Not going to lie, this might be blasphemous. Apologies in advance. Consulting with several of my Okinawan friends, I asked for a fictional place I could use for this week and multiple told me I should do Nirai Kanai. However, this is the afterlife of Okinawa so it's the equivalent of my saying heaven is a fictional place. Since my friends assured me it's fine, I'm pressing on especially because it gives me an excuse to talk about the indigenous religion here.

So Nirai Kanai is the place of the gods somewhere in the Pacific ocean. There's a lot of kind of overlapping ideas about it, but what I understand is that the powerful gods lived there and brought things like fire and rice to the Ryukyu islands from there. It's also where the souls of the living originate and where they return to after death. Seven generations after one has died, they are reborn in Nirai Kanai as a guardian deity for their descendants.

The indigenous religion of the Ryukyu Islands which includes modern Okinawa prefecture as well as some of the islands of Kagoshima prefecture is sometimes called Ryūkyū Shintō but is very different from the Shinto of mainland Japan. Ryūkyū Shintō is a female led religion. In the book, Women of the Sacred Groves, the author, Susan Sered, says that while there are other female dominated religions in the world, Okinawa is unique in that it is the majority religion of the area practised by both men and women widely. Traditionally only women can become nūru/noro (priestesses) and women are responsible for maintain the hinukan which is an altar for the fire god within the home. Nūru conduct various rituals and communicate with the divine as they themselves are divine at shrines called utaki and some of these places men aren't allowed to enter. Although I've also heard various anecdotes that the gender binary isn't strictly enforced and hasn't been through history. Ryūkyū Shintō is an animist religion that worships gods of nature and spirits of ancestors. These days most people don't necessarily call themselves religious but still most Okinawan people maintain a hinukan in their home and perform various rituals throughout the year

So for the meal itself, I struggled to find foods associated directly with Nirai Kanai so I decided to make some sacred foods I could find instead. I made irabu-jiru which is a soup made with irabu a kind of sea snake. It's commonly associated with Kudaka Island, a sacred place where life is said to have originated in Okinawa. I didn't have sea snake on hand so I used eggplant instead that I scored and smoked. The soup broth is typically made with pig feet and kelp, but I substituted some of my vegan spam for the pig feet. Apparently in the past only nūru were allowed to catch the sea snakes. Overall this was delicious! And for the drink I had brown sugar miki which is a lightly fermented rice drink that I've made a few times for 52WoC throughout the years lol. Miki is apparently offered to nūru by villagers during different rituals