Saipan ni yokoso

Carolinian navigators who plied the metawaal wool, the pre-European ocean highway between the Carolines and the Marianas, called our island Sa-i-pan, the uninhabited island. That was not too long ago. It has since been peopled by many ethnic and cultural groups including the polyglot of North America races, Japanese, Germans, and Iberians, particularly the first 300 years since contact with Europe. More recently, with the advent of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the peopling of the islands had seen south, southeast, continental and far eastern Asians in our midst.

While the bells of Kristo Rai toll, we also now hear the call to prayers from the virtual minarets, the clacking of wood blocks before the recitation of the sutras, the plucking of the sitar amidst the incense and the chants. We now feel the whiff of floral scents from the kami gardens. We are a new creation in the western Pacific.

To be sure, our welcome of Japan’s imperial couple, Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, is made with the inevitable backdrop of recent events—the decline of visitors, the exodus of investments on island commerce, and the discontinuance of JAL flights between our shores. We also hear reverberations from three scores of historical time echoing voices of ancestors who figured in World War II in the Pacific. Still, further in the recesses of chronos come memories of the expenditures of Nipponese, Okinawan, and Korean workers who labored in the sugar fields, the tuna-laden waters, and the phosphate and manganese-rich cracks and crannies of the land. Through them were attempts to provide these isles a firm economic base to sustain human living.

Beyond that, we even reach back to those junctures when perhaps, maritime Japan wandered into the domain of maritime Micronesia, at a time when we did not see ourselves as landlocked in agricultural fields but were adventurers among ocean currents and the gyrations of the wild winds.

Your Highnesses come to meditate, contemplate and pray before significant symbolic sites in our land, where spirits of ancestors prevail. Not unlike the description in the Kojiki that records the beginnings of Japan, Saipan, too, is a “sprouting reed shoot” (ashi kabi) in a “young land resembling floating oil and drifting like jelly fish.” The imperial court represents a historical awareness of continuing strength and productive momentum (tsugi-tsugi-ni-nari-yuku-ikioi) and have initiated the Heisei (Peace Everywhere) Era of the Chrysanthemum Throne. We welcome your visit. We embrace your spirit. May you find our spirit congenial to yours, as well.