Aloha! My real name is Jeff Buchanan. I was given the samurai name Kantaroo (Kantarou) in Okinawa. There was this little cafe in the Nakanomachi district of Okinawa City where I would go to sing karaoke usually in the early morning hours or middle of the night when other places were closed. There was this old man that loved to hear me sing in Japanese and he would sing the Kantarou Song (Kantarou Zukiyo Uta) and he could never remember Jeff and he always called me Kantarou. One day I was in there with a couple of my American friends and they decided we should all have samurai names. I already had mine and Donn Seibert was given the name Yosaku (also from a song) and Doug Mansfield was given the name Jirocho. That was in 1984. Those were the days when karaoke hadn't reached the USA yet. I remember the cafe had a little French press coffee maker. Brewed one cup at a time. All the best local food, such as goya champuru, okonomiyaki, etc. What I will never forget though is the friends we got to know there. The song you hear playing now is my song... And the other one is Yosaku. I'm going to start a blog here. I want to write about Okinawa. It is really my favorite place in the whole world. The blog will be about my experiences in Okinawa, in no particular order- just whatever comes to mind each day. Okinawa was not only the greatest adventure of my life, but also a time of spiritual awakening for me. Living in a foreign country for more than a short time requires some flexibilty in the way you look at things and as Wayne Dyer says "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." The picture of me above was taken in Monterey, CA in 1987 not long after my time as an expatriate in Okinawa. It reminded me of Okinawa so I made it into a graphic I sometimes use as an avatar. The rock represents the island of Okinawa. The stone gate is just like one that might be found in one of the old castles there. I really was on top of the world. I was so fearless. The first blog entry will be about how I returned to Okinawa in January of 1984...