The Awkwardness and Attractiveness of Okinawa as a "Cultural Borderland"

To say Okinawa represents a subset of Japanese culture is to ignore how the local culture is influenced by its historical relationships with its other neighbors. Even today, such influences are felt in daily lives. Foods with distinctive Chinese names like sanpin (香片, jasmine tea) and chinsuko (金楚糕, lard cookies) are not found in the local cultures of other Japanese regions, while the tendency to eat meat as they are in big pieces (pig feet and pork belly especially) reminds visitors more of Southeast Asia than the meticulously processed cuisines of mainland Japan.

And it is not only the food that shows how Okinawa remains distinct. Okinawans celebrate chimi (清明, Tombsweeping Festival) just as Chinese-speaking regions do and Japan does not. Traditional Okinawan clothing shows distinct similarity with Korean Hanbok, and traditional music can be played with instruments like tsona (嗩吶, small, high-pitched trumpets), again not found in mainland Japan. With mountain castles that look like Korean ones on the outside and Chinese ones on the inside, even the traditional kings of the islands were products of cultural borrowing from elsewhere.

That cultural borrowing has not stopped as Okinawa's traditional era ended. Decades of post-war American occupation and continued US military presence has led to a much higher influx of American cultural products than mainland Japan. Mixed-blooded children are a common feature, with the governor himself half-white. American foods like steaks and root beer are staples, not just exotic and foreign as they are considered in mainland Japan. Indeed, the very look of contemporary Okinawa, with palm-tree-lined streets and aloha-shirt-wearing residents, depart from its traditional days (when pine trees dominated) by importing the look from American-ruled Pacific islands.

It is unfortunate, then, to recognize that the process of borrowing and incorporating foreign cultural elements that define Okinawan identity is being threatened by an increasing monolithic official discourse that seeks to align itself with Tokyo. Local museums and epithets awkwardly proclaim the "dark history of post-war American occupation" and celebrate the restoration of Japanese rule as an end of decades-long suffering. While recognizing Okinawa's past cultural interactions with other countries, authoritative displays of local history in museums describe such interactions firmly in the past tense, stressing the dominant "Japanese-ness" of Okinawa today.

But go a bit away from the main tourist drags on the island and one realizes that the reality is much more nuanced. Speaking to middle-aged villagers is a process riddled with difficulty as their command of standard Japanese language is heavily influenced by a non-intelligible Okinawan "dialect." They speak of their younger days of working in naichi ("inner lands," or mainland Japan in the local parlance), not forgetting to mention just how much more casual and relaxed life is "over here" than "over there."

Such insistence of the differences between Okinawa and mainland Japan, enunciated in a language that other Japanese cannot understand, shows the danger of putting Okinawa exclusively in a Japanese context.  By denying that Okinawa is a "cultural borderland," shaped by many different cultures rather than the Japanese one, Tokyo risks accentuating an underlying current of Okinawans exploring who they are in a way that they find problematic.  In an official discourse that only differentiates "Japanese" and "non-Japanese," the exploration of Okinawa's multicultural past would be squarely placed in the domain of the subversive "non-Japanese" camp.

And as Okinawa builds itself as a major international tourist hub, that subversive exploration will be increasingly problematized even at the grassroots level.  Foreigners, many of whom from Japan's near abroad that Okinawa had strong traditional cultural interactions, will once again bring in cultural elements that are unfamiliar to mainland Japan but easily adopted in Okinawa.  With foreign tourists much more visible and economically influential in Okinawa than in mainland Japan, foreign cultural interactions, branded as "past" in official history, can become unignorably "present" once again.

As a new generation of Okinawans grow up with the story of protests again American military bases and seeing the influx of foreign tourists reshaping their islands, they will explore Okinawan identity in brand-new ways, many of which mainland Japanese will find extremely foreign and uncomfortable.  Yet, it is there that the greatest attraction of Okinawa lies.  Beyond the pristine sea and the balmy weather, Okinawa is first and foremost defined by its continuing melding of cultures to find itself.  Its identity as a cultural borderland will continue to seduce visitors with a unique atmosphere that is rarely found in racialized East Asian societies that surround it.