5th International Conference on Okinawan Studies
Imagined Okinawa: Challenges from Time and Space

Linda Isako ANGST (Lewis & Clark College)
Longevity, Leisure, and Longing: Wellness Tourism and Okinawan Identity

Through the serious leisure of wellness tourism, the immediacy of problems of longevity function in Japanese society to fix Okinawa as a site for relief from the ailments of late modernity. Okinawan longevity signals a lifestyle in tune to natural rhythms, an intrinsic (read primitive or organic) connectedness to life forces. Middle-class urban Japanese (now and since the time of ethnologist Yanagita Kunio in the early twentieth century) have sought refuge in the redemptive exoticism of the primitive/natural internal other. Okinawa was the antipode to a fast-modernizing Japan, increasingly a repository for Japanese imaginings of a longed-for "simpler" past. Today, Okinawans engage consciously in creating a nostalgic past to which contemporary mainland Japanese can "return," for rest and relaxation. This paper explores ideas of Okinawan healthfulness: can they be judged in part through the success of wellness tourism programs?  Who partakes--middle-aged and elderly Japanese women? Men? Okinawans? What are local views about wellness tourism and Okinawan longevity? Do Okinawans accept Okinawa as a site of "good living" and an alternative to modern ills? Or are market needs more compelling rationale? An ongoing politics of culture [nostalgia], in which prefectural officials work together with Japanese politicians and developers primarily concerned with economic development, compel us to explore the implications for promoting an image of Okinawa that invites Japanese to use the island as a site of leisure and escape. How do we critically situate "wellness tourism" and healthfulness in a place which also sends U.S. troops to fight in Iraq?