Nakandakare

Yesterday, i had a very personal and very strange encounter which took me suddenly to some almost forgotten memories of mine.

I had spent my last year of high school in a small countryside city called Cipolletti, in Argentina.
In my host school,there was a boy whose grandparents were Japanese immigrant moved there before world war 2.
His last name was Nakandakare, which for me didn't sound really japanese and even sounds kind of mysterious. So i processed myself this too mysterious and incomprehensible fact for clueless 17 year old brain, like "oh maybe years of living and struggling inside far-japanese circumstances made his last name sounds like NOT japanese". So i didn't question it myself again or ask him about it.

And almost after 9 years, totally unexpected but a sudden encounter came to me and some smoke-like mysterious feeling which had been resided in my remote memory have just resolved.

As always i was working in the office where i work just few days a week as an office assistant. I was checking a huge list of personal information (name, address, phone number, email etc) and my brain was almost tripping between those mass of numbers and addresses.
Suddenly i saw some Kanji (those chinese ideograms) name very unfamiliar for me, i don't even have an idea how to read it. I turned back to PC and checked this guy's data base to find out what is about this name.

On data base it written, "Nakandakare"

It was a name that i hadn't heard for years!!! And of course it took just a second to bring me some flavors of far memory...

It turns out that, this name Nakandakare is an Okinawan name. Thousands of Okinawan immigrate to Argentina back to 19th and early 20th century.
Okinawa is now a prefecture consists of thousands of very south islands of Japan, but it used to be a kingdom called "Ryukyu" until mid 19th Century, and had developed very unique and its own culture. Also their language was quite different from Japanese. Presently it remains only as dialect and very few people can speak Okinawan. (Miyagi sensei from Karate Kid supposed to be an okinawan too!!)

It's so different than Japanese that i may not understand anything if someone speak to me in Okinawan. It's not like latin languages such as Spanish,Portuguese,Italian,French sounds all alike and are not impossible to understand each other.

So it makes a whole lot of sense that i couldn't recognize the name Nakandakare as Japanese one.

After years of unconscious puzzled, yesterday some clouds which had coverd my memory was cleared and suddenly i am smelling many of them from those days.