(Illustration by Yukiyo Oda/Stripes Japan)

Back in the old days, Okinawans commonly called westerners “Urandaa.” “Urandaa” is the Okinawan way of pronouncing “Oranda,” which means “Holland” in Japanese. Urandaa means “Dutch.” This follows a rule of Okinawan dialect that a word can be converted into the subject of an action by prolonging the last vowel of the word, much just like English converts some verbs into nouns by adding “er” at the end.

Umi/kai [sea] (Image by Stripes Japan)