island is Beauty of the Sea, published in the Los Angeles Times July 14 1985, is about Kume in the Okinawa archipelago, which I had the chance to revisit in 2008 ago and found remarkably still unchanged and undeveloped. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include the photographs I took for the article, which would have been slides I sent via snail mail.
Man, we’ve come a long way.
For updated information on Kobe, see my posts Japan’s Most Famous Ports and Places to Visit Between Kyoto and Hiroshima. For information on Okinawa, see Okinawa the Perfect Getaway from your Japan Vacation.
