Bourdain in the Greek Islands

And now for something completely different: an escape from the news headlines. “Pretend that everywhere is just like here: beautiful, sleepy, delicious food. Everything is just fine.” This was Tony Bourdain, getting away from it all in the summer of 2016.

It's a restive world right now. Lebanon. Gaza. Ukraine. The climate crisis. Growing signs of financial turmoil in the markets. An endless litany of horror stories on the nightly news.

Anyone looking to get away from it all — as Tony Bourdain did in October  2015, nine years ago now, during a swing through Greece’s Cyclades islands for CNN’s Parts Unknown — could do worse than to revisit, or perhaps visit for the first time, Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode set in the Greek islands.

Bourdain gave the familiar tourist hotspots — Mykonos, Santorini, — a pass in favour of the island of NaxosThe Greek Islands, settle on the Mediterranean isle of Naxos for several weeks, far away from news headlines of a global market crash, street riots in Athens, refugees fleeing a widening war in the Middle East and the ever-present threat, now a clear and present danger worldwide, of the climate crisis.

This is actually a perfect time to revisit the Parts Unknown episode The Greek Islands, if only because the more things change— well, you know the rest.

Bourdain was coming off a year of travelling through hardcore conflict zones, regions beset by civil unrest and roiled by poverty, growing inequality and political turmoil. Through his lifetime affinity for Greek mythology and a desire to kick off a new season of Parts Unknown by taking a break from CNN’s usual fare of fire and fury, Bourdain, tailed by veteran producer/director Tom Vitale and a crew that included Bourdain’s longtime cameraman Zach Zamboni among others, started out with a simple premise, as he put it in his Field Notes at the time for CNN, to “go to a really nice, laid-back Greek island — one with an actual local culture, businesses and income streams outside of tourism — and slide gently into another year of making television whilst maintaining my suntan from summer vacation.”

Preferably an island without a sea of other visitors. Leave Crete to the cretins, as he might have said — but only in a moment of weakness.

And so, lo and behold, this. The Greek Islands. Praise the gods of Ancient Greece. Mt. Olympus and their human enablers:  Apollo, Aphrodite, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus, Hera, Demeter and the gang, ably aided and abetted by their human enablers, heroes all (well, nearly all): Achilles, Theseus, Odysseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Orpheus,  Helen of Troy (actually, she was from Sparta, but why quibble over a mere detail).

Think of it: an idyllic two weeks or so of languishing in the Mediterranean, hoping and dreaming of a better world, surrounded by good food and good people. Bourdain’s idea was to resurrect a sense of not just what the Mediterranean was during Homer’s time, not the cartoon character but the worthy wordsmith behind those classic epic poems of Ancient Greece, Iliad and The Odyssey. Those heady times could return, Bourdain insisted, after several glasses of Mylonas “Naked Truth,” a wine easy on the nose  —those in the know say)  “evolved and complex with quince, cheese and a certain nuttiness,” while on the mouth, “full and round, warm and nutty — the finish is long!” If only those-in-charge had the wisdom and foresight — yes, that’s a touch of Bourdainesque sarcasm in play there, clever of you to catch it — to nurture and encourage the pursuit of pleasure, be it philosophical or physical, public or ion private, far away from the madding crowds and a world beset with trials and tribulations and, in the Eastern Mediterranean and much of the Middle East, governed by religious fanatics. Enough of these Netanyahus and Yahya Sinwars — bring back Pericles, Leonides and Agamemnon (during his better days; his worse days, not so much).

Of course, reading Greek poetry in peaceful, contemplative solitude wouldn’t be Bourdain without his ready wit and caustic observations of the human condition. And The Greek Islands, while bucolic and pleasantly restoring, has all that and more.

Naxos, for one.

Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades and the centre of ancient Cycladic culture is not a tourist island. It’s best known for its being the source of emery, a rock rich in corundum, and for being the place where the young Zeus of Greek mythology was raised in a cave on an island the poet Homer lionized as Dia, the sacred island “of the Goddess.” There is no nightlife. Not even Coldplay. The party scene is virtually non-existent, or at least it was at the time Bourdain visited. This was about as close to the classic Greek islands as anyone was likely to get in the early 21st century.

Vitale and his camera team wanted to keep the camera constantly moving, ever-so-slowly even, to create a kind of dreamy drift through the chill life in the Greek islands. Naxos is relatively secluded, despite its size, and steeped in a deep small-island tradition of locally sourced food and good wine, a place where close friends and family are what matters, not catering to cruise ships and the great unwashed who board them.

“We shot an offshore dive on a sunken shipwreck, drank raki with the local governor and his in-laws, and sampled fresh fish right off the boat,” Jerry Risius, the episode’s director-of-photography, wrote in his blog at the time, shortly before Greek Islands aired on CNN.

“We had an amazing meal with the politically outspoken group the Stray Bitches, and travelled to the mountainous village of Apeiranthos, where we shot Tony enjoying a traditional celebration in the town square.

“Sometimes, we luck out with local crews … and in Greece, we lucked out. We had the most amazing crew. They helped keep our cameras in constant movement. It was solitary Tony magic with a location-appropriate tempo, and it created a Greek epic.”

Parts Unknown was all about showing us the world through Bourdain’s eyes, in his own words, and on that front, he didn’t disappoint. Bourdain wouldn’t be Bourdain without, well, Bourdain.

On Greece’s financial crisis in 2015, about to happen again? “It’s bumming me out. It’s harshing my total buzz.”

Sorry, Homer, but Odysseus, aka Ulysses, was somewhat of a cad. “I can tell you this: Ulysses was kind of dick. I mean, he left his wife alone for how long?”

On getting away from it all: “The pressures of the outside world I don’t want to think about. I’m on a Greek Island here. It's a beautiful day. I’m planning on passing out on the beach, snorkelling, you know, maybe doing some watercolours, doing a little cooking, napping, eating, more napping, contemplating the mysteries of the universe, or napping, either one or eating cheese — all of those are honourable options. I mean, that’s a vacation to me: staying put and doing nothing.”

The party scene in small-town Greece, in Apeiranthos: “The sort of place where you can still walk into a town square and find yourself caught up in a celebration. This one celebrates Greco-American actor John Stamos’ return to ‘Full House.’”

Bottom line: In the end, Bourdain sought a little peace and quiet, and peace and quiet is pretty much what he found. “The narrow slices of life depicted in this episode,” he wrote in his Field Notes at the time, “are me learning right there along with you.”

Can’t go wrong there.

Supplementary reading:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/greek-islands/greece-episode-facts/

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/greek-islands/bourdains-field-notes-the-greek-islands/

     https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-greece/

CNN

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Bourdain in Okinawa

Where King Tacos meets tofuyo and taco rice, and US military bases rub up against Chinese tourists: This is Anthony Bourdain in Okinawa, almost ten years ago to the day.

It’s a measure of Anthony Bourdain’s power as a storyteller, not to mention that he’s remembered after all this time, that even an off-the-cuff episode like Parts Unknown’s sixth-season outing to Okinawa has one commenter on Reddit saying that it made him want to go there.

It also says a lot for Bourdain that he found something interesting and little-known to say about a foreign land that has seared itself into the consciousness of a generation of Americans and others who fought in the Pacific toward the end of the Second World War. As Bourdain recounts in an episode that is by turns gripping, emotionally wrenching and oddly whimsical in parts, a history lesson reimagined as a cultural, sociological and culinary take on an enigmatic, often misunderstood corner of the world.

As Bourdain recalls, early in Okinawa, a U.S. invasion fleet of nearly 1,500 ships, a landing force of 182,000 combatants — 75,000 more than Normandy — approached Okinawa on April 1, 1945.

April 1945. Think about that. In Europe, Nazi Germany surrendered on May 7, just five weeks later. Imperial Japan would sign the official “Instrument of Surrender” four months after that, on Sept. 2 of that year.

The battle for Okinawa was hard fought, and terrible.

Bourdain reminds us in his voiceover that what came next was what Okinawans called ‘The Typhoon of Steel.’  Having island-hopped across the Pacific, Allied forces saw Okinawa as the key base from which to stage air operations and ready a landing force for the final push into the Japanese mainland and V-Day in the Pacific.

“The fighting was brutal for both sides. The cost of lives and resources for the Allied forces was tremendous. And, when it was over, military planners looked at the mainland, looked at what Okinawa had cost them, and projected even more appalling losses. What came next, we all know.”

That one line, for me, perfectly explains what separated Bourdain from the countless other travel documentarians out there: “What came next, we all know.” He didn’t feel the need to explain what happened. He took it as a given that his audience—those of us who watched his programs, rapt with attention and marvelling at his stories—were, and still are, smart enough not to be spoonfed every little detail.

“What is not widely known,” Bourdain continued — and this is another Bourdain tell, that he frequently/often/always told us things we didn’t know — “is that more people died during the battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

There are more things we didn’t know, or at least that I myself didn’t know before watching Okinawa: that Okinawans are a separate people with a separate language, culture, cuisine and history to mainland Japan, always subservient and kept under the thumb of their larger, more traditional neighbour to the north. And during the war, Okinawans, the majority of them civilians — men, women, and children alike — paid a terrible price for being caught in the middle, an accident of geography, a footnote in history were it not for people like Bourdain who take those familiar, taken-for-granted words from Remembrance Day (the UK, Canada) and Memorial Day (the US), “Lest we forget,“ and imbue them with genuine meaning.

This is Bourdain, though, with all the wit, passion, and acerbic observations and observances we’ve come to know and expect — and enjoy — from his best work throughout Parts Unknown’s 91 hour-long episodes over 12 seasons and six years.

Bourdain: “Okinawa is a place with a fighting tradition—a history of ferocious resistance, but it’s nothing like what you might think. Not at all.”

“For all the relative rigidity of the mainland, Okinawa answers in its own unique way. Don’t eat the same thing each day. That’s boring. There’s even an Okinawan term for it, chanpurū, something mixed—bits borrowed from all over, served up for anyone to eat.”

And the playful side. This, during a martial arts (karate) exhibition:

“I’m not accusing anyone of gambling” — illegal, or shall we say “quasi-legal” in Okinawa — “but, um, I see some money changing hands.”

And the food:

“In Okinawa, pork is king. OK, they’ve got tofu, too.”

To one of the local fixer/handlers/restaurateur/chefs who share their family histories with this tall, upstart visiting American with the shock of white hair and a mouth to match:

“Your mom would’ve been like a hipster hero.”

Karate and puffer fish!

Yes, but what of the future? As anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of the news headlines knows, Okinawa is home to 30,000 US servicemen and women anchored on several of the largest, most prominent US military bases in the Pacific, casting an increasingly wary — and perhaps nervous — eye toward mainland China.

Toward the end of the hour, Bourdain breaks bread, in a manner of speaking, with Tetsuhiro Hokama Sensei (born 1944, not a terrific year to be born in that part of the world), chairman of the Kenshikai Goju-Ryu karate group, and Vivian Takeuchi, a local who has lived in both the U.S. and Okinawa. Takeuchi’s aunt, Sumiko, was an entertainer who sang at American military bases after the war.

“Okinawans may be easygoing and laid back,” Bourdain says, “but the island is also a relative hotbed of political activism, largely inspired or provoked by what Okinawans see as high-handed treatment from a central government with different cultural and historical traditions, who do not consider their needs or priorities. (Not to mention) their disproportionate shouldering of the U.S. military presence for the entire country. There are close to 30 “military installations” on Okinawa, and even though it is one of the smallest Japanese prefectures in terms of livable area, the bases account for more than half of the foreign military presence. Even more problematic, Bourdain notes, much of Okinawa's arable land suitable for farming on an island whose whole traditional identity was built around farming is being eaten up by military bases.

Everything is relative, though.

“Tourism is probably the future of Okinawa,” Bourdain tells Takeuchi at one point. “You have beautiful weather, beaches. If the bases leave, it is going to be big hotels and resorts and golf courses.

“Which is worse? Chinese tourists or American Marines?”

Takeuchi considers the question for a moment, weighing military bases against Chinese tourists and the inevitable gentrification of hotel complexes and credit card swipe machines unchecked tourism would bring, and smiles ruefully.

“I will stick with the Marines,” she says, and Bourdain laughs.

There it is.

As James Pankiewicz, Brit expat, black belt in Shōrin Ryū karate and translator for many of the karate sensei on the island, tells Bourdain: “They are saying, please eat. Less talking, more eating.”

Better than the alternative, as always. Life is about compromise, after all.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/parts-unknown/ryukyu-f7569582bbeb

     https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-okinawa/

     https://visitokinawajapan.com/discover/food-and-longevity/okinawan-food-culture/

CNN

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