Japanese Shoe Carnival

Shopping on Okinawa can be a little frustrating.  Our main source of clothes and shoes is of course the BX (military exchange) and I've found that the buyers for the BX are a bit blind to the weather conditions on Okinawa.  Like they don't stock reasonable beach shoes, even though we live on an island.  And they had a nice selection of winter parkas and gloves, even though we live on a tropical island.  And now I need sandals for Cannon and all I can find are tennis shoes or leather dress shoes.  Leather dress shoes are not practical when the kid is wearing shorts and playing.

So today Stevie and I ventured to a Japanese shoe store.  I had not tried the Japanese shoe stores before because Japanese womens shoes don't come in my size (size 9).  That would be the equivalent of an LLL or possibly even an LLLL in Japanese sizes.  The Japanese size their shoes in two ways - either by centimeters or S, M, L, or LL.  It makes a person feel bad to be told that they are an LLL - I maintain that I am not big foot!

But I had hopes for Cannon to fit in their sizes so off we went to Shoe Plaza which was a store similar to Shoe Carvnival in the US.

From observations of the Japanese people, I knew their shoes were, well let's say, different, from US styles.  All of Japanese fashion is different from US styles, but this was the first time I was able to see them up close and personal.  Wow!  Double wow, and maybe even triple wow for the men's shoes!  At times I had to ask Stevie if we were in the men's section or women's.  You would too if you saw shoes like these...

Yes, those are men's shoes.  And so are these...

And these...

The kids shoes are colorful, and most often shiny, to say the least.  I contemplated those yellow ones for Cannon...

...but decided against them.  Emmy might have liked the girly tennis shoes with the obligatory "Hello Kitty".

Alas, I was so disappointed when these didn't come in my size...

But as you can see, my foot is a little bigger than Japanese shoes...

Well, it made for an interesting morning, but unfortunately we came to the conclusion that out of the hundreds of types of shoes in the store, there were NO casual sandals for Cannon so we ended up with an ugly pair of knock off Crocs.  At least the poor kids won't have to go barefoot!

(PS - If you can't read it, the sign at the top says "If size is agreeable, buying profits.")  Can you make sense of that?