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Footprints in paradise : ecotourism, local knowledge, and nature therapies in Okinawa

FOOTPRINTS IN PARADISE

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New Directions in Anthropology

General Editor: Jacqueline Waldren, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford

Volume 1 Coping with Tourists: European Reactions

to Mass Tourism

Edited by Jeremy Boissevain

Volume 2 A Sentimental Economy: Commodity and

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Carles Salazar

Volume 3 Insiders and Outsiders: Paradise and

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Jacqueline Waldren

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Volume 9 Recalling the Belgian Congo:

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Marie-Bénédicte Dembour

Volume 10 Mastering Soldiers: Conﬂict, Emotions,

and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit

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Volume 11 The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in

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and System

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Volume 15 Deﬁance and Compliance: Negotiating

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Heba Aziz Morsi El-Kholy

Volume 16 Troubles with Turtles: Cultural

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Dimitrios Theodossopoulos

Volume 17 Rebordering the Mediterranean:

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Liliana Suarez-Navaz

Volume 18 The Bounded Field: Localism and Local

Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley

Jaro Stacul

Volume 19 Foundations of National Identity: From

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Josep Llobera

Volume 20 Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and

the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus

Paul Sant Cassia

Volume 21 Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time

in a ‘Model’ Bulgarian Village

Deema Kaneﬀ

Volume 22 An Earth-Colored Sea: ‘Race’, Culture

and the Politics of Identity in the Postcolonial

Portuguese-Speaking World

Miguel Vale De Almeida

Volume 23 Science, Magic and Religion: The Ritual

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Edited by Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Volume 24 Crossing European Boundaries: Beyond

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Edited by Jaro Stacul, Christina Moutsou and

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Volume 25 Documenting Transnational Migration:

Jordanian Men Working and Studying in Europe,

Asia and North America

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Volume 26 Le Malaise Créole: Ethnic Identity in

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Rosabelle Boswell

Volume 27 Nursing Stories: Life and Death in a

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Volume 28 Inclusionary Rhetoric/Exclusionary

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Volume 29 The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing

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Pola Bousiou

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Volume 31 Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing

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Noel B. Salazar

Volume 32 Tourism, Magic and Modernity:

Cultivating the Human Garden

David Picard

Volume 33 Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics,

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Tijo Salverda

Volume 38 Tourism and Informal Encounters in

Cuba

Valerio Simoni

Volume 39 Honour and Violence: Gender, Power

and Law in Southern Pakistan

Naﬁsa Shah

Volume 40 Footprints in Paradise: Ecotourism,

Local Knowledge, and Nature Therapies in Okinawa

Andrea E. Murray

Volume 41 Living Before Dying: Imagining and

Remembering Home

Janette Davies

Volume 42 A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity

in the Cult of Maria Lionza

Roger Canals

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FOOTPRINTS IN PARADISE

Ecotourism, Local Knowledge,

and Nature Therapies in Okinawa

Andrea E. Murray

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Murray, Andrea E.

Title: Footprints in paradise : ecotourism, local knowledge, and nature therapies in

Okinawa / Andrea E. Murray.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references

and index.

Identiﬁers: LCCN 2017010903 (print) | LCCN 2017015913 (ebook) |

ISBN 781785333873 (eBook) | ISBN 9781785333866 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Ecotourism—Japan—Okinawa Island. | Economic development—

Japan—Okinawa Island. | Traditional ecological knowledge—Japan—Okinawa Island.

Classiﬁcation: LCC G155.J3 (ebook) | LCC G155.J3 M87 2017 (print) |

DDC 338.4/79152294—dc23

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For my grandparents, Jo and Winston Murray,

who taught me the value of good old-fashioned hard work

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures

viii

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: “We want them to know nature!!”

Chapter One: Okinawa’s Tourism Imperative

Chapter Two: Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

Chapter Three: Knowing and Noticing

Chapter Four: Ecologies of Nearness

Chapter Five: Healing and Nature

114

Conclusion: Yambaru Funbaru!

151

References

156

Index

167

vii

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 0.1 Map of Okinawa Island, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan

Figure 1.1 Map of U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa

Figure 2.1 Advertisement for Habu-Mongoose Show, Nago

Figure 2.2a Giant Yambaru Kuina, Churaumi Aquarium, Motobu 36

Figure 2.2b Kuina in Training, Tourism Welcome Center, Kunigami 36

Figure 2.2c Cuddly Kuina Mascot at Waterfowl Festival, Naha

Figure 2.2d Crying Kuina, Kunigami

Figure 2.3a “Mongoose Northward Prevention Fence,” Yonabaru

Forest, Kunigami

Figure 2.3b Ministry of Environment “Mongoose Busters”

Extermination Program Logo

Figure 2.4 Tourist Habu-Mongoose T-Shirt: “A Battle of Legend”

Figure 2.5 Okinawan Agrotourists Harvest Sugarcane, Itoman

Figure 2.6 Agrotourists Operate Sugarcane Press, Itoman

Figure 3.1 Northern Okinawans Dine and Chat During

Community Gathering, Kunigami

Figure 4.1 Dolphins Kiss in Caricature at Wellness Village, Motobu 87

viii

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List of Figures

Figure 4.2 “Restaurant Flipper” Invokes Okinawan Culinary

Tradition, Nago

Figure 4.3a Volunteer Coral Gardeners on Land, Ginowan

106

Figure 4.3b Coral Polyp Transplants (3 months)

107

Figure 4.3c Coral Polyp Transplants (6 months)

107

Figure 4.3d Volunteer Coral Gardeners at Sea, Ginowan

108

Figure 5.1 Okinawans Do Forest Therapy, Yonabaru Forest

114

Figure 5.2 Flier for Okinawans: “Treasure Box” Nature Games

119

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PREFACE

Social and political life on small subtropical islands is frequently shaped by

the economic imperative of sustainable tourism development. In Okinawa,

“ecotourism” promises to provide employment for a dwindling population

of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering re-

gional pride. In this volume, I consider how new subjectivities are produced

when host communities come to see themselves through the lens of the visit-

ing tourist. I further explore how Okinawans’ sense of place and identity are

transformed as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as

cherishable yet vulnerable resources.

I present a case study of how local ecological knowledge moves inter-gen-

erationally (between Okinawan elders and youth) and cross-culturally (be-

tween Okinawan nature guides and international and mainland Japanese

tourists, the latter being often also considered “foreign”). By tracing the for-

mal and informal social networks through which speciﬁc attitudes, beliefs,

and sensibilities about the environment are circulated and reproduced, I

demonstrate how nature-based therapies marketed to tourists for stress relief

and lifestyle rehabilitation (e.g., forest therapy, dolphin therapy, and coral

gardening) also inﬂuence Okinawan attitudes toward health and wellness.

These kinds of activities reconﬁgure human relationships with nonhuman

animal species: creatures previously “good to eat” (Harris 1985) are now

even better to heal.

Sustainability in Okinawa always begins with the question of military

bases. The ecotourism concept poses a compelling, if problematic, economic

alternative to the expansion of U.S. bases into northern Okinawa, the hub

of environmentally oriented conservationist, educational, and tourist pro-

grams on the main island. My analysis of the ecological and cultural eﬀects

of sustaining the tourism industry in Okinawa speaks to small islands facing

similar economic and environmental challenges in East Asia, the Caribbean,

Oceania, and beyond.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deepest gratitude goes out to the wealth of friends, family members, and

colleagues who have helped me to generate, investigate, and ultimately com-

plete this project over the last decade. Chapter 1 was conceived with the help

of Sarah Vaughn, Goutam Gajula, Shafqat Hussain, and Anand Pandian

through a panel on “Vulnerability’s Ethical Engagements and Traces” held

at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in November

2011. My colleague Rheana (Juno) Parreñas’s work on rehabilitant orang-

utans in Malaysia inspired me to consider nonhuman animal histories in

relation to human vulnerability in Chapter 2. Countless words of thanks to

Lisanne Norman and Jennifer Mack for patiently reading, editing, and cri-

tiquing every line of every chapter as they ﬁrst emerged, and to Dr. Norman

for her continued editing of the manuscript as it developed. I would have

been completely lost without tracking your changes!

Sarah Kashani and Fumi Wakamatsu supported my conceptual thinking

on Japan, while the members of the Political Ecology and Reischauer Insti-

tute of Japanese Studies Working Groups provided invaluable feedback every

time we met to workshop our writing. My dear friends Illiana Quimbaya,

Sarah Kashani, Jennifer Mack, Cynthia Browne, Bridget Hanna, Aquene

Freechild, H’Sien Hayward, Alison Hillegeist, Annie Turner, and Ruthe

Farmer kept me aﬂoat when I struggled most. Megan Scheminske, your

graphic design skills are uncrushable! My fantastic oﬃcemates Kristin Wil-

liams, Esra Gokce Sahin, Jeremy Yellen, Christopher Leighton, Hiromu

Nagahara, Raja Adal, and Jennifer Yum were always available with ample

empathy as we typed, typed, typed, in a row, day and night, Monday through

Sunday. Your humor and support were a breath of fresh air, and you know

exactly how precious oxygen was in our oﬃce.

I could not have conducted my ﬁeldwork without the kindness and gen-

erosity of Professors Junko Ōshima and Katsunori Yamazato, and Ms. Kaori

Kinjō from the University of the Ryukyus. The incredible kindness shown

to me by my formal (and informal) advisors at Meio University—Profes-

sors Yūji Arakaki and Sumiko Ōgawa, and Dr. Eugene Boostrom—kept me

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Acknowledgments

healthy and at home in Okinawa. My dear healing friend, Yuri Arakaki, my

loving host mother Yoshiko Nakasone, and her wonderful niece Mutsuko

Inafuku enriched an often isolating ﬁeldwork experience by making me feel

welcome, always. “Weasel” the wily translator: Thank you for your sense of

humor about my ﬁeldwork.

At Harvard, Marianne Fritz, Cris Paul, Susan Farley, Amy Zug, and Su-

san Hilditch helped me to keep perspective as I struggled to clear the steep

hurdles set by the Department of Anthropology and GSAS. The endless ef-

forts of these fantastic women oﬀer the ﬁnest argument for “Staﬀ not Stuﬀ!”

To my cohabitants Chris Mosier and Chenzi Xu: Our lively conversations

brought me much-needed levity during one of the most stress-ﬁlled years of

my life. Anne Allison, Diane Nelson, Deborah Thomas, and John L. Jack-

son, Jr.: Thank you for turning me on to the weird world of Anthropology

when I was most impressionable. Kimberly Theidon, thank you for helping

me to persevere when I was most discouraged.

The Department of Anthropology, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese

Studies, and the Harvard Asia Center generously supported my preliminary

summer ﬁeldwork, as well as my participation in the Japanese language

schools and academic conferences that helped me to reﬁne my research ques-

tions. Special thanks to Ted Gilman and Stacey Matsumoto for aﬀording

me the many perks of being a Graduate Student Associate at RIJS (twice!).

The Fulbright Institute of International Education made my ﬁeldwork pos-

sible despite some very diﬃcult circumstances, and I am forever indebted to

Dr. David Satterwhite and the staﬀ at the Japan–United States Educational

Commission in Tokyo for their tremendous support and ﬂexibility through-

out the daunting health challenges I faced during ﬁeldwork. My heartfelt

thanks go to Jackie Waldren for being such an inspiring friend and mentor to

me over the past decade. Without your encouragement this Berghahn Book

would not exist.

My thesis committee members each brought a diﬀerent intellectual and

disciplinary gift to the table: Michael Herzfeld, you pushed me to write,

write, write, and write some more when I was blocked and despairing, and

you oﬀered thoughtful encouragement when I needed it most. Steven Ca-

ton, you validated my unconventional writing style while gently reminding

me that I still needed to make an argument. Ian Miller, your enthusiasm

for my topic kept me engaged when my own thoughts were moving from

critical to cynical. Thanks to you, I ﬁnally have the conﬁdence to show my

historiography to a real historian! Ted Bestor, as my advisor, friend, and sur-

rogate family in Cambridge, you and Vickey have constantly reminded me

why I became an anthropologist. You have shown me a kindness that extends

worlds beyond anything I could have imagined when I ﬁrst came to big,

xii

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Acknowledgments

scary Harvard University. You have both seen me through the raw and the

cooked, and I will never forget your generosity. Thank you.

Thank you to my sister, Lauren Sullivan, and to my father, Michael

Murray, for keeping the faith—in me. Jennifer “Mama Jen” Desmond: You

rescued me many times throughout graduate school and during my tumul-

tuous time in Japan. I am so grateful to you for your unfailing love and

support, always. You are also owed an honorary doctorate for your thought-

ful, real-world contributions aimed at making this project make sense.

Philip Klinkner, thank you for bringing me home after a very long journey.

I love you.

xiii

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INTRODUCTION

“We want them to know nature!!”

Our guide’s impassioned explanation of his primary objective was lost on

most of the sunburned ecotour group I had joined for an afternoon of man-

grove kayaking in Higashi, one of Okinawa Island’s northernmost villages.

We sat in a circle on straw tatami mats, sheltered at last from a blazing July

sun by the red-tiled roof of a traditional Okinawan house built on sturdy

stilts to welcome rare cool breezes blowing through. An exhausted, hungry

group of ecotourists dug eagerly into a bowl full of saataa andaagii, black

sugar and pineapple-ﬂavored “Okinawa donuts,” and chugged hibiscus tea.

Our guide, “Cha-chan,”1 a twenty-something Okinawan outdoor enthusiast

nicknamed after brown tea leaves for his year-round tan, told us about his

desire to “teach” nature, along with a bit of Okinawan history and culture,

on every tour he conducted.

His boss, Mr. Miyagi, a generation or two older and noticeably less tan,

sat on the opposite side of the ﬂoor table we were gathered around. Miyagi

interjected that the Higashi Nature School’s goals were also practical: “Of

course, our ﬁrst objective is to improve the economic health of the area.

Agriculture does not appeal to the younger generations, so we bring in third

sector business and industry to retain and attract young people.”

Cha-chan was one of many self-declared “nature lovers” I met during ﬁf-

teen months of ﬁeldwork in the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa. He spoke

of the need to retain the rich biodiversity of northern ecosystems, symboli-

cally including himself when he told me: “I never want to be separated from

this place!” His boss, director of the Higashi Tourism Promotion Associa-

tion, was also a nature enthusiast but focused more on how to sustain the

livelihood of young guides like Cha-chan by continuing to attract the twenty

thousand mainland Japanese tourists who annually visit his hometown of

Higashi, a village with only two thousand permanent residents. Since the

late 1990s, the Higashi Nature School has grown to become northern Oki-

nawa’s model of success in promoting the “ecotourism” concept to visiting

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Footprints in Paradise

tourists, and to a predominantly pineapple-farming community not yet ac-

customed to having large tour buses full of Japanese homestay students ﬂood

their rivers, forests, and living rooms.

Miyagi’s description of the dramatic shift in local labor away from the

sun, sweat, and dirt aﬀorded by the primary experience of farming, toward

the more tertiary sun, sweat, and dirt supplied by guiding ecotours, indi-

cates that tourists are not the only population to experience something pro-

foundly new and diﬀerent when they don a wetsuit to dive deeper into the

ocean, or enter a subtropical forest to listen for the call of rare birds. When

I asked him whether the growth of ecotourism in Higashi had changed lo-

cal attitudes toward nature, Miyagi replied without hesitating: “Not much.

It hasn’t yet. The locals only see the money. It’s easy to see business. Then

again, people have begun to really want to show a nice clean town to visitors

for proﬁt purposes, and this has had a good eﬀect on the environment. The

attitudes will change from now on.”

This book is an attempt to see, notice, and know how “Nature” is con-

structed and reconstituted as a cultural, economic, and touristic resource

in Okinawa. Looking through the lens of Japanese and international eco-

tourists while tracing the footprints of their Okinawan nature interpreters, I

present a case study of how knowledge about the environment is localized,

packaged, and reproduced for tourist consumption in northern Okinawa as

part of a much larger Japanese state project promoting village revitalization.

The economic and social transformation of the northern Yambaru Area of

Okinawa Island—from an “inconvenient countryside” and a “harsh place

with only mountains” (Ministry of Environment 2008: 2) into a biodiver-

sity hotspot that hosts nearly 25 percent of Japan’s plant species and four of

Japan’s twelve endemic animals—redeﬁnes the environmental sensibilities of

visitors and residents alike.

I consider the touristic, activist, and educational initiatives through which

Okinawans express and promote their archipelago’s speciﬁc environmental

concerns to visitors while forging new touristic enterprises to sustain local

economies. The binarizing social and analytical categories of visitor/visited,

local/expert, insider/outsider, and host/guest frequently deployed in anthro-

pological studies of tourism2 are both reproduced and transcended in Oki-

nawa. Multiple forms of naturalized touristic encounters between humans

and other humans, and between humans and nonhuman forms of life are

made visible through ecotourism and other facilitated experiences of nature.

The nature of these experiences calls into question the location and limits of

the natural environment that local guides and visiting tourists seek to expe-

rience, encouraging new theoretical perspectives on why we are compelled

to get closer to “green.” In Okinawa, knowing nature—even loving it—is a

matter of interpretation.

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Introduction

Locating the Ecotourist: Theoretical Questions

As a typical Japanese tourist in Okinawa, you would probably arrive in Jan-

uary, March, or August with your spouse and 1.25 children, drop your lug-

gage at one of Japan Airlines’ luxurious, all-inclusive beachfront hotels, and

instruct your pre-programmed GPS-equipped rental car to take you straight

to three of the most popular tourist sites: Okinawa Peace Memorial Park; an

enclosed cultural theme park such as Okinawa World; and Churaumi, the

world’s second-largest aquarium. You might collect a few kariyushi “happi-

ness” Hawaiian shirts for your co-workers and some pit viper–infused awam-

ori liquor before ﬁnally hitting the beach, where you could partake in marine

leisure sports such as snorkeling or a one-time fun dive. You would allot ap-

proximately 2.5 days to see, do, and buy it all before ﬂying back to Tokyo to

return to work, and your fond memories might not include any Okinawans.

For a middle-class family embarking on its ﬁrst big trip, the practical

appeal of taking a “quasi-overseas trip to quasi-foreign, quasi-tropical” (Figal

2012: 122) Okinawa would likely include the ease of speaking Japanese and

spending yen, minimal travel time (about four hours by plane from Tokyo

to Naha), and aﬀordable amenities.

These stereotypes of Japanese patterns of domestic tourism3 are well-worn

territory, among both tourists (5.7 million visited Okinawa in 2009), and

anthropologists of Japan (e.g., Graburn 1989; Hendry 1995; Ivy 1995). An-

thropologists have tended to frame their studies of tourism in terms of the rit-

ual and religious origins of tourism (Graburn 1983), the marketing of village

tourism to urban Japanese (Ivy 1995; Robertson 1991), or the negative social,

cultural, and environmental eﬀects of village tourism (Moon 1997, 1998).

Whether explaining the historical roots of contemporary Japanese modes

of travel (Graburn 1983) or analyzing the relationship between nostalgia and

national identity at play in domestic village travel (Robertson 1988), anthro-

pologists of Japan have tended to study domestic tourism from the perspective

of the tourist guest. Common scholarly assumptions that tourism has been

“imposed on locals, not sought, and not invited” (Stronza 2001: 262) have im-

peded a full understanding of why host communities engage in tourism in par-

ticular ways. Studies of recipient communities have criticized the deleterious

social and environmental eﬀects of tourism caused by the commodiﬁcation of

nature (Moon 1997: 222) without fully considering the ﬁnancial, cultural, and

community beneﬁts that locals may also derive from actively studying their

surroundings and sharing certain aspects of their lives with outsiders.

Marilyn Ivy points out that “those who are living continuously in the

place where they were born do not call that place furusato [old village or

native place]” (Ivy 1995: 103). I contribute to the anthropology of Okinawa

by asking how nostalgia operates for Okinawan hosts engaged in ecotourism

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Footprints in Paradise

in northern towns such as Ōgimi, where a giant carved banner greets visitors:

“Welcome to the long-living furusato!” Chris Nelson’s (2008: 24) ethnogra-

phy of Okinawan popular performers provides insight into how the trope

of the idyllic Okinawan past both attracts visitors “in search of an authentic

experience of a lost Japan” and incites the postwar “will to memory” among

the performers. Okinawan nature interpreters (including young novices and

experienced retirees) also reify these discourses of loss through storytelling

and performance when leading tours.

The existing literature on Japan provides useful theoretical frameworks

for understanding how domestic tourism supports rural areas struggling

with depopulation and stagnant economies (Ivy 1988, 1995; Moon 1997;

Siegenthaler 1999) and creates educational opportunities for tourist “pil-

grims” (Graburn 1983). Yugo Ono’s (2005) study of Ainu ecotourism and

cultural heritage advocacy in Hokkaido demonstrates how one of Japan’s

ethnic minority groups can mobilize the natural resources of the countryside

to supplement previously established rural industries such as rice cultiva-

tion, ﬁshing, and logging. While recent scholarship dedicated to the political

ecology of global tourism begins to cover more territory (cf. Mostafanezhad

et. al 2016), ecotourism in East Asia has been largely overlooked by social

scientists. Previously one had to journey to a Tanzanian island marine park

(Walley 2004), a Costa Rican rainforest (Vivanco 2006), or an Indonesian

island (Lowe 2006) to ﬁnd a critical ethnographic examination of the com-

modiﬁcation of the environment (Walsh 2012) through ecotourism.

Ecotourism is most commonly associated with the hyper-naturalized

imaginary of the “Global South” (this term refers to countries such as Costa

Rica, Kenya, and Brazil), but over the last twenty years national parks and

nature preserves throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan

have also begun to adopt the concept. Through a politics of nature Laura

Ogden (2011: 96) regards as “ecological fame-making,” northern Okinawa’s

Yambaru forests, for example, are now comparable to Costa Rica’s Monte

Verde, a veteran “biodiversity hot spot” (Vivanco 2006: 10) that contains

5 percent of the world’s ﬂoral and faunal species. Every ten square kilometers

of Okinawa is more than “twenty times richer” (McCormack 1999: 262)

than equivalent areas elsewhere in Japan.

Anthropologists have studied tourism as a transnational vector for the

commodiﬁcation of culture (Greenwood 1989); as route for and producer

of globalization (Enloe 2014; Stronza 2005); as a mediator of insiders’ and

outsiders’ sense of community and belonging (Smith 1989: 5; Waldren

1996); as a colonialist holdover (Urry 1990); as a source of environmental

degradation and exploitation (Bundy 1996; Vivanco 2006); even as a form

of governance (West and Carrier 2004). As a result, Amanda Stronza (2005:

263) suggests, we know ‘“practically nothing’ about the impacts of tourism

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Introduction

on tourists themselves. How are they aﬀected by what they see, do, and

experience during their travels?” Paige West and James Carrier (2004), in

their case studies of ecotourism in Jamaica and Papua New Guinea, ﬁnd

that the dominant hopes and desires of Western tourists can be gleaned from

the behaviors of host countries. They argue that ecotourism “encourages a

particular way of knowing people and things in pertinent parts of the world”

(2004: 485) and further develop Carrier’s term “virtualism” (Carrier and

Miller 1998) to explain how ecotourism, a quintessentially neoliberal busi-

ness concept, moves and grows in similar ways despite being implemented

in diverse cultural contexts.

Virtualism explains some of the contradictions inherent in ecotourism:

that it tends not to preserve valued ecosystems, but rather creates landscapes

that conform to Western fantasies about Nature4 through a rationalized

“market-oriented nature politics” (West and Carrier 2004: 485; cf. Sivara-

makrishnan 1998); or that the local (“traditional”) values that ecotourism

host communities intend to preserve tend to be replaced by capitalist com-

mercial values (West and Carrier 2004: 486). One of the most common

fantasies disseminating from the so-called Global North is the “rescue of

Nature from anthropogenic destruction” (Keller 2015: 8), a discourse driven

by the rise of industrial capitalism and an underlying belief that Nature is

(or at least should be) kept separate from humanity (West and Carrier 2004:

485). My key questions include: How are these discourses mobilized in a

non-Western, non–Judeo-Christian context? Is there a Japanese equivalent

to the Nature rescue fantasy? If so, how does it manifest in ‘“Tropical Para-

dise Okinawa’” (Figal 2012: 8)?

Cliﬀord Geertz (1997: 20) writes that the study and management of tour-

ism requires that it be conceptualized as an “extended ﬁeld of relationships,

not readily disentangled from one another, not easily sorted … into clear-cut

and exclusive, opposing categories.” Such oppositional categories include host/

guest, inside/outside, local/global, we/they, and here/there. Studies of eco-

tourism in the early twenty-ﬁrst century must also address binaries such as

human/non-human, North/South, Western/non-Western, and rich/poor. Ac-

cordingly, this study of the political ecology of ecotourism in Okinawa

demonstrates that “green development” (Adams 1990) is not limited to de-

veloping equatorial nations, and challenges the binarizing discourses of the

Global North and Global South. Ecological appreciation of one form or an-

other is becoming a “positive national characteristic” (Vivanco 2006: 10) in

many countries, but cultural expressions of this cosmopolitan sentiment are

both historically and geographically contingent. This ethnography contrib-

utes to sustainable development literature by providing a case study of eco-

tourism in Okinawa—among the poorest prefectures of one of the world’s

wealthiest nations.

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Footprints in Paradise

I began my ﬁeldwork planning to focus on the experiences of mainland

Japanese tourists. However, the ﬁrst few ecotours I joined helped me realize

that the local (“host”) experience of ecotourism, while it does not involve

travel per se, aﬀects Okinawan perceptions of the environment that move

well beyond the socioeconomic motivations identiﬁed by Mr. Miyagi in the

opening ethnographic anecdote. Engagement in tourism-related activities

that encourage Okinawans to view their proximate natural environments as

unique and even healing shapes local participants’ sense of place and sense

of self. In the process of embracing, reappropriating, and responding to the

early twenty-ﬁrst–century set of political and economic constraints, which I

label collectively as the “tourism imperative,” Okinawans also come to view

their biophysical surroundings like a tourist.

Authenticity and Power

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of [their]

expeditions.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

The tourist can be deﬁned as “a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily

visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change”

(Smith 1989: 1). Valene Smith’s classic deﬁnition is broad enough to in-

clude virtually all kinds of tourists seeking multiple forms of change (geo-

graphic, climatic, psychological, or spiritual). Amanda Stronza argues that

these leisured people are actually “key protagonists in processes of globaliza-

tion” (2005: 171). Are all tourists today mere pawns in a multibillion-dollar

global industry, or do participants in small-scale forms of alternative tour-

ism develop a sense of ethical responsibility to the places they visit? In 2012,

2 percent of all human carbon emissions came from airplane travel (Mc-

Grath 2016). If ecotourists are concerned with the protection of the natural

environment, then why not curb the carbon footprint and “staycation” at

home?

While “sun, sex, sea, and sand”5 (Crick 1989: 307) form highly visible

components of most island tourism, leisure travel in Japan is often character-

ized as including an explicitly educational element as well (Kato 1994). Go-

toh et al. (2008) ﬁnd that changes in Japanese demand for marine tourism

can also be linked to larger nationwide sociological trends: growing demands

for leisure time, greater quality of life, and extended leisure activities—as

opposed to short periods of socializing around work—are all changing the

nature of domestic tourism in Okinawa. The authors suggest that ecotour-

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Introduction

ism (sometimes referred to as “green tourism”) favors “the environment

and environmental consciousness over sightseeing” through its promise of

a “richer holiday experience through deeper interaction with a community”

(2008: 31).

Until 2015, The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) oﬀered a

simple deﬁnition of ecotourism: “responsible travel to natural areas that

conserves the environment and improves the welfare of local people.” The

updated deﬁnition reveals the importance now given to the role of the local

interpreter: “responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environ-

ment, sustains the well-being of the local people and involves interpretation

and education [of staﬀ and guests]” (TIES 2015). Center for Responsible

Tourism Director Martha Honey’s vision of ecotourism is even more ambi-

tious: beyond promoting low-impact, small-scale travel to fragile, pristine,

and usually protected areas, ecotourism also “helps educate the traveler; pro-

vides funds for conservation; directly beneﬁts the economic development

and political empowerment of local communities and fosters respect for dif-

ferent cultures and for human rights” (Honey 2000: 33). These idealized

deﬁnitions warrant unpacking; ecotourism is the fastest growing segment of

the tourism industry, with global expenditure estimates ranging from US$30

billion (Honey 1999: 9) to US$1.2 trillion (West and Carrier 2004: 483; cf.

Butcher 2007; Gössling 2003; Gössling and Hall 2006; Hill and Gale 2009;

Holden 2000). This ethnography builds on Noel B. Salazar’s (2010) study of

power in tourism by moving away from one-sided studies of the impacts of

the global tourism imperative on hosts or guests and instead analyzes the sto-

ries and experiences of local guides, interpreters, and other primary media-

tors of “Tourist Okinawa” (Figal 2012: 15), a carefully curated and mutually

constitutive tropicalized space.

Ecotourism is an idealized travel concept that often emerges in discourses

of sustainable tourism development, but perhaps due to its inherently local-

ized scope, the movement lacks internationally agreed upon standards of im-

plementation and oﬀers few comparative or comprehensive metrics that can

be used to determine its eﬀectiveness. Likewise, the genuine ecotourist can

hardly be identiﬁed by his or her rucksack and reusable canteen. Rather, eco-

tourism researcher Robert Fletcher suggests, the ecotourist might be more

easily identiﬁed by the strenuousness of leisure activities pursued. According

to Fletcher (2009: 276), unlike “conventional mass tourism where the object

is typically to relax and pamper oneself, the aim of ecotourism is to engage in

strenuous physical exertion and experience uncomfortable—if not expressly

unpleasant—conditions.”

Debates about the problem of authenticity pervade social science litera-

ture on tourism. Erve Chambers (2000) emphasizes the source of agency as

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Footprints in Paradise

the key measure of authenticity in host communities. Gerald Figal’s (2012:

89) work on heritage tourism in Okinawa builds on Chambers’s theory of

authenticity by not equating the real/traditional/authentic with “always and

only things of the past one strives to reproduce faithfully under conditions

of modernity” (cf. MacCannell 1999). My objective in studying ecotourism

development in Okinawa is neither to “condemn hoaxes nor to award diplo-

mas of genuineness, but rather to understand a moral and social phenome-

non which is especially peculiar” (Lévi-Strauss 1955: 18).

West and Carrier (2004: 485) demystify another contradiction inherent

in ecotourism—the apparent ethical contradiction between conservation and

travel—by demonstrating that the authenticity of a traveler’s experience is

judged through the framework of “Nature and the frontier” rather than the

messages of conservation biologists or anthropologists. Primordial Nature,

with its host of exoticized plants, animals, and (in some cases) people, can

only be reached by “being here” (Geertz 1988: 130). We can begin to un-

derstand ecotourism’s peculiar mix of leisure, fantasy, and activism by ﬁrst

studying its proponents and practitioners—those who are already “here,” nav-

igating with great passion the future of tourism development on Okinawa.

Ecotourism is meant to change the nature of encounters between hosts

and guests in destination communities and ecosystems around the world

(Stronza 2005: 171). This ethnography focuses on the experiences of “ed-

ucationally oriented” Okinawan and mainland Japanese travelers (Smith

1989: 5). The consumer proﬁle of the ecotourist is diﬀerent from that of the

middle-class Japanese tourist who, since the 1960s, has desired Tropical Para-

dise Okinawa. However, Akinori Kato ﬁnds that the diﬀerence is more likely

a matter of degree than kind. The educational component of ecotourism is

important not only to Japanese vacationers who seek to camouﬂage or at

least justify the purely recreational element of their trips with an educational

(or religious) component (Kato 1994: 57–59); improving environmental ed-

ucation about Okinawa is also a top priority for many of the nature guides

I met during ﬁeldwork. By examining the touristic reciprocity that shapes

host-guest encounters at Okinawa’s natural sites, I hope to complicate our

understanding of the motives and desires of those who preserve, maintain,

package, and present these places for outsiders—and for themselves.

By studying ecotourism in Okinawa, I complicate the narrow view that

most educationally oriented travelers who participate in ecotourism, whether

as paying customers, guides, or planners, are also members of a very narrow

demographic: “namely, white, professional-middle-class members of post-

industrial Western societies” (Fletcher 2009: 271). According to Robert

Fletcher, these professionals tend to be people who practice (or were raised

by practitioners of ) “relatively well-paid white-collar professions” (271)

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Introduction

such as teaching, journalism, business, and law. While Japanese people have

been problematically characterized as “Honorary Whites” or even “Honor-

ary Europeans” (Adachi 2010; cf. Beasley 1987; Kawasaki 2001), Fletcher’s

generalizations about the ethnic, cultural, and geographic backgrounds of

most ecotourists lose traction when considered in the Okinawan context. In

Okinawa, racialized discourses of diﬀerence constructed vis-à-vis the idea of

the dominant mainland Japanese ethnic group unsettle hemispheric divides

(cf. Keller 2015; Lowe 2006; Tsing 2005) that inform much of the existing

scholarship on ecotourism.

Nature has always been a resource in Okinawa, but Yambaru’s recent eco-

nomic transformation from supplier of lumber for postwar reconstruction

in the south to recipient of vacationers (from southern Okinawa Island,

mainland Japan, the United States, and beyond) has dramatically altered the

region’s economic makeup. This transformation has also spurred new dis-

courses of ecological uniqueness that inﬂuence local residents’ regard for the

everyday rivers, forests, and oceans that constitute the northern landscape.

By bringing this landscape to life in a dynamic new way, ecotour guides re-

conceptualize their own and their customers’ practical, physical, emotional,

and spiritual relationships with biophysical nature.

This book is a parallel endeavor. Rather than presenting the biophysical

world in snippets of colorful ethnographic details to evoke the scene of pri-

mary human-human interactions and events, I place forests, oceans, rivers,

and their array of nonhuman inhabitants centrally in my narrative. I em-

ploy “landscape ethnography,” which Laura Ogden deﬁnes as “an approach

to writing culture that is attentive to the ways in which our relations with

non-humans produce what it means to be human” (2011: 28). My objective

is to provide new interpretations of a few key interspecies relationships cul-

tivated through Okinawan ecotourism today. These relationships are clearly

inﬂuenced by, but not reducible to, the profound social, political, and en-

vironmental consequences of colonization and war, and the attendant dis-

courses of death, loss, violence, and invasion so superbly articulated by other

anthropologists of Okinawa (e.g., Angst 2003, 2008; Nelson 2008).

I attempt to expand scholarship on Okinawa by including nonhuman

animal histories, without which critical Okinawan perspectives on the en-

vironment cannot be usefully incorporated into the literature on tourism-

dependent islands, sustainability, and ecotourism. In addition to rendering

legible the lasting ecological consequences of nineteenth-century Japanese

colonialism, of the devastating 1945 Battle of Okinawa, and of the postwar

U.S. occupation of Okinawa (1945–72), I conduct a hopeful analysis of

Okinawan responses to the tourism imperative through new forms of en-

gagement with nature.

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Footprints in Paradise

Fieldsites and Methods

I conducted the ﬁrst half of my ﬁeldwork (August 2009–April 2010) from

Ginowan, a central Okinawan city about a twenty-minute drive north of

the capital city of Naha where close to 90 percent of Okinawa’s popula-

tion resides (see Figure 0.1). I chose to move to Ginowan because it put

me just a short drive away from the University of the Ryukyus, where I

was aﬃliated and audited a variety of courses on ecotourism, sustainable

tourism development, and environmental education over the course of my

ﬁeldwork. Ginowan, located next to the town of Chatan (where I completed

my open-water scuba diving certiﬁcation in 2009), is one of the primary sites

for coastal coral transplanting activities described in Chapter 4. The bulk of

my training dives were conducted with members of Reef Check Okinawa, a

nonproﬁt organization (NPO) in the southern city of Itoman.

For the second half of my ﬁeldwork (December 2010–May 2011), I

moved north to Nago, the largest city in the Yambaru Area. The name “Yam-

baru” (೶ჰ) combines the Chinese characters for “mountain” and “ﬁeld,”

refers to the area’s geographic characteristics. The Yambaru Area includes

Nago City and the three villages of Kunigami, Higashi, and Ōgimi (see Fig-

ure 0.1). From Nago, I was able to frequently visit the Wellness Center in

the town of Motobu and the Churaumi Aquarium, as well as the Kunigami

Forest Therapy Centers, all of which became central sites for my research.

Yambaru’s forests are comprised of low hills covered by evergreen oak (Itajii)

and subtropical plants, including wild orchids, azaleas, ferns, and mistle-

toe (McCormack 1999: 267). Protected species include the Ryukyu robin,

Scops owl, Pryor’s woodpecker, Okinawa rail, and rare amphibians, reptiles,

and insects.

Throughout my ﬁeldwork I was a visiting scholar in the University of the

Ryukyus’ Department of Tourism Sciences (DTS) and at the International

Institute for Okinawan Studies (IIOS). I worked primarily with sustainable

tourism planning and environmental education specialist Professor Junko

Ōshima (DTS) and Katsunori Yamazato, Professor of American literature

and Director of IIOS. By guest lecturing in Professor Ōshima’s Ecotourism

courses, I gained a sense of the kinds of questions and problems being ad-

dressed by tourism researchers. During the second half of my ﬁeldwork, I

was also a visiting scholar in Tourism Sciences at Meio University in Nago.

Under the auspices of Professors Yūji Arakaki and Sumiko Ōgawa, I had

the privilege of presenting my ﬁndings at the Okinawa Ecotourism Promo-

tional Association’s annual conference in 2011. These kinds of intellectual

exchange opportunities provided invaluable networking opportunities and

helped me to refocus my scope of inquiry over the course of my ﬁeldwork.

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Introduction

With the help of my advisers, I gained introduction to a variety of gov-

ernment agencies and NPOs that generously facilitated my participation in

the majority of activities described in this book. At the Okinawa Interna-

tional Center in Urasoe, I attended weekly lectures and training sessions on

ecotourism and sustainable tourism development sponsored by the Japan

International Cooperation Agency (JICA), a Japanese government orga-

nization frequently compared to USAID. JICA sponsors tourism industry

professionals from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries and

Oceania to engage in sustainable tourism training workshops and site visits

ranging from six weeks to six months in length. By following these groups,

actively participating in their brainstorming sessions, and serving as a discus-

sant during presentations of their project summaries, I became familiar with

the discourses of sustainability and development that pervade the tourism

sector of islands currently receiving Overseas Development Aid (ODA) from

Japan.

By following and riding on the oﬃcial JICA bus, I learned which na-

ture-based tourism sites are considered most important by the Okinawans

who organized our visits. Sites included the Churaumi Aquarium, the Za-

mami Whale-Watching Association, the Ufugi Nature Museum, and Kuniga-

mi’s Forest School, all of which are discussed in the chapters that follow.

JICA and the Okinawa International Center worked in conjunction with

NPOs such as the Okinawa Environment Club (OEC) and the Kunigami

and Higashi Tourism Associations to organize experiential training ﬁeldtrips

that fostered discussion and debate between international participants on

the relative merits and disadvantages of how ecotourism is conducted in

Okinawa. With permission from key administrators of these training tours,

I participated in ecotourism activities and observed how sustainable tourism

in Okinawa is produced for tourist consumers, local residents, and tour staﬀ.

The interviews included in this book were conducted as formal and infor-

mal semi-structured conversations with the government oﬃcials, academics,

nonproﬁt directors and aﬃliates, guides, tourists, and museum employees

who were kind enough to answer my questions before, during, and after

tours.

I also attended Okinawa Prefecture–sponsored conferences on topics

ranging from biodiversity, conservation, and slow living to long-stay tourism

and community building. Much of the data I include was gleaned from com-

prehensive presentations and handouts provided by lecturers at these talks.

A presenter at one of these conferences outlined some of the common so-

cioeconomic characteristics of ecotourists: “They are mostly women in their

twenties, of the highest educational background.” He went on to list a few

sub-categories proﬁling the typical ecotourist:

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Footprints in Paradise

• Socially Aware (politically active)

• Visible Achiever (interested in material success)

• Young Optimist (age 18–24)

I quickly determined that I was the Young Optimist (or at least, that

I had been when I began graduate school). Having my demographic mir-

rored back to me so succinctly made me squirm, and reminded me to avoid

broad generalizations about my informants wherever possible. Castaneda

and Wallace (NAPA Tourism Workshop, 19 November 2008) acknowledge

some common challenges associated with studying tourists, a category most

anthropologists have probably occupied at some point during their time in

the ﬁeld: “One runs the risk of studying her/himself being a tourist partic-

ipant. … Studying tourism, especially tourists, can lead to uncomfortable

introspection without a path through the maze of self-interpretation.” The

theme of “uncomfortable introspection” that runs throughout this book is

an unintended consequence of my methodological approach, which can

be summarized as participating in ecotours and other nature-based tourist

activities; observing the ways that guides and tourists interacted with each

other and with the nonhuman life forms they sought; and conducting in-

formal, semi-structured interviews with the ecotourism advocates and local

participants whose lives and livelihoods are aﬀected most directly by the

expansion of alternative tourism activities in the north.

This book represents my attempt to create a path through the “maze of

self-interpretation” that concerned me as an ethnographer, but also held clear

signiﬁcance for Nago Museum and Ufugi Nature Museum aﬃliates, Forest

and Dolphin Therapy participants, and perhaps most of all for the Japanese

and Okinawan nature interpreters who, like me, linked their identities di-

rectly to their interpretive work. My research contributes to anthropological

perspectives on tourism, inter- and intra-subjectivity, and the environment

by probing the ways in which discourses of vulnerability, loss, and disaster

shape the politics of island tourism development and produce new forms

of environmental aﬀect in guides and participants. I bridge the existing an-

thropological literature on the small island “vulnerability paradigm” (Moore

2010), “hosts and guests” (Smith 1989), and interspecies (or “post-human”)

relationships by focusing on the organized natural and touristic encounters

that bring these discourses into the same frame.

I begin my inquiry by asking: How do people become ecological stake-

holders through participation in forms of travel idealized as sustainable?

What kinds of performative acts serve to destabilize and reconstitute the

economic, political, and social categories oversimpliﬁed by the labels Tour-

ist, Expert, and Local? I consider broadly what is at stake in our ability to

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Introduction

cultivate and support aﬀective relationships with nonhuman forms of life—a

need that increasingly manifests in the form of nature-based tourism.

The pages that follow will take you on a series of ethnographically ren-

dered ecotours and other touristic animal encounters that re-create the com-

plexity of experience I saw, touched, and felt when following guides and

their tourists into the woods, under the sea, and into the town halls, con-

ference rooms, and museums where they discussed what these forays into

nature mean to them.

FIGURE 0.1 • Map of Okinawa Island, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan6

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Footprints in Paradise

Notes

1. All informants’ given names and nicknames have been changed. All Japanese and Oki-

nawan names are presented throughout the text as follows: [First Name] [Family Name]

in accordance with standard English language practice.

2. Noel Salazar (2010: 139) grapples with the politics of naming social actors in host com-

munities, considering “passive” terms favored by other scholars: “visitee,” “travelee,” and

“touree.” Salazar favors the more agentive “tourate” for his multi-sited study of foreign

tourist guides in developing countries. Because this ethnography explores the ﬂuidity of

identities within domestic tourism and across multiple social frames (cultural, occupa-

tional, political), I do not favor any one descriptor for Okinawans involved in the tourism

industry. Rather, I adopt the language used by my informants to describe their work.

3. While the focus of this ethnography is Japanese domestic tourism, it is worth noting that,

according to the World Tourism Organization, in 2005 roughly a quarter of international

“tropical island tourists” came from Australia, Japan, and Indonesia (Picard 2013: 17). For

a discussion of translation, knowledge, and nature-based Japanese tourism in Canada, see

Satsuka (2015).

4. Raymond Williams (1983) observes that the word “Nature” is “perhaps the most com-

plex word in the [English] language” (219). Following Anna Tsing (2005) and Eva Keller

(2015), I capitalize “Nature” when emphasizing a particular related discourse or deﬁni-

tion such as “singular global system uniting all life” (Tsing 2005: 91). I do not capitalize

“nature” when using the term to convey its many other meanings. For a groundbreaking

history of a similarly problematic term, “Wilderness,” see Cronon (1995).

5. These are Crick’s often cited “4-S’s of tourism” (1989).

6. Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

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Chapter 1

OKINAWA’S TOURISM IMPERATIVE

Introduction

A basic familiarity with Okinawa’s history and political economy is essential

to understanding the prefecture’s tourism industry in the early twenty-ﬁrst

century. In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the historical circum-

stances that have produced tourism dependency in Okinawa. I trace the

development of Okinawa’s tourism imperative to explain the contemporary

practice and presentation of ecotourism in northern Okinawa.

Island Geographies, Populations, and the Politics of Naming

Okinawa is Japan’s southernmost prefecture. The formal prefecture consists

of roughly 160 islands encompassed by a longer chain of islands collectively

known as the Ryūkyū Archipelago (ਹ౯⊝ặ), about forty of which are

inhabited by people. The Ryūkyū Archipelago stretches over a thousand

kilometers, extending southwest from Kyushu (the southernmost island of

Japan’s four main islands) to Taiwan. The archipelago is usually divided from

northeast to southwest and includes four geographic subgroupings: Oki-

nawa, Miyako, Yaeyama, and Senkaku Islands. The prefecture’s capital city,

Naha, is centrally located on Okinawa Island (Okinawa hontō),1 by far the

largest of the Ryūkyū Islands and the primary site of my ﬁeldwork.

Okinawa’s political history can be examined through the lens of language,

which is also deeply linked to the questions of cultural authenticity, exoti-

cized otherness, and regional pride that continue to shape touristic represen-

tations of the island today. The former semi-autonomous Ryūkyū Kingdom

operated centrally in an expansive trading system that began during the sev-

enth century, connecting the archipelago with China from the fourteenth

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Footprints in Paradise

century, and Japan from the ﬁfteenth century, until the late nineteenth cen-

tury, throughout which the Ryūkyūan government paid tribute to both pow-

ers (Zabilka 1959: 15–17).

The name, according to the Chinese, is of Chinese origin, for the word “Lew-

k’ew” [Ryūkyū] means “hanging beads” and refers to the fact that this island

chain is like a string of tassels on the skirt of China. But though the Japanese

have allowed their own pronunciation of this name to stand, they favor the name

“Okinawa” or the “long sea rope” which stretches as a cable between Japan and

Formosa [Taiwan], and thus makes these islands and Formosa an integral part of

Japan proper. (Gast 1945: 12)

The expansionist Japanese government formally annexed Okinawa in 1872,

establishing Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. Americans referred to the same

group of islands as “Ryukyu” from their ﬁrst involvement in the mid nine-

teenth century until the end of the post–World War II U.S. military occu-

pation (1945–72).

The Okinawan-language term for Okinawa is Uchinaa. There are many

ways to refer to the Okinawan language, each carrying a diﬀerent political

valence. In Japanese, the now dominant language of Okinawa Prefecture

(and the language in which I conducted the bulk of my ﬁeldwork), one is

most likely to hear the terms Okinawa-go (Okinawan) or hōgen (dialect of

Japanese). In Okinawan, however, Uchinaaguchi (literally “mouth of Uchi-

naa”) denotes the umbrella language that was spoken throughout the island,

with some regional variation, until Japan’s forced assimilation policies sys-

tematically eradicated it from classrooms and other public spheres during

the early twentieth century.

Linguists such as Rumiko Shinzato have recently established that Uchinaa-

guchi2 is not, in fact, a dialect of Japanese. While the two languages are genea-

logically related, Okinawan is less than 70 percent cognate with standardized

Japanese and the two are mutually unintelligible (2003: 284). Shinzato

(2003: 284-291) identiﬁes the following six distinct periods over the course

of less than one century, a period during which the Okinawan language was

purged from daily life but eventually emerged as a key marker of cultural

pride and diﬀerence:

1) Before the creation of Okinawa Prefecture (1879): Okinawan exists as

an independent language of the Ryūkyū Kingdom

2) From 1879 until the start of First Sino-Japanese War (1895): Oki-

nawan is gradually marginalized through the “top-down” imposition

of Japanese-language–only schools and conversation training centers

for monolingual adults

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Okinawa’s Tourism Imperative

3) From 1895 until Japan invades China again, eﬀectively beginning the

Second World War (1937): Japanese becomes the language of educa-

tion through a period of more grassroots standardization, while Oki-

nawan is still spoken at home

4) 1937–45, a period which spans the Second Sino-Japanese War and

World War II: Okinawan is denigrated as a dialect, the use of which

is punishable in increasingly militarized schools during a period of

extreme Japanese nationalism

5) 1945–72, the period of the formal U.S. Military occupation of Oki-

nawa: Okinawan declines rapidly under postwar U.S. policies designed

to propagate English and squelch the rise of pro-Japanese sentiment

6) 1972–present (Reversion to Japan in 1972): Okinawan resurges as a

point of prefectural pride following Okinawa’s political reversion to

Japan

Until 1879, Okinawan monolingualism was standard throughout the

Ryūkyū Kingdom; today, Okinawans under age sixty speak and understand

Okinawan-accented standard Japanese. The Japanese (and later, the U.S.)

government’s political conquest of Okinawa was achieved in part through

“linguistic conquest” (286), and I very brieﬂy summarize these periods to

historicize one of the most intensive processes through which Uchinaan-

chu (people of Okinawa) have come to regard themselves as “Okinawan”

and, to a lesser degree, “Japanese.”3 Okinawan-language greetings such as

Haisai! (Hello) and Menso~re! (Welcome) are much more likely to be di-

rected at sunblocked tourists than spoken between Okinawans in everyday

conversation.

Okinawans also have many names for mainland Japan4: Yamato (which

indexes the ancient Japanese capital of Nara and the dominant Japanese

ethnic group, known in Okinawan as Yamatonchu), Naichi (a relic of the

Japanese colonial period that indexes the main islands as the “internal” or

“home” territories), and occasionally even just Nihon (today’s most com-

monly used Japanese language name for Japan). My informants frequently

used these descriptors selectively to imply varying degrees of historical, cul-

tural, and linguistic separateness from Japan.

My informants regarded the reclamation and continued use of Okinawan,

and of dialects of Okinawan unique to the northern area where I worked, as

central to the joint enterprises of revitalizing local pride and strengthening

small-scale tourist economies. Whether for the ediﬁcation and entertainment

of mainland Japanese tourists or for the beneﬁt of Okinawans, the preserva-

tion of the Okinawan language functions as a strategic claim to authenticity

by emphasizing the islands’ cultural and historical diﬀerence from Japan.

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Footprints in Paradise

Okinawa’s “3-k” Economy

Your assignment to the Ryukyu (Ree-YOU-que) Islands—of which Okinawa is

the largest—will place you in pleasant surroundings, face to face with people

quite diﬀerent from those back home. If you have not been in the Far East before,

the sights you see and the people you meet will seem strange at ﬁrst. But you

will feel at home once you get acquainted with the Ryukyuan people and make

friends with them.

It would be a mistake, in an essentially rural and village country such as the

Ryukyus, to expect the dazzling attractions found in Tokyo, London, or Paris.

But the Ryukyus have much to oﬀer, not the least of which is the natural beauty

of a varied landscape. And wherever you go, you will ﬁnd the Ryukyuans friendly

and hospitable. These winning traits of the people have earned for Okinawa such

titles as “Land of Courtesy” and “Isle of Smiles.” Even the most glum visitor will

enjoy the good-natured smiles and laughter of the Okinawans …

Because of the strategic importance of the Ryukyus, it is essential that you

understand the islands’ background and people and the political circumstances

under which the United States retains control there. This guide will help you ap-

preciate the Ryukyuan point of view by telling you a little about the Ryukyuans,

their way of life, their problems, and their aspirations. The more you know about

the Ryukyuans, the more you will appreciate them and enjoy your tour of duty

among them. Take advantage of an unusual opportunity to know at close range

these delightful Asian people. (A Pocket Guide to Okinawa,5 U.S. Department

of Defense 1961)

The above excerpt, taken from an early 1960s U.S. Department of Defense

“Pocket Guide to Okinawa” written for military personnel, illustrates key

aspects of the deep connections between Okinawa’s tourism industry and the

presence of U.S. military bases on the island (see Figure 1.1). Glenn Hook

and Richard Siddle (2003: 6) reject the image of Okinawans as “non-threat-

ening, laid-back and relaxed ‘exotic’ islander[s], ever ready to burst into song

and dance, happily supportive of the status quo and the ‘warm’ relationship

with the mainland,” a stereotype reiﬁed through similar kinds of pamphlets

now directed at mainland Japanese tourists instead of U.S. soldiers.

The formal U.S. occupation of mainland Japan ended in 1952 with the

signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which recognized Japan’s ‘“resid-

ual sovereignty”’ (Tanji 2006: 61), but allowed U.S. forces ‘“to be stationed

all the time in and about Japan.” Of Okinawa, President Eisenhower pro-

claimed in his 1952 State of the Union message: ‘“The Ryukyu Islands will

be held for an indeﬁnite period,”’ thus reinscribing the politicized diﬀerences

between Uchinaa and Yamato described previously. Another twenty years

passed before Japan and the United States negotiated the return of Okinawa

to Tokyo’s jurisdiction.

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Okinawa’s Tourism Imperative

FIGURE 1.1 • Map of U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa6

Note: Not all U.S. military facilities are labeled.

On 15 May 1972, seven new laws were implemented to administer the

islands, including a law to address “Special Measures for Promotion and De-

velopment of the Islands of Okinawa” (Asato 2003: 234). Tourism fell under

the rubric of the Promotion and Development Plan, meant to help Okinawa

achieve parity with mainland Japan. In 1973 the mayor of Nago City fore-

shadowed the issues I explore here when he criticized Tokyo’s industry-driven

approach to development: “Human beings have become enslaved to produc-

tionism, which results in the destruction of the basis of our existence. Rather,

we citizens of Nago should take as our goal the creation of the most favorable

life environment” (234). The mayor’s criticism of Okinawans’ postwar de-

velopment imperatives as “productionism” can be read as a response to the

Okinawa Tourism Association’s (OTA) attempts to produce what members

called “tourism consciousness” (kankō ishiki) in the prefecture beginning

in 1954 (Figal 2012: 37). Gerald Figal’s (2012: 39) description of the OTA

mission can be understood as a kind of virtualism wherein “Okinawans

needed to view physically and conceptualize discursively their island in terms

consonant with the expectations of outsider visitors.”7 The Tropical Paradise/

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Footprints in Paradise

Tourist Okinawa mentality expressed by so many Okinawans today had to

be learned as an alternative narrative to the all too real “poverty-stricken,

foreign-occupied, war-ravaged homeland” (39) Okinawans were forced to

contend with in the postwar period.

Once the 1972 Reversion eliminated strict U.S. policies that required

passports and visas for travel between Okinawa and Japan, a newly domestic

tourism promoting the “subtropical climate, the beautiful ocean, and the

exotic city scene” became a major industry (Shinzato 2003: 290). Gavan

McCormack (1999: 275) identiﬁes the 1975 Marine Expo as the beginning

of mainland Japanese interest in Okinawa’s touristic potential, which led to a

decades-long “wave of steel” and concrete in the form of resort development.

Tourist visits jumped from 800,000 annually in 1974 to 1.8 million in 1975,

3 million in 1992, and nearly 6 million in 2009.

By the mid 1980s and 1990s, streamlined travel was furthering the spread

of a so-called “Okinawa boom” across Japan: Okinawa-themed music, the-

ater, and cinema gained popularity on the Japanese mainland, driving re-

newed interest in the revival and preservation of the Okinawan language and

mainstreaming a renewed sense of Okinawan pride. Domestic tourism con-

tinued to rise as things Okinawan grew in popularity and commercial prof-

itability, and the previously stigmatized idea of “Okinawa Time” (a slower,

more relaxed pace of life) found new currency among stressed mainland vis-

itors (Nelson 2008: 236).

Now, in the midst of what Hook and Siddle (2003: 6) identify as the

“third wave” of the post-Reversion tourism frequently characterized by bat-

tleﬁeld tours and organized shopping trips for cheap goods, Okinawans in-

volved in ecotourism are actively resisting the typical travel packages that

place visitors in mainland-funded luxury hotels staﬀed by non-Okinawans.

Tourism forms one leg of Okinawa’s basic economic structure, often re-

ferred to as the “3-k” economy, meaning that kichi, kankō, kōkyō jigyō—

“bases,” “tourism,” and “public works,” respectively—constitute the main

sectors of employment in Okinawa. These three industries frequently come

into conﬂict over questions of aesthetics and environmental health. Hook

and Siddle describe how human intervention in the form of widespread U.S.

military base construction subjected postwar Okinawa to “the good, the bad

and the ugly” (2003: 3). Bases bring at least four major kinds of suﬀering

to Okinawans living nearby: clamor, calamity, contamination, and crime

(Gillem 2007: 17). Linda Angst (2003) and Cynthia Enloe (2014) show that

Okinawan girls and women are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence

perpetrated by U.S. soldiers, who between 1972 and 2001 constituted four

percent of Okinawa’s population and were responsible for 1.7 percent of

crime (Cullen 2001, quoted in Gillem 2007: 308). Chronic aircraft-related

noise pollution,8 oil spills, accidental jet and auto crashes, and robberies and

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Okinawa’s Tourism Imperative

murders committed by U.S. soldiers are among the many complaints voiced

by Okinawans (Gillem 2007: 48).

Among Japan’s forty-seven prefectures, Okinawa comprises just 1 percent

of Japan’s landmass but holds 75 percent of U.S. bases in Japan (Hein and

Selden 2003: 5). The United States, which has more overseas military bases

than any other country (Enloe 2014: 126), currently maintains fourteen

military bases on or near Okinawa Island. These bases occupy close to 20 per-

cent of the island’s landmass and comprise roughly one-third of Yambaru in

the form of jungle training areas (McCormack 1999: 267). In 2016, there

were roughly 27,000 active-duty service members stationed on Okinawa, a

number that doubles when Department of Defense civilians and dependents

are included (Narang 2016). The social problems caused by U.S. military

bases remain the top priority in contemporary Okinawan politics, and griev-

ances frequently invoke base-related environmental destruction and the loss

of natural habitat for Okinawa’s animals.

In 1996 the Okinawa Development Agency’s expansive public works

projects constituted more than half of all construction business in Okinawa

(Hein and Selden 2003: 4). The “pristine” forests of the north become in-

creasingly valuable when juxtaposed with the “bulldozed and concreted”

rivers, beaches, and land, the damage from which feeds into the coastline

in the form of red soil runoﬀ, killing coral and other sea life in less obvious

ways (5).

Redeﬁning “The Environment” in the Postwar Period

To approach deﬁning a “favorable life environment,” we must ﬁrst consider

how the meaning of the term “environment” has taken shape throughout

Okinawa’s history. Okinawa-based scholar Eiko Asato succinctly outlines the

development trajectory I explore in this work: the destruction of the natural

and social environment, Asato (2003: 236) writes, “began with the devastation

of war, was followed by the degradation of the environment through military

base construction [and was] followed by industrial and tourism development.”

Shin Yamashiro’s (2005: 51–55) summary of the “critical phases” of Oki-

nawa’s environmental history complements Shinzato’s earlier analysis of Oki-

nawa’s linguistic history:

1) Preparation for War (1940s to October 1944)

2) Direct Impact of the War (1944–45)

3) Aftermath of the War (1945–72)

4) Preservation and Conservation of Natural Resources (1972 to the

1990s and onwards)

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Footprints in Paradise

During the immediate postwar period, the newly formed United States

Civil Administration of the Ryukyus (USCAR) Department of Health, Ed-

ucation and Welfare focused on urgent matters such as sanitation, disease

control, and the primary concern of better ‘“health”’ (52)—better social en-

vironments where people could live. During the 1950s, U.S. administrative

archives used the term “environment” in reference to other issues such as

family planning, water quality, and pest control (52) (likely the control of

the rodents, snakes, and mongooses I will discuss in Chapter 2). In 1950s

and 1960s Okinawa, concerns for the environment revolved around infra-

structure and public health.

The reversion movement for Okinawan “interdependence” was framed

as a nationalist, anti-capitalist eﬀort, as was common for decolonization

movements throughout Asia and Africa following World War II; and for

many Okinawans (and Japanese) the struggle for Okinawan independence

represented not only the retrieval of Okinawa for Japan but also a strong

assertion of Japanese independence (Tanji 2006: 86). By the 1970s, Oki-

nawa’s environmental administration had shifted from a “human-centered”

orientation toward a more comprehensive view that incorporated human

and nonhuman species as well (Yamashiro 2005: 52). Yamashiro identiﬁes

the 1970s post-Reversion period as the moment of the Okinawan environ-

mental movement’s emergence, a time “through which we can witness how

environmental aﬀairs became infused with attempts to protect the endan-

gered natural environment and to preserve Okinawan identity” (52).

In the early postwar period, the tourism industry was seen as an economic

sector with “great potential for national economies, opening up opportu-

nities for recreation and leisure for large parts of the population in indus-

trialized countries” (Gössling and Hall 2006: 13). Although the notion of

tourism-as-development persists in many countries, the rise of the Green

Movement in the 1960s and 1970s raised public interest in issues such as

erosion and beach crowding. The conﬂuence of diﬀering attitudes toward

the environment by U.S. military and Okinawans produced the milieu of

environmental politics that shapes discourses of the environment today. In

the 1960s, for example, U.S. military interest in developing central Okina-

wa’s Ishikawa Beach for recreational purposes led to the discovery that the

seawater was severely contaminated by nearby Ishikawa City—a ﬁnding that

eventually led to the ﬁrst water and sewage disposal system in Okinawa (Ya-

mashiro 2005: 53–54).

In early twenty-ﬁrst–century Okinawa, discourses of environment-as-

health and environment-as-nature remain intertwined in ways strongly inﬂu-

enced by the tourism imperative. Dolphin Therapy and Forest Therapy, which

I discuss at length in Chapters 3 and 4, further naturalize contemporary beliefs

that aﬃliating with nature improves human health and overall well-being.

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Okinawa’s Tourism Imperative

Tourism in Okinawa Today

Following reversion to the Japanese state in 1972, Okinawa has undergone

major economic transformations. The Okinawa Development and Promo-

tion Plan (ODP) (drafted by the prefectural government in cooperation with

Tokyo) was designed to reduce the socioeconomic gap between Okinawa

and mainland Japan and improve Okinawa’s economic self-reliance (Kakazu

1994: 151), primarily through an expansion of domestic agricultural exports

and tourist imports. Small islands such as Okinawa tend to suﬀer from what

Kakazu calls “dis-economies of scale”: overdependence on external trade and

oﬃcial economic assistance, extremely limited resource bases, high costs of

transportation and other infrastructure, extensive out-migration, and vul-

nerability to natural disasters and environmental disruptions (217). Okina-

wa’s former agriculture (primarily sugar) and manufacturing industries have

shrunk rapidly in the face of increasing global competition, and the prefecture

depends heavily on the Japanese government for domestic development aid.

Tourism and associated service sector activities constitute the most

profound change in Okinawa’s economic and geographic landscape post-

Reversion. During the U.S. occupation, tourism accounted for only 4 percent

of Okinawa’s gross prefectural product; by the 1990s tourism had reached

25 percent (Egami 1994: 829), and by 2004 tourism accounted for 20 per-

cent of Okinawa’s total external receipts, of which 40 percent is spent on

imported goods and services (Kakazu 2011, quoted in Murphy 2011: 16).

Toward the end of the U.S. occupation, the Okinawan labor of the “house-

keeping force” required for non-tactical, non-operational chores became

the “prime pillar” of Okinawa’s economy (Morris 1968: 3). Today military

bases constitute only 5 percent of Okinawa’s GDP, down from 15 percent in

1972 (Gillem 2007: 233). According to University of the Ryukyus econo-

mist Tetsuo Umemura (2007 n.d.), in 2006 Okinawa’s economic structure

by industry was as follows: primary (agriculture, ﬁshery, and forestry) 1.9

percent, secondary (manufacturing and construction) 11.8 percent, and ter-

tiary (services, including tourism) 90.3 percent. The gradual shift from a

military-based to a tourism-based economy has also produced the greatest

economic boom in Okinawa since 1972: more than ever, Okinawa Prefec-

ture’s 1.4 million residents rely on mainland tourists who spend more than

JP¥400 billion9 (approximately US$4.7 billion) annually—close to a quarter

of Okinawa’s gross regional product (Kakazu 1994: 5).

The tourism industry grew roughly tenfold from the 1960s to the mid

1990s (Kakazu 1994: 1), yet Okinawans still rank lowest among Japanese

in terms of per capita income: a report by the Japan Cabinet Oﬃce shows

Okinawans earned an average of ¥2,021,000 ($24,000) in 2005, less than

half that of the average Tokyo resident. Nonetheless, Okinawa currently has

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Footprints in Paradise

the fastest-growing economy in Japan (2.6 percent, 2003–2013), and the

prefecture’s population, unlike that of the rest of the Japanese archipelago,

continues to grow.

Tourism has expanded as U.S. military base–related spending has declined,

and the results of this substantial industrial changeover have been mixed. Re-

sort facilities, for example, run the risk of becoming economic fortresses that

never fully integrate with the local economy, even as they vacuum up pre-

cious natural resources to draw mainland visitors. The rapid “resortization of

the Ryukyus” (Kakazu 1994: 151) involves giant Japanese ﬁrms edging out

local hotels to build massive resort complexes replete with eighteen-hole golf

courses and multiple swimming pools. Hotel development is always capital-

and space-intensive, but water use statistics are perhaps the most staggering:

while the average Okinawan household consumes 391 liters of water per

day, a typical city hotel and a grand resort hotel respectively use more than

810 and 1,192 liters per guest per day. Mass tourism may ultimately cause

the demise of the beautiful beaches and lush sceneries that make Okinawa

such an ideal place for a luxuriant new resort. Okinawa’s ability to resume

its Ryūkyū Kingdom status as a host of international (touristic) exchange

depends on the preservation of the islands’ most cherished natural resources.

Ecotourism in Okinawa is part of a broader localization movement in-

tended to stem what Hiroshi Kakazu calls the economic “boomerang eﬀect”

of large-scale package tourism, whereby Japanese investment funds quickly

boomerang back to mainland Japan with limited spillover eﬀects on the local

economy (Kakazu 1994: 159). Ecotourists visiting Okinawa would ideally

do a homestay, patronize a local minshuku,10 or rent a pension for one or two

weeks, during which time they would participate in trekking, snorkeling,

canoeing, and kayaking tours operated by local nature interpreters11 rather

than spending their money on bus tours run by guides who typically come

from mainland Japan.

The World Tourism Organization (WTO) estimates that by 2020 more

than 1.6 billion tourists will have visited the Asia Paciﬁc region, and Oki-

nawa’s former governor Hirokazu Nakaima worked to attract at least ten

million of these visitors to Okinawa by 2017 (Murphy 2011: 16). Under

the banners of sustainable rural development, local income generation, and

the preservation of biodiversity, international lending and aid agencies have

pumped millions of dollars into ecotourism projects worldwide since the

late 1970s (Honey 1999: 7). Thus, over the last twenty years the practice

and philosophy of ecotourism has developed in response to the mass tourism

“Big Bang” (Oshiro 2007) that has already hit the Asia Paciﬁc.

Amidst a sprinkling of Taiwanese duty-free shoppers, South Korean golf-

ers, and families of American soldiers, the vast majority (95 percent) of tour-

ists in Okinawa still come from mainland Japan (Okinawa Tourism Direc-

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Okinawa’s Tourism Imperative

tory). The ODP estimated the “eco-footprints” of an additional one million

tourists annually in 2013, a source of major concern and protest among the

many Okinawans who would prefer to increase the quality of tourists rather

than their quantity. Many residents feel that the islands’ touristic carrying

capacity has already been surpassed and do not support former governor Na-

kaima’s ODP because of the long-term social and environmental risks posed

by extensive tourism development in Okinawa.

Mobilizing Diﬀerence: Distinguishing the Exotic

Anthropologists have noted the “ambivalent valorization” (Nelson 2008:

14) of Okinawa as culturally separate from a Japan that remains invested in

discourses of its own ethnic homogeneity (see also Hein and Selden 2003;

Molasky 1999). Over the last 150 years Okinawans were often portrayed as

racially diﬀerent from Japanese. This led to social eﬀects with grave material

consequences, including poverty and famine, forced labor and migration,

and military conscription and occupation (Nelson 2008: 12). Being distinc-

tive, on the other hand, can also mean being desired. In the context of the

tourism industry, the cultivation of Okinawa as an exoticized tropical12 par-

adise (as opposed to a backward colonial outlier) has sustained the cultural

“boom” needed to support the prefecture economically.

During ﬁeldwork my Okinawan informants intermittently referred to

their islands as “Japan’s Hawaii” (paradisiacal), the “Galapagos of the East”

(biodiverse) (McCormack 1999: 263), and the “Keystone of the Paciﬁc”

(strategic) (Zabilka 1959: 21). The latter term adopts the U.S. military’s per-

spective on the island but has more recently served to promote international

business tourism as well. The 2010 Okinawa Tourism Promotion Plan ap-

peals to business travelers incentivized by the prefecture’s exoticized beauty

to attend international conferences and conventions held in Okinawa, a

place that can be reached within four hours by plane from many major cities

in Asia, including Hong Kong, Manila, and Seoul. Emphasizing Okinawans’

unusual longevity13 and the population’s “overall superior state of wellness”

(Willcox et al. 2001: 423), medical anthropologist Craig Willcox even lik-

ens the archipelago to “The Real Shangri-La” (healthy) (2001: 1) (cf. Zhang

2017). These kinds of images are what attracted the six million domestic and

international tourists who visited Okinawa in 2009.

Upon closer examination, however, each of these highly marketable char-

acterizations of Okinawa contain a much deeper history of the island’s en-

vironmental and political vulnerability to outside forces. Ecological wounds

inﬂicted on Okinawa during World War II are today reﬂected by the absence

of certain features of the landscape, such as formerly vibrant villages and

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Footprints in Paradise

greenery in the south. The southern half of Okinawa Island was left as a geo-

graphic palimpsest in the wake of the Battle of Okinawa; a surface on which

the “traumatic erasures” (Daniel 1996) of recent history can still be seen. The

obliteration of so many features of the prewar landscape eventually created

the space to reinscribe the memory of human life lost during the war. At the

Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum in Itoman the names of more

than 240,000 war dead14 are engraved onto row upon row of black granite

walls known as the “Cornerstone of Peace.” More than 100 stones fan out

across Mabuni Hill, the location of Japanese military headquarters during

the Battle and the site of some of the ﬁercest ﬁghting at the end of the battle.

The stoic memorialization of the wounded dead in this case historicizes an

acute instance of violence, while the legacy of defeat keeps Okinawa vulner-

able to U.S. military interests decades later.

The war-based “dark tourism”15 (Lennon and Foley 2000) conducted in

the south grows stark when juxtaposed with the “green,” nature-based tour-

ism of the north. Taku Suzuki, following Maria Tumarkin (2005), charac-

terizes the postwar “touristiﬁcation of traumascapes” in southern Okinawa

as “neither a gradual nor a linear transformation of a place of horror and

sorrow into a place of consumerism and pleasure” (Suzuki 2010: 16). Suzuki

articulates the historical push and pull between touristiﬁed former battle

sites, labeling them as places for “sincere mourning of the victims and seri-

ous commitment to paciﬁsm” and as sites of sheer vulgarity (16). Suzuki’s

example of the Himeyuri Cenotaph,16 a war memorial visited by more than

800,000 people per year, suggests that battlegrounds shift in meaning and

recognition over time, in accordance with tourist popularity and a changing

political climate.

J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley (2000: 11) theorize the popularity of

visits to war memorials and battlegrounds in the early twenty-ﬁrst century

as secular pilgrimages made possible by global communications technolo-

gies, advertised through the commodiﬁcation of destinations for their edu-

cational value, and ultimately driven by their capacity to introduce visitors to

“anxiety and doubt about the project of modernity.” If the tragedies of World

War II can be reiﬁed through the present-day preservation and commer-

cialization of dark locations, then where and when does the war end? What

can a close examination of the places where the Battle of Okinawa did not

devastate the landscape—where there is an absence of stone memorials

and dated, quantiﬁed placards—teach us about the full scope of Okinawa’s

traumascape?

The tourism imperative has shaped the way that human history is told

in Okinawa. The legacy of the Battle of Okinawa can also be found in the

presence (and preservation) of new features of the landscape, such as acces-

sible highways,17 marked battle sites, and historical museums. The northern

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Okinawa’s Tourism Imperative

Okuni Forest Road, built between 1977 and 1994, crosses thirty-ﬁve kilo-

meters through the heart of Yambaru and has paved the way for the invasion

of “hitherto unknown feral animals,” including dogs, cats, and mongooses

(McCormack 1999: 269). The next chapter unravels the discourses of vul-

nerability that have come to shape human-animal touristic encounters in

northern Okinawa today.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, when I use the terms “Okinawa” and “Okinawan” I am referring

speciﬁcally to Okinawa Island and its human inhabitants.

2. I indicate romanized Japanese-language long vowels using conventional macrons (ā, ū, ō,

etc.). I present Okinawan-language long vowels diﬀerently (aa, uu, oo) to reinforce the

linguistic diﬀerences between the two languages that my informants unfailingly pointed

out to me.

3. Particularly when traveling abroad, many Okinawans will introduce themselves as Oki-

nawan ﬁrst, and Japanese second, to demonstrate their pride and, as a few of my infor-

mants mentioned, because most of the Americans they meet are already familiar with

Okinawa owing to the U.S. military connection.

4. When Okinawans speak of mainland Japan (hondo) they are referring to the four largest

islands of Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido. (Residents of Hokkaido Prefecture,

another relatively late addition to the Japanese state, tend to speak of only the ﬁrst three

as Japan’s “mainland”). In this text, “mainland” indicates the Okinawan perspective unless

otherwise indicated. Within Okinawa Prefecture, Okinawa Island is considered the main

island of the Ryūkyū Archipelago and is referred to as Okinawa hontō.

5. This Department of Defense oﬃcial publication (DOD Pam 2–50) was created by the

Oﬃce of Armed Forces Information and Education. Secretary of Defense Robert S. Mc-

Namara endorsed the guidebook for use by U.S. military personnel.

6. Courtesy of Megan M. Scheminske.

7. See Thompson (2006) for a more general discussion of island (re)tropicalization and

Picard (2011) for analysis of host-community agency within the context of the tourism

imperative.

8. For the ﬁrst half of my ﬁeldwork, I lived about 3 km from U.S. Marine Corps Futenma

Air Station in Ginowan (central Okinawa) (see Figures 0.1 and 1.1). The noise blaring

from aircraft ﬂying overhead shook the walls of my American-style house a few times each

week. I escaped this noise pollution entirely when I moved north to Nago.

9. Due to constant ﬂuctuations in the exchange rate between Japanese yen and U.S. dollar, I

quote most monetary ﬁgures in yen. At the time I conducted my ﬁeldwork (2009–2011),

the average exchange rate was JP¥85 to US$1. (Hereafter currency will be represented as

“¥” for Japanese yen and “$” for U.S. dollar.)

10. Minshuku translates roughly as “peoples’ lodgings” or “staying with the people.” This form

of lodging is popular throughout Japan: Okpyo Moon discusses the mutual beneﬁts of

such an arrangement in her case study of Hanasaku (Gunma Prefecture) (Moon 1998:

117–18).

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Footprints in Paradise

11. Honey (2000: 30) deﬁnes nature interpreters (discussed at length in Chapter 5) “well-

trained, multilingual naturalist guides with skills in natural and cultural history, environ-

mental interpretation, ethical principles, and eﬀective communication,” and key agents of

ecotourism’s success.

12. Following Eva Keller (2015), I recognize that “the tropics” is both an imaginative and an

empirical concept. Because the notion of the tropical is deeply embedded in discourses of

European colonial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (some, but not

all, of which resonate with the Japanese colonial project during the same time period),

in this ethnography I avoid using the language of tropicality except where I am quoting

secondary sources.

13. According to 1996 World Health Organization and Japan Ministry of Health and Welfare

statistical data, Okinawans ranked ﬁrst in the world for longevity, with an average lifespan

of 81.2 (compared with 79.9 in mainland Japan) (Willcox et al. 2001: 2). By 2008, how-

ever, researchers at the University of the Ryukyus found that Okinawan female longevity

had declined slightly while male longevity had dropped from ﬁrst place to twenty-sixth

out of Japan’s 47 prefectures (NIH 2008 n.d.).

14. This ﬁgure includes military and civilian deaths across nationality and ethnicity, and also

accounts for the war-related deaths of Okinawans in other parts of Japan and abroad.

While the name “Cornerstone of Peace” alludes to the U.S.-Japan security agreement, the

inclusion of the names of all non-Okinawan casualties is meant to express a more universal

and transcendent ‘“philosophy of peace’” (Hein and Selden 2003: 69). Sociologist Masaie

Ishihara describes this philosophy as “a kind of habitual way of life born of Okinawan

historical experience” (Ishihara 2001, quoted in Hein and Selden 2003: 69).

15. A competing term coined to encompass the phenomenon of morbid tourism is Tony

Seaton’s thanatourism. Seaton (1996: 236) deﬁnes thanatourism as “travel to a location …

motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death.”

16. The Himeyuri Cenotaph memorializes the gas bombing deaths of the Himeyuri Nurse

Corps, a group of 211 high school girls who cared for wounded Japanese soldiers during

the Battle of Okinawa.

17. The construction of an extensive network of highways across Okinawa in lieu of trains

during the U.S. occupation made the island susceptible to the global politics of gas and

oil in an unprecedented way, and precluded the rebuilding of the old railway system in

the age of the automobile. Since 2003 a monorail has run throughout Naha City, but

Okinawa remains the only prefecture in Japan without a sophisticated railway system.

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Chapter 2

SLOW VULNERABILITY IN OKINAWA

Introduction

Vulnerability is often understood as a condition of defenselessness to the

surrounding environment. To be vulnerable is to be susceptible to physical

or emotional harm. Human beings may ﬁnd themselves vulnerable in the

context of violent warfare, in the presence of provoked venomous snakes,

and in the throes of global economic instability. Yet there is no satisfactory

verb to describe the act of being made vulnerable. “Vulnerability” is rather

conceived of as a state or a quality, comparable to a noun such as “power-

lessness” or an adjective akin to “defenseless.” In Japanese, a person can be

easy to wound (℗ƇŴƬƯƧżŧ) and a group of people can be charac-

terized as socially vulnerable (ഠ߶֥೐ᆀ). However, both the English and

Japanese languages could be vitalized by a verb that describes more fully the

process of being made vulnerable or “vulnerabilized.” In this chapter, I ar-

gue that social, political, and environmental vulnerability in Okinawa is not

static; rather, vulnerability is a processual phenomenon that must be situated

historically to be properly understood. This chapter reconsiders the relation-

ship between violence and vulnerability by attending to the problem of time.

Temporality is crucial to understanding the long-term eﬀects of colonization

and war, the experiences of those who are vulnerabilized, and the expression

of this vulnerability in Okinawa today.

Animals, Violence, and Vulnerability

Forests full of Itajii (Castanopsis sieboldii), numerous valleys and ﬂowing rivers,

and the sea surrounded by Inoo (lagoon). … Stretching from north to south

and with only a short distance from the mountain recesses to the sea, Yambaru

consists of diverse environments that change in a variety of ways. The creatures

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Footprints in Paradise

of Yambaru use various environments in intelligent ways and live closely

linked together. The nature of Yambaru supports human beings too, who

are also closely connected to other creatures and the natural environments.

—Exhibit caption on “The Nature and Creatures of Yambaru”

Ufugi Nature Museum, Kunigami

Vulnerability in Okinawa is expressed through animals. Since it was ﬁrst

formally described by scientists in 1981, the Okinawa rail (in the Okinawan

language, Yanbaru/Yambaru kuina), has become the cultural, touristic, and

conservationist mascot of northern Okinawa’s Yambaru region. The Oki-

nawa rail is a rare ﬂightless bird endemic1 to the main island, an area fa-

mous for its natural beauty and rare semitropical forests. The rail’s inability

to defend itself against both “natural” predators such as the venomous habu

(pit viper), and “unnatural” predators, primarily the mongoose (an invasive

species), make the bird particularly powerful as a symbol of Okinawa’s envi-

ronmental vulnerability. More recently, human automobile drivers have also

killed the nocturnal bird known for crossing rural roads at dawn.

I ﬁrst learned about the rail, the habu, and the mongoose while hiking

on group forest treks in the northern Yambaru Area of Okinawa Island. Our

guides’ lively moralized stories about these three animals’ relationships to the

landscape, to humans, and to each other are what ﬁrst led me to think about

nonhuman animals as agents of environmental change in Okinawa. The na-

ture of the human-animal “close connections” alluded to in the epigraph

can be more fully understood by combining two histories that are often told

separately: (1) the mongoose’s environmental colonization of Yambaru, and

(2) Japan’s political and economic colonization of Okinawa.

In this chapter, I argue that the sensationalized “violence” enacted between

a pit viper and a mongoose in a contemporary, touristic context reﬂects a

much larger history of economic violence. This violence began when Japan’s

development of an expansive sugar industry on Okinawa Island during the

late nineteenth century thrust Okinawa into a volatile global economic sys-

tem. Sugar quickly became a quintessential vulnerabilizing cash crop that

intensiﬁed the links between humans and animals during this period—both

intimately, to each other, and to the larger economic and environmental

imperatives that prompted new forms of interspecies contact on the island.

The environmental vulnerability produced by the “sugaring” of Okinawa

exploded into an acute crisis during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, which de-

stroyed much of the southern and central part of Okinawa. Compared with

the overwhelming environmental devastation wrought by World War II, sug-

ar’s relatively protracted agricultural “assault” on the Okinawan landscape

may appear insigniﬁcant. Even so, Okinawa’s current economic structure

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

and environmental challenges cannot be adequately understood without

attending to historical processes large and small, and to violent forces fast

and slow. Stories of the habu, the mongoose, and the Okinawa rail can

be told in many ways; in this version, I emphasize time as the narrative

vector that connects Okinawa’s nineteenth-century political economy with

today’s tourism imperative. Through the creation of a multispecies narrative

history we can begin to understand the legacy of colonization and war on

Okinawa’s “untouched” northern landscape, and how this history continues

to shape the “conditions of possibility” (Foucault 2002) for contemporary

island tourism.

Animal Actors

Mr. Uchihara, a cheerful man in his mid-sixties, jumped on stage wearing

amber-colored glasses, a tropical Okinawan kariyushi shirt, and a headband

reminiscent of an Okinawan eisaa drummer.2 Welcoming about a dozen vis-

itors to the habu-mongoose show at the Izumi tourist rest stop in Nago (see

Figure 2.1), he encouraged us to take pictures before things had even started.

FIGURE 2.1 • Advertisement for Habu-Mongoose Show, Nago

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“Did you know that a pit viper can survive without food for six months?!”

Uchihara asked, warming up the audience by sharing some bits of trivia

about the snake we were there to see. A few months earlier, I had seen an en-

tirely computer-simulated habu-mongoose show at a nearby cultural theme

park. After hearing that these shows were no longer “real,” I was unsure what

to expect.

Suddenly he surprised us all by whipping the lid oﬀ a large plastic garbage

can tucked in a corner of the room to produce a real live yellow- and white-

splotched snake. Of the four poisonous snake species on Okinawa Island, he

assured us, this was not one. He enticed a few nervous children to go up on

stage and try on the harmless “boa” for size. “Click! Click! Click!” went their

parents’ mobile devices. “Remember to use your ﬂash!” he repeated, clearly

concerned with the quality of our photos. I did not desire this particular

memory, not even for ﬁeldwork. Was it too late for me to ﬂee on the grounds

of animal cruelty? As though reading my mind, Uchihara singled me out as

the only non-Japanese tourist present, and stated that my foreignness made

it doubly important for me to enjoy the experience. He brought the snake

closer, suggesting that I hand my camcorder to my neighbor for a photo

opportunity. I shuddered, and was immediately embarrassed by my reﬂex-

ive recoil. I very tentatively grazed the snake’s skin with my ﬁngertips, then

placed the luckless creature back in its garbage can.

“And now, for the real thing!” Uchihara shouted merrily as he used a

shiny metal hook to scoop out a habu from an adjacent can. He squeezed

the base of the snake’s head, forcing its jaws open to reveal a sharp pair

of fangs. He swung the snake around eﬀortlessly, manipulating its poses

like a master puppeteer. There were a few squeaks and tremors from the

audience, but most people appeared to trust him to keep us alive through

the end of the show. Pointing to the snake’s brown-grey triangular head,

Uchihara taught us that head shape is the easiest way to determine whether

a species is poisonous, and commanded, “Repeat after me: I will not touch

this outside.”

After a few more minutes of showing the habu, Uchihara returned the

snake to its plastic lair and pulled down a giant projector screen. He stood

before us and began recounting the history of the live habu-mongoose show

we were not about to see: “It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s okay for dogs to ﬁght dogs,

and for bulls to ﬁght bulls. And people ﬁght people, right? But to pit one

animal against a diﬀerent species is illegal. This is a very unusual law. They

say Japan is the only place in the world with a law like this.” I was surprised

by his disapproval of what seemed to me like a fairly reasonable (if imper-

fect) moral delineation, but as he continued I began to understand his logic:

“It’s okay for a human to kill a mongoose, and it’s okay for a human to kill

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

a habu.3 These animals are exterminated! But it’s not okay for us to let them

kill each other. The ﬁne for doing this is ¥1,000,000 [$12,000]!”

Anticipating a tinge of disappointment from those of us who had hoped to

see a live show, he reassured us that we were still in for a rare treat, because this

“precious” ﬁlm could only be seen at his habu house. The ﬁlm was about four

minutes long, and this version was indeed on the “real” end of the violence

spectrum. After opening with an aerial view of Yambaru’s lush green forests

full of chirping birds and leaping frogs, we were plunged into the midst of

a battle: an angry-looking snake stared us down, accompanied by an omi-

nous surging soundtrack reminiscent of the ﬁlm Jaws. Then a vicious-looking

mongoose appeared, swaying to the mesmerizing beat of Indian tabla drums

that invoke its geographic homeland. The mongoose panted and hissed and

the habu darted wildly around it, both angling to strike. For a while things

looked promising for the snake, but the mongoose was victorious.

The lights came back on, and set before us was the real live champion.

“Meet Michiko!” Uchihara cried. Michiko was a twelve-year-old ﬁghting

mongoose that Uchihara described dotingly as “undefeated” despite her

smaller stature. He kneeled down and cooed to her, “Oh, Michiko…,” mak-

ing everyone laugh. Her medium brown fur was surprisingly ﬂuﬀy, and she

yawned and stretched as she cleaned herself within the conﬁnes of her small

metal cage. As with the habu, nobody was allowed to touch Michiko. Her

eyes danced curiously around the room while Uchihara spoke. After we met

Michiko, the show quickly devolved into a sales pitch for habu-derived male

potency pills and other snake by-products.

At the close of the show I approached Uchihara and Michiko to intro-

duce myself. The stench of urine emanating from the newspaper that lined

her cage was overwhelming, and made it diﬃcult for me to imagine her

as anything much scarier than a guinea pig. Up close she was even cuter,

though her rhythmic shimmying turned into a nervous circular pace as I

approached. I asked Uchihara a few more questions about his views on ha-

bu-mongoose ﬁghts, and he explained that he and his colleagues had been

running these shows for over thirty years: “This is our work,” he reiterated.

Shortly thereafter he tried to recruit me to talk to the prefectural government

on his behalf, saying, “You’re a student! Maybe they’ll listen to you.” I po-

litely excused myself to purchase some snake oil.

Staged performances such as the habu-mongoose show described here

are naturalized and sensationalized in Okinawa for a variety of proﬁt-driven

and political purposes. These animals are framed as natural enemies by the

tourism industry, through local conservation initiatives, on postcards and in

cages; their actual recorded histories belie a much more complicated biolog-

ical and political relationship.

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Animal Actors in situ: “And now, for the real thing!”

Okinawa Rail

The Okinawa rail has not always been endangered, and it has not always

been restricted to the forests of northern Okinawa. As a sixty-year-old Yam-

baru retiree put it: “That bird was so common it hardly had a name. We used

to eat it.”4 First formally described by Japanese ornithologists in 1981, the

rail has many oﬃcial monikers: Okinawa rail (English), Gallirallus okinawae

(Linnaean), Yambaru kuina ǺȉǦȁǅƺǠ (Okinawan), and ೶ჰඣ哇

(Japanese).5

The rail’s population was estimated at around 1,800 in 1986, but by 2004

this number had dropped to somewhere between 700 and 1,000. The bird’s

transformation from an unremarkable forest dweller to an endangered spe-

cies and national treasure began when two Japanese researchers from the

Yamashita Institute of Ornithology published an article based on a dead

specimen they discovered in the northern village of Kunigami. Until World

War II, the bird could be found in many parts of Okinawa Island, but much

of its forest habitat was destroyed during the Battle of Okinawa and, to a

much greater extent, through postwar urban reconstruction. Jun Ui, a leader

in Japanese environmental studies, estimates that 90 percent of Okinawa’s

“pristine nature” has been lost since the 1972 Reversion (McCormack 1999:

270). Both these events were catastrophic for the bird, driving it farther and

farther north until, according to an administrator I met from the Ministry

of Environment, it could no longer accurately be called the “Okinawa” rail.

Thus, it came to be known by its current northern habitat as the national

protected species: Yambaru kuina.

The kuina can run fast, jump high, and ﬂutter, but it cannot ﬂy. It roosts

in trees, especially Itajii (evergreen chinquapin), and forages for small frogs,

snails, and lizards on the forest ﬂoor. Its eggs commonly fall prey to forest

crows and the habu. The pint-sized bird which weighs around 430 grams

and has a wingspan of about ﬁfty centimeters, is also eaten by mongooses,

abandoned stray dogs, and feral cats.

Habu

Habu is the Japanese term for a variety of native venomous pit vipers found

in Okinawa. Adult Okinawa habu (Trimeresurus ﬂavoviridis) and Hime habu

(Ovophis okinavensis), the two species most commonly found on Okinawa’s

main island, are between 120 and 150 centimeters long. Like the kuina, the

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

habu is nocturnal, but its habitat is much more diverse: it can live in forests

and ﬁelds, on mountains, and near small bodies of water. One may even

encounter a habu seeking shelter (or rodents) in old sheds and around family

tombs. The habu often resides somewhere between open palm forest and

cultivated farming areas, increasing its likelihood of contact with humans.

Mongoose

The small Indian mongoose (Herpestes javanicus) was introduced to Oki-

nawa Island in 1910 as a “biological pesticide,” a chemical-free alternative

to controlling the habu and the black rat (Rattus rattus), both of which are

detrimental to sugarcane farming. The mongoose prefers drier forest and

scrublands, but it can tolerate areas with fairly dense human populations

and is notorious for raiding chicken and egg farms. It is an opportunistic

feeder that ranges from 50 to 65 centimeters in length. Mongooses subsist

on insects but also eat amphibians, reptiles, birds, and bird eggs.

The Japanese term for “invasive species,” gairaishu (literally “species that

comes from the outside”), can also be translated as “introduced,” “non-native,”

“foreign,” or “alien” species. English-language literature on the mongoose (cf.

Yamada and Sugimura 2004) commonly refers to the animal as “invasive,”

owing to the degree of harm it is perceived to cause in its new environment.

The politics of naming, labeling, and categorizing animal species according

to their geographic origin greatly inﬂuences discourses of natural heritage,

biodiversity, and vulnerability in Okinawa. Moralized discourses of the vil-

lainous mongoose, the pathetic kuina, and the dangerous habu are brought

to life for Okinawan and tourist consumption and contrived through perfor-

mances such as habu-mongoose shows. The commoditized versions of their

“cultural biographies” (Kopytoﬀ 1986) and interrelationships—as natural or

unnatural, right or wrong, funny or tragic, fair or unfair—are couched in an

environmental politics that elides much deeper historical connections.

During ﬁfteen months of ﬁeldwork in Okinawa, I saw plenty of kui-

nas: stuﬀed, drawn, carved, sculpted, and sold. Only once did I manage

to see a live kuina as it paced frantically behind the glass walls of a cage at

NeoPark Okinawa, an animal park in Nago City. One of my ecotour guides

pointed out its loud, distinctive morning call while we were hiking, but the

Ufugi Nature Museum’s taxidermic version, complete with recorded vocals,

brought me as close as I could get to the bird without receiving special per-

mission to visit a kuina rehabilitation center. When I asked one of the mu-

seum’s employees why it was so diﬃcult to ﬁnd a live kuina, she asked me in

return why I expected it to be easy: “They are, after all, still wild.”

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Type-casting

Aside from when the kuina becomes front-page news following a gruesome

roadkill incident, or darts successfully across the road in a streak of good

timing, most people in Okinawa experience the rare bird as caricature (see

Figures 2.2a–2.2d).

FIGURE 2.2a • Giant Yambaru Kuina, Churaumi Aquarium, Motobu

FIGURE 2.2b • Kuina in Training, Tourism Welcome Center, Kunigami

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FIGURE 2.2c • Cuddly Kuina Mascot at Waterfowl Festival, Naha

FIGURE 2.2d • Crying Kuina, Kunigami

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Whether it is wallowing in a pool of its own tears, nurturing its young in the

form of a gigantic Chia Pet, pumping iron for self-protection, or bumbling

around as a playful children’s mascot, in Okinawa the kuina has become an

icon of all things endangered. The Ministry of Environment and nonproﬁt

organizations such as the Kunigami Tourism Association regularly invoke

the kuina in the promotion of conservationist agendas. Its “cuteness” has also

made it extremely marketable on t-shirts, postcards, posters, and as stuﬀed

animals sold at tourist hubs across Okinawa.

Habu are not considered endangered, and most farmers attempt to kill

them on sight because of the health hazard they pose. Today, habu bites are

not usually fatal if medical care is sought immediately, but they occasionally

cause paralysis. (Bodily risks are compounded if one is unfortunate enough

to be bitten multiple times.) According to Uchihara, the master of ceremo-

nies at the habu-mongoose show I attended, until an eﬀective serum became

available in 1963, 75 percent of people bitten died within twenty hours

(96% if bitten a second time, 99% if bitten a third time). Colorful habu

warning signs are frequently posted near forested hiking trails, on university

and lower school campuses, and around popular tourist attractions.

Habu warnings are much more likely to be encountered than the snake

itself. Most Okinawans I spoke with have happened upon a live habu once or

twice, and I was often told to avoid parks after dark to prevent contact with

habu. I once saw a dead habu sprawled on the side of the steep winding road

that leads to Kunigami’s Yonabaru Forest, but most encounters I had with

live habu were through glass. The ﬁrst time I saw a habu, it was preserved in a

jar of clear alcohol and for sale on International Street (Kokusaidōri), Naha’s

main tourist strip.

Habu are hunted primarily for extermination purposes and to produce

habu-shu, a snake-infused version of the popular Okinawan distilled rice

liquor awamori. Hunters can be paid more than ¥5,000 ($40) per snake.

Habu-shu is considered a gourmet souvenir and sells for anywhere from

¥10,000 to ¥80,000 yen ($85 to $700), depending on the size of the snake

and the quality of the alcohol.

Unlike the kuina and the habu, the diurnal mongoose can be seen cross-

ing the road by people living in Yambaru. Outside a museum or theme park,

I saw a mongoose only once and nearly mistook it for a small feral cat when

it darted in front of me near my apartment in Nago. Like the kuina and the

habu, the mongoose is most commonly witnessed in the abstract (see Figures

2.3a and 2.3b).

The mongoose was imported to combat pests on sugarcane plantations

in southern Okinawa, but it was unexpectedly proliﬁc; by the 1990s it had

spread throughout the central part of the island and was encroaching on

the north. Okinawa Prefecture and the national Ministry of Environment

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FIGURE 2.3a • “Mongoose Northward Prevention Fence,” Yonabaru Forest,

Kunigami

FIGURE 2.3b • Ministry of Environment “Mongoose Busters” Extermination

Program Logo6

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have jointly sponsored the “Yambaru Mongoose Busters,” a volunteer-driven

program based in the north that aims to eradicate the mongoose from the

prefecture. Imagery generated in connection with these eﬀorts reiﬁes the

interspecies morality play described in popular accounts. The Mongoose

Busters logo (Figure 2.3b) presents the mongoose and the kuina together in

a stark, abstracted manner that emphasizes the “batsu” (incorrect) nature of

their unnatural relationship. (The red x in Figure 2.3b is a symbol commonly

used to ﬂag mistakes and errors; here x marks this particular animal dynamic

as wrong.) The mongoose is the banned aggressor, depicted in black, while

the kuina is the innocent victim in white.

Paired images of the mongoose and the habu imply a similar kind of

power imbalance, but they are completely diﬀerent in tone. The habu-mon-

goose show sign in Figure 2.1 celebrates the violence of the foreign mon-

goose against another of Okinawa’s native species and exploits it for proﬁt at

¥300 ($2.50) per ticket.

Legendary Propaganda

A legend is a story coming down from the past, one popularly regarded as

true, but not historically veriﬁable (see Figure 2.4). Kay Milton (2002: 150)

discusses myth in the “popular sense that it is false,” and in the anthropolog-

ical sense: “that it is believed in and dogmatically asserted because it protects

particular interests and ideologies.” Legends can also be thought of as myths

of recent origin. In this sense, the habu-mongoose ﬁght is doubly legendary:

a recent myth, whose persistence maintains certain Okinawan ideologies of

indigenousness and invasion.

In addition to the moral and narrative dimensions already described,

popular perceptions of species vulnerability in Okinawa are shaped by the

kinds of images provided this chapter. The kuina falls prey to both the habu

and the mongoose, yet the relationship between the habu and the kuina

is considered natural because these two animals are both Okinawan. As

an invasive species, on the other hand, the mongoose is subject to much

greater scrutiny and more aggressive extermination tactics because it does

not “belong.”

The habu-mongoose dynamic in Okinawa can also be regarded as “un-

natural” because of the animals’ opposing activity cycles. Without human

intervention, they would only rarely encounter one another in the wild and

should therefore be considered “legendary” rather than “natural” enemies.

Furthermore, though it possesses immunity to viper venom, the small In-

dian mongoose has to be trained to eat snake meat through regular pre-ﬁght

exposure to its smell and taste. Nor is the ﬁght evenly matched—the mon-

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FIGURE 2.4 • Tourist Habu-Mongoose T-Shirt: “A Battle of Legend”

goose wins more than 90 percent of the time, sustaining little more than a

temporary limp if bitten.

Habu-mongoose interaction has been symbolically naturalized by specta-

cles that pit one animal against the other in a death match. These shows were

held live until 2000, when they were outlawed as Okinawa fell under intense

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international scrutiny while hosting the G8 summit. The subsequent shift in

narrative is reﬂected in an English-language handout I was given explaining

a “swimming competition” I watched between a sea snake and a mongoose

at the theme park Okinawa World: “Now, the death match is replaced by a

friendly swimming competition, promoting love and peace.” According to

Uchihara, as of 2011 the bloody live version can only be found on Amami

Ōshima, a small Ryukyu island north of Okinawa that belongs to Kyushu

Prefecture.

Theodore C. Bestor (1989: 2) distinguishes between tradition understood

as historical continuity and tradition understood as traditionalism, which he

deﬁnes as “the manipulation, invention, and recombination of cultural pat-

terns, symbols, and motifs so as to legitimate contemporary social realities by

imbuing them with a patina of venerable historicity.” The manipulation and

antagonizing “recombination” of the habu and mongoose can be imagined as

a traditionalistic performance: these animals are cultural symbols for “native”

and “invader” in a contemporary Okinawan social reality shaped by power-

ful discourses of vulnerability, heritage loss, invasion, and endangerment.

By way of critiquing Eric Hobsbawm’s “invention of tradition” hypothe-

sis (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), Marilyn Ivy (1995: 21) resists analytical

binaries such as invention/authenticity, ﬁction/reality, and discourse/history.

Ivy settles instead on the term “phantasmatic” to characterize the late twen-

tieth-century reinscription of Japan’s cultural and historical erasures in re-

sponse to popular anxieties over the loss of national identity. For Ivy, the

phantasm is “an epistemological object whose presence or absence cannot

be deﬁnitively located” (1995: 22). The historical origins of the phantasmatic

event can never be suﬃciently pinpointed; rather, the origin of an event

“emerges as such only through its displacement” (22). In the habu-mongoose

ﬁght, the animals and the show event itself are “displaced” in what Ivy calls

the “second event”—as opposed to the ﬁrst ﬁght, which took place some-

where between the Okinawan imaginary and South Asia. The habu and the

mongoose represent the “nature that culture uses to make second nature”

(Taussig 1993, quoted in Ivy 1995: 21), through the production of a second

event. Digitally simulated and (re)produced clips of staged habu-mongoose

ﬁghts might then be regarded as a “third event”—the mimesis of a mimesis.

Today, habu-mongoose shows in Okinawa are comprised of ﬁlmed re-

productions and computer simulations replete with dim lights and dramatic

soundtracks. The virtual simulation of an always already simulated ﬁght

perpetuates the legend in a manner that further collapses the distinction

between reality and representation, real and imaginary (Baudrillard 1994:

3). To be sure, the actual habu-mongoose ﬁght is only “really real” (Geertz

1973: 443) to the animals. When placed in a ring together, the two will

ﬁght, and at least one (usually the snake) will die. Their antagonistic relation-

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

ship can also be described as “hyperreal,”7 Jean Baudrillard’s (1994: 1) term

for the “generation by models of a real without origin or reality.”

And yet, as Cliﬀord Geertz observes in a study of the Balinese cockﬁght,

these matches invoke important cultural themes that also pervade contem-

porary life in Okinawa, including death, loss, and vulnerability. The habu-

mongoose ﬁght presents one view of the “essential nature” of these dominant

discourses, “rendering ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by pre-

senting it in terms of acts and objects” (1973: 443). Here the metaphorical

ﬁnds dramatic, violent expression in the bodies of two animal actors—“ac-

tors” who can be viewed jointly as dramatic performers, and as nonhuman

agents of social change (cf. Latour 2004). What caused this ﬁght? Is there a

really real story? The history that follows reveals the material origins of this

mythical pairing.

Setting The Scene

One version of the story begins like this:

In 1910, a leading Japanese biologist could not ignore the fact that hundreds of

Okinawans died every year from venomous snakebites. He decided to apply the

natural enemy theory, and released 17 mongooses in Okinawa, where they are

not an indigenous species. In 1981, a new species of bird called the Okinawa rail

was discovered in the Yambaru, the northern forest area of the island. Almost at

the same time, researchers for the ﬁrst time realized that the original population

of 17 mongooses had increased to about 30,000, thus placing the Okinawa rail

and other indigenous species on the verge of extinction. Today, the foreign preda-

tors are conquering the Yambaru, the safest haven of the Okinawa rail.

—Yas Mamemachi (Detour Japan n.d.)

“The Mongoose Conquers Indigenous Species in Okinawa”

Detour Japan website editor Yas Mamemachi begins his posting in an online

series on “The Fear of Foreign Species” by summarizing the history of the

speciﬁc interspecies relationship that troubles many Okinawan and main-

land Japanese conservationists today.8 Literature from biology, history, and

anthropology shine light on social, political, and environmental vulnerabil-

ities. Newly shuﬄed sources narrate a re-contextualized story of the factors

that have gradually led to the kuina’s demise, and oﬀer alternative plotlines

often drowned out by presentist cries of “Save the kuina! Kill the mongoose!”

While many foreign species are introduced accidentally, the mongoose’s

forced “invasion” of Okinawa Island was deliberate and well documented.9

Describing the seventeen mongoose pioneers, wildlife biologists Fumio Ya-

mada and Ken Sugimura (citing Kishida 1931) write that “six males, six

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Footprints in Paradise

females and ﬁve individuals of unknown sexes were trapped in what is now

Bangladesh and taken to Okinawa Island by Dr. S. Watase” (Yamada and

Sugimura 2004: 118). These individuals reached sexual maturity at around

four months and expanded their range rapidly (by approximately one kilo-

meter per year) from their original site of release in Naha.

The kuina has been designated one of Japan’s Natural Monuments,10 but

the mongoose is not without its titles. In 2000 the International Union for

Conservation of Nature identiﬁed it as one of the “World’s 100 Worst In-

vasive Alien Species” (IUCN 2000; Yamada and Sugimura 2004: 118). The

mongoose has earned this title in part because there is no clear evidence that

it actually preys on the snakes it was introduced to combat (Yamada and

Sugimura 2004: 120). Furthermore, in addition to eating (and thus in a

sense creating) Japan’s “exotic species,” it causes even more damage to taro,

sweet potato, melon, and sugarcane—the very crops that it was brought in

to protect.

The predator mongoose is easy to hate but hard to kill. In addition to rely-

ing on volunteer eﬀorts, the Ministry of Environment incentivized trappers

with a bounty of $45 (up from $20 in 2000) per mongoose killed in 2003.

Despite the combined eﬀorts of Okinawa Prefecture and the national Min-

istry of Environment, only 1,290 mongooses were captured between 2000

and 2003 (Yamada and Sugimura 2004: 122). As I observed when hiking on

ecotours, current methods of trapping over large areas are cumbersome and

frequently capture the wrong animal.

Most mongoose narratives emphasize 1910 as the moment of rupture

in Okinawa’s environmental history, eliding important connections between

the mongoose “invasion” and Japan’s earlier colonization of the archipelago.

The wildlife biology articles I consulted for information about the mongoose

in Okinawa (e.g., Gosling 1989; Kishida 1931; Simberloﬀ 2001; Yamada

and Sugimura 2004) mention the nineteenth-century development of plan-

tation agriculture, and historians explain the problem of snakes that drove

the animal’s introduction to the island.

Follow the Snakes

The bite of a habu should be lanced, and a tourniquet applied above

the wound as soon as possible after the snake has struck. The blood should

then be drained from the area of the bite and the wound washed with

potassium permanganate or treated with sulphur and heat. After

bandaging, the patient should be immobilized and kept warm. The

serum must be administered to snake-bite victims as soon as possible.

—Gladys Zabilka, Customs and Culture of Okinawa

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The Japanese government wanted to tackle the problem of snakebites in Oki-

nawa by non-mammalian means, as well. In 1905, Charles Leavenworth, a

visiting history professor from Shanghai’s Imperial Nanyang College, pub-

lished a pamphlet describing a visit to the “Loochoo [Ryukyu] Islands.”11 In

a section entitled “The Snakes,” Leavenworth (1905: 44) writes, “A number

of persons are bitten every year, and of these some die and others are injured

for the rest of their lives, as a result of the poison.” Leavenworth recounts

his tour of a government-established snake laboratory where “the poison has

been carefully investigated and a Serum Antivenomicum, prepared by the Jap-

anese Government Serum Institute of Tokyo, is provided there for dealing

with the snake-bites” (44).

Leavenworth’s colorful description frames the habu in a familiar way:

“seven hundred hissing monsters were there in wire cages … An actor might

have practiced there, as Demosthenes did before the sea waves, for a chorus

of hisses could be heard on all sides” (44–45). These caged snakes were no

more a threat to him than the pickled ones I encountered on Naha’s touristy

International Street in 2011: “As one passed along the rows, hideous snakes

would rise and dart at one, until striking against the metal barrier, they

would fall back in harmless inaction” (45). A bounty was oﬀered for snakes

at this time, too, but for a purpose predating the habu liquor market.12 Fifty

sen13 (former Japanese currency also used in Okinawa) was paid for a live

habu “specimen,” ﬁve for a dead one. Leavenworth alludes to the abundance

of snakes on the main island, adding that “this … was not an oﬀer for an un-

limited supply, but only for those which were needed for scientiﬁc work, for

at that rate to all comers the treasury of the institution might be exhausted

much sooner than the snakes.” The historian concludes poetically: “It is an

ill-wind, however, which blows no good and the writer was informed … that

the snakes do one useful service by eating the rats, which otherwise might do

great injury to the stalks of the sugar cane” (45).

The “Spirit” of Okinawan Sugar

In early March 2011, a Nago Museum researcher, Mr. Yamato, invited me to

join him at a museum-sponsored community volunteer sugarcane harvesting

and pressing event. At this early juncture in my research, the kurozatō (black

sugar) that is today ubiquitous on the dining tables of Okinawan homes,

and at every tourist venue, meant little more to me than a breath mint.

While driving along Okinawa’s many winding country roads I had learned

to recognize sugarcane ﬁelds, some of which bumped right up against major

traﬃc arteries on the drive south to meet my scuba diving club at Odo Beach

in Itoman City (see Figure 0.1). I had eaten molasses-ﬂavored black sugar

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Footprints in Paradise

chunks at all kinds of social gatherings, but I had no idea how it was made.

Yamato convinced me to participate by insisting, “By doing this you will un-

derstand the Okinawan spirit.”

He picked me up near my apartment in Nago and drove me and his

nephew Fumitaka, who was visiting from Tokyo for spring break, to a small

sugarcane farm in the neighboring town of Motobu. The basic history he

provided as we drove began with sugarcane being grown as a cash crop in

the late nineteenth century, by the direct order of the Japanese Meiji colonial

government. Then he quickly fast-forwarded to the 1960s, explaining to my

surprise that the prevalence of sugarcane in Okinawa today is a direct result

of the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which the skyrocketing international

price of sugar prompted many more Okinawan farmers to convert their rice

ﬁelds into sugarcane ﬁelds.

We parked next to the ﬁeld and I borrowed some rubber boots and gloves

from the trunk of his car. Two other volunteers were present—a married

couple who also worked for the museum. The couple explained that they

participated in these monthly museum-sponsored outings as a form of con-

tinuing education to keep them informed about things they identiﬁed as

“traditionally” Okinawan.

Mr. Arasato, a tan farmer in his late sixties, introduced himself as the

owner of the ﬁeld and handed each of us a rusty machete. We walked sin-

gle-ﬁle toward row upon row of unruly green and brown sugarcane stalks that

shot out in all directions. Arasato demonstrated how to hack into the base of

the stalk incisively, without injuring oneself. He paid particular attention to

me as we practiced. Fumitaka and I were new to sugarcane harvesting but the

others dug into their work with vigorous conﬁdence. Arasato also showed us

how to recognize and avoid rotting and mouse-ravaged stalks, which were no

good for juicing and had to be tossed into a separate junk pile (see Figure 2.5).

The gnarled cane stalks grew close together, ﬂailing wildly, and I had no

idea where to begin chopping. I tentatively picked through a few stalks,

looking around every couple of minutes to see if the others had some sort of

divide-and-conquer strategy for cutting. I wanted to do it right, to be eﬃ-

cient with each strike. After watching me toil for about ten minutes, Arasato

came to correct my grip on the machete. He oﬀered some encouragement:

“See, it’s easy!” Indeed, the task was not very complicated. Forsaking per-

fection, I slowly relaxed into the work and began cutting rhythmically. The

sound of hacking permeated the ﬁeld. “This is fun!” I thought as I started to

sweat and grew more aggressive toward the cane with each blow.

Just as I was about to carve into some “really real” ﬁeldwork, Arasato

was back. He invited me to gather up the severed stalks and carry them to

his pickup truck. He made a passing comment about leaving the chopping

to the men, “This work is hard … ,” which I resented for a moment until

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

FIGURE 2.5 • Okinawan Agrotourists Harvest Sugarcane, Itoman

I looked around and realized how much more the others had harvested. I

reluctantly relinquished my machete and instead began dragging the long,

crooked cane stalks to the truck.

We had only worked for about twenty-ﬁve minutes when Arasato began

gnawing on a piece of sugarcane rather loudly. He invited us to copy him as

he peeled back the tough green skin with his front teeth. “It’s more fun to

eat than to harvest, isn’t it? Kids today don’t know how to handle raw sug-

arcane,” he lamented. He bit further into the pulpy, ﬁbrous, cream-colored

meat of the stalk, and juice ran down his chin. I removed my gloves and at-

tempted to peel back a small chunk of the stalk with my bare ﬁngers. When

this did not work, I decided to follow suit and bit straight into the thing. The

sweet cane juice was refreshing and delicious.

We got back to work, and in less than an hour we had amassed enough

sugarcane to ﬁll the bed of Arasato’s truck. We drove a couple of miles back to

his house, where he revealed his rugged, rusty sugarcane-pressing machine.

The diesel-powered machine choked and sputtered as we began feeding the

long stalks through its grinding metal teeth. As the crushed cane emerged

on the other side, its murky juice squirted into a pail underneath. I lined up

the straightest stalks for insertion, saving the twisted ones for someone more

experienced. Arasato warned me to protect my ﬁngers by gently guiding the

cane through unforced. We had to stop production numerous times when

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Footprints in Paradise

the stalks jammed in the jaws of the machine, but this was easily ﬁxed by a

little reverse heave-ho. My eyes traced the only visible power cord to a small

generator that appeared to be connected to the truck’s engine. Curious, I

asked whether this was the “old-fashioned” way of pressing cane juice (see

Figure 2.6); Arasato smiled and retorted that the truly old-fashioned method

involved a cow pushing a cart in a circle.

FIGURE 2.6 • Agrotourists Operate Sugarcane Press, Itoman

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

After we had ﬁlled two large jugs with the dark amber-colored liquid,

Arasato led us into his shed, where he had stoked a small ﬁre. We sat on

tree stumps encircling the ﬁre pit while he served us hot black tea from a

thermos. One of the other volunteers had washed some fresh potatoes and

put them in a vat to boil. We munched on the hot potatoes sprinkled with

Okinawan salt and chatted about the freezing weather, which was roughly

10° Celsius that day (50° Fahrenheit).

During a lull in conversation, I asked Arasato what he thought about the

future of farm tourism on the island. He told me about his plan to begin host-

ing student groups over the next three years, predicting that a mixture of tradi-

tional farming and agrotourism (known in other parts of Japan since the 1970s

and 1980s by the village revitalization catchphrase “Nōgyō to Kankō” or “Agri-

culture and Tourism” [Moon 1997: 221]) would be the most viable option in

the future. I handed him my business card and invited him to email me with

any upcoming farming volunteer opportunities. “Yes, my daughter has been

meaning to set up my computer …” he replied. I apologized, embarrassed, and

pointed to my phone number instead. He sent me home with a recycled PET

bottle full of the raw juice and reminded me to boil it ﬁrst before drinking.

Becoming “Sugar Islands”

To understand the Japanese government’s increased attention to snakebites

in the early twentieth century (and hence the introduction of the mongoose

as one possible solution to the problem), we must turn the clock back even

further. Okinawa’s history of agricultural development in the context of col-

onization is crucial to understanding the changes that led farmers to spend

substantially more time working in rapidly expanding, rodent-ridden cane

ﬁelds and being bitten by habu.

Sugarcane (satōkibi) was never grown on a large scale for local consump-

tion. The traditional Okinawan diet is based on sweet potatoes (rather than

rice), which were ﬁrst introduced from China’s Fukien Province around

1605 (Kerr 1958: 560). Sugarcane was cultivated in Okinawa long before

more advanced production technology was introduced in 1623, but it was

typically consumed raw or ground and boiled into a syrupy sweet liquid.

The Japanese government formally annexed the Ryukyu Islands in 1872,

but Okinawa Prefecture was not established until 1879. What was Okinawa

like before it became a formal colony of Japan? One traveler’s romantic mid

nineteenth-century account reads as follows:

The prospect, as ships near the land in approaching the harbor of Napha [Naha],

is beautiful. From the beach to the summit of the long and gently ascending

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Footprints in Paradise

slope, nearly the whole surface seems to be in the highest state of cultivation. The

diﬀerent shades of green presented by the diﬀerent winter crops; the uniform, ter-

raced hills; the groves to relieve the uniformity of cultivated ﬁelds, and on the dis-

tant and even line of the summit of the ridge, the peculiar pines, with their limbless

trunks and ﬂat, broad, spreading tops, under which the deep-blue sky is seen, all

conspire to form a most rich and highly cultivated rural landscape. (Gast 1945: 19)

This excerpt comes from agriculturalist James Morrow’s “Report Made to

Commodore Perry on the Agriculture of Lew Chew” (7 February 1854)

for the 1853 United States Japan Expedition.14 Morrow’s rendering of mid-

nineteenth-century Okinawa suggests an agricultural abundance: “Every foot

of ground appears to be carefully cultivated, unless from situation or barren-

ness cultivation would be unproﬁtable” (19). In addition to sugar, his report

describes beans, rice, and patches of red and white sweet potatoes that “meet

the eye in every direction” (20).

Historian George Kerr’s (1958: 402) depiction of Okinawa in the 1880s

paints a much less paradisiacal portrait of the island: “Okinawa had no po-

tential wealth to exploit, and Tokyo did not have surplus wealth to invest in a

proﬁtless regional economy.”15 Japan’s policies toward Okinawa diﬀered from

those regarding Hokkaido (another recently annexed island in the north-

ernmost part of Japan), where abundant forests, ﬁsheries, and mines drew

greater administrative and ﬁnancial investment. Kerr describes Okinawa as

“of secondary importance, merely an economically unrewarding territorial

link between Japan proper and the new ‘treasure island’ [Taiwan]” (423),

which Japan acquired following the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Lacking

any “material assets of value” (402), late nineteenth-century Okinawa was

viewed by Tokyo as an underutilized landscape in need of development.

Neither Morrow’s nor Kerr’s representation of Okinawa is suﬃciently

complex, but together they oﬀer opposing perspectives that shed light on

Okinawa’s transition from a semi-independent Ryukyu Kingdom to a “prof-

itless” colony of Japan in the decades following Perry’s 1854 visit. Once a

part of the Japanese Empire, Okinawa came to be viewed as lacking in com-

parison to a much larger colonial sphere that grew to include Taiwan (1895),

Korea (1910), Manchuria (1931), and beyond.

In Okinawa, sugar was deemed the most proﬁtable product for main-

land Japanese brokers and shippers. Between 1890 and 1910 the Ministry of

Agriculture organized administrative agencies such as the Okinawa Prefec-

tural Sugar Improvement Bureau to transform the modes of production and

monitor the quality of the product (Kerr 1958: 431). This attracted further

investment from capitalists in Osaka and Tokyo, as well as government sup-

port for experimental farms designed to increase Okinawa’s competitiveness

in a growing global market.

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

By 1915, all the assets of the Sugar Improvement Bureau were controlled

by the Okinawa Sugar Company, followed by the even larger and more pow-

erful Taiwan Sugar Corporation, whose principal shareholders included Ja-

pan’s imperial household and the Mitsui and Mitsubishi corporations (432).

Thusly, Kerr writes, “control of Okinawa’s basic agricultural industry passed

entirely out of Okinawan hands.” As the bulk of proﬁts derived from Oki-

nawan sugarcane boomeranged back to the mainland, a high percentage of

Okinawa’s farming population “became entirely dependent upon the metro-

politan markets, which left them extremely vulnerable to price ﬂuctuations

caused by conditions in Formosa [Taiwan] or in Japan proper” (431). The

rapid expansion of the Okinawan sugar industry produced an insidious form

of economic vulnerability.

Historian Wendy Matsumura (2007: 39) describes this shift through bi-

ography, drawing on the ﬁrsthand observations of Noboru Jahana, a bureau-

crat who, as one of the ﬁrst Okinawan students sent to be educated in Tokyo,

became an intellectual export. When Jahana returned to Okinawa in 1891:

He observed that the poor peasantry, who depended on sweet potato for their

food source, was being pushed to the brink of starvation because they had no

energy or land left over to grow their food supply after converting most of their

lands into sugar cane ﬁelds. As a response to the twofold problem of decreased

self-suﬃciency and increased indebtedness that emerged from the conversion of

lands to sugar cane ﬁelds, [he] proposed encouraging higher yield planting and

manufacture methods rather than increasing the total area over which cane is

cultivated. (Matsumura 2007: 154)

Instead of expansion of the acreage devoted to cane cultivation, Jahana en-

couraged the production of new technologies that would increase overall

yield through improved planting and manufacture methods. Jahana recog-

nized what Matsumura describes as the peasantry’s “vulnerability to starva-

tion” (154), and advocated for more balanced crop production.

Okinawa’s economic vulnerability was both created and maintained

through Japan’s colonial inﬂuence. Writing in 1933, economic geographer

Yukuo Uyehara characterizes Okinawa’s sugarcane production as inferior to

that in places such as Cuba and Hawaii, where the plantation system of agricul-

ture was better established. In the early 1930s, Okinawa had only ﬁve of the

smoky sugar reﬁneries described by Jahana in the previous excerpt. Uyehara

describes the “very primitive” modes of labor in Okinawan “home factories”

(1933: 403), some of which I witnessed during my time as an agrotourist:

These ﬁelds are operated by the families in a way similar to that of the rice ﬁelds

of the mainland. The men cut the cane and carry it back to the homes on horse-

back, by hand, or on wagons. On the farmsteads are compressing machines into

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Footprints in Paradise

which two or three women, sitting on either side of each machine, feed the cane.

Compressed juice is then boiled in big pots to black sugar, which is the last stage

of nearly all Okinawa sugar. (Uyehara 1933: 400)

This passage from Uyehara’s account of the Ryukyus was written to empha-

size that “urgent attention” (403) was needed to improve reﬁning methods

in order to raise the income of farmers.

With the inﬂux of Japanese manufactured goods and the rising urban

standard of living, the island’s traditional system of bartering for items such

as foodstuﬀs for handicrafts began to give way to a currency-based economy

(Kerr 1958: 404). Okinawans were compelled to engage in sugar production

because they now had to produce foodstuﬀs and textiles for themselves and

“enough in addition to pay for the new things which they now believed to

be necessities.” Perhaps most vulnerabilizing, villagers struggled to maintain

the self-suﬃcient communal landholding arrangements that had supported

farming for centuries.

Another form of instability derived from changing consumer tastes. The

national demand for sugar shifted from brown to white, and by the 1920s,

large capital-backed sugar factories linked to reﬁneries on the mainland had

become “major intrusions to the existing landscape of Okinawa” (Matsu-

mura 2007: 154). Matsumura depicts these factories, “whose black smoke

ﬁlled the island’s skies,” as “unnerving contrasts to the 3,000 or so small brown

sugar manufacture huts littered throughout Okinawa’s countryside” (301).

The growth of these kinds of commercial-scale reﬁneries further reduced

farmers’ home cultivation of sweet potatoes in favor of the more proﬁtable

work of supplying sugarcane to factories. The state’s sugar-centered policies,

particularly during the early Taisho period (1912–1926), precluded the kind

of balanced economy that Jahana envisioned.

By the outbreak of World War I, Okinawa had become a “monocultural

producer of a global commodity” (304) and was intricately connected to

Imperial Japan and the larger world economy.16 The limited global supply of

sugar ensuing from the destruction of Europe’s beet-sugar factories during

the war precipitated the ‘“golden years of Okinawa’s brown sugar industry’

[between 1918 and 1919]” (304), but the 1920 Tokyo Stock Market collapse

devastated what was by then Okinawa’s primary export commodity just as

suddenly. In 1926, sugar was valued at 22% or ¥11,000,000 (approximately

$130,000) of the value of all island products and constituted 59% of total

exports (Uyehara 1933: 400).

The transformation of sugar from an exotic foreign luxury into a basic

necessity of daily life was part of a much larger global trend that began in

Europe and the Americas in the mid-seventeenth century. Sidney Mintz’s

(1985: 197) trailblazing analysis of the relationship between the commod-

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

iﬁcation of sugar and the history of capitalism and industry in Europe and

the Americas traces a growing consumer dependence on “sweetness” during

this period: “From 1880 until the onset of World War I—the period when

sugar production was technically modernized—the production of centrifu-

gal (‘modern’) sugar rose to more than sixteen million tons.” Between 1900

and 1970, global sugar production increased somewhere between 500 and

800 percent (197).

Celia Lowe (2006: 21) identiﬁes the “archaeological shift in the milieu

of reason” that occurred when, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Eu-

ropean colonial projects shifted from primarily “extractive trade practices”

such as the sugar trade, toward a larger project of governing, educating, and

“advancing” colonial populations. In Okinawa, the extraction of sugar grew

into a kind of “civilizing mission” with the Imperial Japanese (and later U.S.)

government’s investment in pest control. The deep connections between sci-

ence, public health, and animal control continue to intersect in the bodies

of hunted habu, but today are more visible in the form of the “Mongoose

Busters.”

Matsumura (2007: 309) details the history of sugar production and

economic crisis in Okinawa in terms of a “broader crises of politics and

existence” that occurred with the islands’ transformation from a semiauton-

omous kingdom into a prefecture of Japan. Through the development of

the sugar industry on the islands, political colonization became economic

colonization (Kerr 1958: 432); moreover, I argue that this agricultural shift

produced a form of environmental colonization. The Japanese state’s sug-

ar-producing imperative permanently altered the landscape of Okinawa

Island. From 1880 to 1920, the area planted with sugarcane in Okinawa in-

creased more than tenfold. By the early 1930s, 70 percent of Okinawan

farmers were invested in this cash crop (Uyehara 1933: 400), provoking a

crisis of existence not only for both humans and nonhumans. With the help

of the rat-eating and (occasionally) snake-ridding mongoose, sugarcane ﬁelds

came to dominate the landscape, and this opportunistic “invader” came to

dominate the “indigenous” kuina and its shrinking habitat.

Multi-species and Multidisciplinary Histories

Scholars have increasingly recognized the need for more integrative research

that explicitly connects social and natural histories. In many respects, the

structure of Clarence Glacken’s 1955 study of human geography in three

Okinawan villages resembles that of a classic anthropological village study.

Glacken’s chapters, all written in the simple present tense, fall under static

headings such as “The Family System,” “Community Life,” “Agriculture,”

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Footprints in Paradise

and “Religion.” In a very brief ﬁnal chapter on “Environmental and Social

Change,” however, Glacken calls for precisely the kind of historiography I

have attempted here: “If these two histories … here artiﬁcially divided—

could be written as one, if changes in the physical environment at certain

periods could be correlated with known historical events, much would be

learned … of the relation of a culture to its environment” (1955: 295).

Glacken concludes that “the history of the Okinawan people, like the con-

jectural [early] history of their land use, demonstrates the importance of

culture contact, as a consequence of warlike migrations and invasions or of

peacetime trade and travel, in forming the culture as it appears today” (298).

The anthropocentric notion of “culture contact” (Shostak and Nisa 1981:

346) is enriched by a simultaneous discussion of interspecies physical con-

tact, such as biting, hoeing, chopping, ﬂuttering, clawing, pickling, and

pouncing. Igor Kopytoﬀ (1986: 67) argues that “biographies of things can

make salient what might otherwise remain obscure … in situations of cul-

ture contact, they can show what anthropologists have so often stressed: that

what is signiﬁcant about the adoption of alien objects—as of alien ideas—is

not the fact that they are adopted, but the way they are culturally redeﬁned

and put to use.” The objectiﬁed, alien mongoose scratches its biography onto

the landscape while pressing northward.

Mary Louise Pratt (1991: 34) complicates the notion of “culture contact,”

instead oﬀering “contact zone” as a “term to refer to social spaces where cul-

tures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly

asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their after-

maths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (see also Pratt

1992). Laura Ogden (2011: 76) expands the “contact zone” into a “space

of knowing,” “where bodies, geographies, biota, and mythologies engage in

overlapping mobilities.”

Stefan Helmreich applies Jean and John Comaroﬀ’s concept of “alien-

nature” (2001) to invasive species, which Helmreich (2009: 17) regards as

“emissaries of … a biotic world of illegitimate, inundating ﬂows called forth

by the shifting and contradictory dynamics of globalizing social forces” such

as the sugar trade. The “alien” mongoose was adopted and commoditized

by Japanese agriculturalists, and put to use in Okinawa for a speciﬁc pur-

pose that quickly went awry. The mongoose’s deviation from its intended

use has redeﬁned its material and cultural signiﬁcance from “pesticide” to

“predator.”

Biologists such as Yamada and Sugimura (2004) document the species

vulnerability that resulted from the 1910 introduction of the small Indian

mongoose in Okinawa. Historians such as Kerr (1958) and Matsumura

(2007) delineate the human experience of economic vulnerability during

the same time period, but little work has been done to explicitly link the

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

parallel stories of this protracted yet profound transformation of Okinawa’s

physical environment.

Temporalizing Vulnerability

For those familiar with the trajectory of the World War II Paciﬁc Theater,

“Okinawa” evokes the superlatives of fast violence: the Battle of Okinawa17

(fought early April to mid-June, 1945) is often called the “Typhoon of Steel”

(tetsu no bōfū) in reference to the U.S. assault on the island. This phrase

vividly characterizes the kind of high-speed destruction witnessed by civil-

ians and soldiers through a battle often remembered as the bloodiest in the

Paciﬁc. Somewhere between one-fourth and one-third of the Okinawan

population—at least 100,000 civilians—were killed, as were roughly 60,000

Japanese and 14,000 U.S. soldiers (Allen 2002: 33). This fast-paced devas-

tation also set a slower problem in motion: the postwar U.S. military col-

onization of the main island, by which U.S. bases displaced thousands of

Okinawans and came to occupy more than 20 percent of the land on Oki-

nawa (Gillem 2007). Over time, this loss has “compound[ed] the onslaught”

(Asato 2003: 229) of the original battle.

The “mongoose invasion” of Okinawa and the U.S. Marine Corps inva-

sion both followed a northward route18 that pushed through Japanese defen-

sive lines. I juxtapose these two historical events not to imply that they are

somehow morally equivalent, or similar in terms of the scale of devastation,

but rather to illustrate some of the striking narrative and geographical pat-

terns that emerge when equal attention is given to otherwise incomparable

events. It took eighty years for the mongoose to travel from southern Oki-

nawa to the north, and for an original population of seventeen animals to

expand to roughly 30,000 today. This slow movement with its slow con-

sequences, including the “long dying” (Nixon 2011: 3) of the kuina, rep-

resents what environmental activist and literary critic Rob Nixon calls “slow

violence” for its subtle perniciousness.

This contrasts sharply with the “spectacular time” of the 82-day Battle of

Okinawa in the spring of 1945. Okinawans died at the hands of both mili-

taries, but the Japanese military is notorious in Okinawa for its compulsory,

enforced civilian group suicides and policy of non-surrender despite a losing

battle. This extreme physical violence is linked to the economic violence

of the previous century: in both cases, Okinawan land was viewed by the

Japanese state as exploitable, whether for planting sugarcane or as a proxy

battleground.

Gladys Zabilka (1959: 19), writing on the Ryukyu Islands under U.S. oc-

cupation, characterizes the U.S. military’s eﬀorts after the Battle of Okinawa

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Footprints in Paradise

as a “mop-up campaign” that began on 23 June 1945: “Cave positions were

systematically sealed up by ﬂame throwers and demolitions, with hundreds

of Japanese entombed within. Extensive patrolling ferreted out individual Jap-

anese soldiers hiding out in the cane ﬁelds and rice paddies. By the end of the

month the mop-up had yielded an estimated total of 8,975 Japanese soldiers

killed, 2,902 military prisoners taken, and 906 labor troops rounded up”

(1959: 20, my emphasis). The United States’ Ryukyus campaign oﬃcially

ended on 2 July 1945.

Sugar, war, and furry carnivores come together in brief narrative mo-

ments such as M. D. Morris’s discussion of the uses of prewar Okinawan

sugarcane, all of which was sent to “Japan, the Hungry Ermine”19 (1968:

144): “Japan used the cane to produce commercial alcohol for torpedoes

and engines—war production” (56). Even farms with some access to new

technologies were set back tremendously by the battle. Ross Gast (1945: 14)

describes the majority of Okinawans as “ill-treated and under-paid sugar

cane laborers” in the period leading up to and throughout the war. By the

1950s, not much had improved: Clarence Glacken (1955: 150) ﬁnds that

“the old Okinawan method of crushing the cane is used in the northern

village[s] because machinery destroyed in the war has not been replaced.”

The lack of parity between southern and northern Okinawa was determined

more by Japan’s postwar investment strategy than by which region was most

devastated during the battle, and is still evidenced by the advent of nostalgic

agrotourism in the north.

Mapping Tourism

Amid the rubble generated by “two competing cultures” (Zabilka 1959:

3)—Japan and the United States—M. D. Morris (1968: 2) describes Okina-

wa’s postwar landscape as “mountains of systematically stacked steel chemi-

cal drums and wood shipping crates range over square miles of depot areas

fenced in by mesh and barbed wire. Acres of new vehicles sticky with cosmo-

line stand ready to be put into motion in convoy caravans.” As early as 1955,

the Japanese defensive lines from World War II were beginning to translate

into what I call the ecological “beauty lines” that would ultimately determine

the kinds of regional tourism practiced in postwar Okinawa:

The recent war was a powerful agent in changing the physical environment of

Okinawa. In the south the destruction aﬀected the grasses, shrubs, and the trees,

adding to the contrast, which already existed before the war, between the scenery

of the south and of the north. The physical beauty of the mountains, the wooded

hills sloping to the sea, the pleasant commingling of neatly hoed ﬁelds, trees, and

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

wild-growing shrubs belong to Okinawa north of the Ishikawa-Nakadomari line.

(Glacken 1955: 298)

Roughly 60 percent of Okinawa Prefecture was forested before the war, in-

cluding standing trees and cut areas (Uyehara 1933: 402). Today just 40

percent of the main island of Okinawa is forested, primarily in the north

(Yamada and Sugimura 2004: 118). During the battle, 94% of all build-

ings on Okinawa were also destroyed (Zabilka 1959: 19). Massive postwar

reconstruction made southern Okinawa a locus of stone war memorials and

marble monuments such as the Peace Memorial, while in the north anything

still green and “natural” also became a potential touristic resource.

This ecological, political, and aesthetic borderline has been reinforced by

more recent (and largely unsuccessful) attempts to quarantine the mongoose

in the south by setting traps and building a fence along what has become

known as the Shioya-Taira line. The artiﬁcial border formed by the Shioya-

Taira (nicknamed the “S-T line”) runs between the two towns located on

opposite coasts just north of Nago City. The growth of ecotourism in the

north has produced a small-scale economy through which tourists and locals

are introduced to each of the species discussed in this chapter. Yambaru eco-

tourism is itself a creative enterprise built along these beauty lines.

A Kunigami Tourism Association (KUTA) ecotourism promotional book-

let20 I received in 2009 cites one of the few positive environmental eﬀects of

the U.S. military presence in Okinawa: The U.S. Marine Corps Jungle War-

fare Training Center (JWTC, also known as Camp Gonsalves and the North-

ern Training Area) had kept ordinary citizens and non-military researchers

out of large sections of the forest since its creation in 1958. This restriction

left many abundant areas undeveloped and contributed to the relatively late

scientiﬁc discovery, and ensuing protection, of the kuina. While most people

were kept out of the Northern Training Area, some animals still managed

to inﬁltrate the military’s built environment: M.D. Morris (1968: 4) writes

that “nature … is in conﬂict with progress. The habu, the Ryukyus’ resident

reptile, perhaps a direct descendant of the one that allegedly disrupted the

bliss of Eden, at night often climbs the [U.S. military’s] high-tension towers

and while slithering across the cables, short-circuits a whole community’s

electric power.”21

Continuing the Japanese government’s early twentieth-century attempts

to conquer the habu, USCAR (United States Civil Administration of the

Ryukyu Islands) built a serum-manufacturing habu station on Amami

Ōshima in the early postwar period. In 1951, the station was supplied with

977 habu, many of which came from a special farm in Nago that paid a

bounty of ¥100 (then worth about $.80) for each snake captured (Zabilka

1959: 25). The snakes were “milked” for venom, which was then dehydrated,

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Footprints in Paradise

shipped to Japan for processing, and returned to the Ryukyus as bottled

serum (26).

The JWTC, ﬁrst established as an early Vietnam War counter-guerilla

school, was originally roughly eighty square kilometers in area (see Figure

1.1). About half of this land has gradually been returned to the Japanese gov-

ernment since 1996, through a U.S.-Japanese Special Action Committee on

Okinawa (SACO) agreement intended to reduce the military burden and re-

lease the use of reservoirs that control the ﬂow of drinking water to the south

(MOFA 1996). The control and creation of water (through desalination) is

aﬀected signiﬁcantly by these kinds of agreements, which in turn make wa-

ter use a top priority in debates over tourism and sustainable development

in Okinawa. The national protected forests that surround tourist-oriented

environmental education centers such as the Forest School (࿐ƖƑ೦) and

forest therapy programs (both discussed in subsequent chapters) were also

returned to the Japanese government beginning in 1996. Following more

than twenty years of negotiations, in late 2016 U.S. Secretary of Defense

Ashton Carter announced that an additional 9,800 acres (roughly forty

square kilometers) of Northern Training Area land would be returned to the

Japanese government by year’s end. While Japan has, in turn, agreed to build

helicopter landing zones and access roads for continued use as U.S. military

training grounds, this agreement marks the greatest land return since Okina-

wa’s 1972 reversion (Browne 2016 n.d.).

Conclusion

Natural disasters do not exist.

—Ilan Kelman, “Natural Disasters Do Not Exist”

Contemporary touristic narratives of environmental vulnerability between

the habu, the mongoose, and the Yambaru kuina have slowly shed the his-

torical context needed to understand broader political and environmental

discourse in Okinawa. Stories center on the current state of these three an-

imals, both naturalizing and occluding the human interventions that ﬁrst

brought them together. Problems of scale and temporality, of past, present,

and future, shape our interpretations of violence. The relatively unspectac-

ular time of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sugaring of

Okinawa amounts to a form of environmental colonization that began in

southern cane ﬁelds but has migrated to northern forests over the course of

the last century.

Following Edward Said, Nixon writes that “struggles over geography are

never reducible to armed struggle but have a profound symbolic and narra-

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

tive component as well” (Said 2001, quoted in Nixon 2011: 7). Okinawa’s

slow vulnerabilities are exacerbated by its unstable relationship with the Im-

perial Japanese state and the U.S. military; and through shifting interspecies

dynamics over time. As central actors in this complicated story, the habu,

kuina, and mongoose—along with associated discourses of threat, victim-

hood, cuteness, and nuisance—have been the focus of both science and fable.

The legacy of the Japanese colonial project in Okinawa leading up to

World War II and throughout the postwar U.S. military occupation of the

islands lives on in the forest as much as it does in memorials, museums,

and local memory. The infamous story of ravaging mongoose versus inno-

cent kuina (a battle triangulated by the scary habu) is retold and re-created

through touristic avenues. Yet this story is truncated, because it elides the

larger political picture that unleashed the lesser-known animal invasion of

Okinawa.

Economic and environmental vulnerability in Okinawa cannot be un-

derstood without careful attention to historical detail. In this chapter, I have

responded to Amelia Moore’s (2010: 119) critique of the “vulnerability par-

adigm” that pervades much of the social science literature on small islands.

The environmental history provided in this chapter resists the notion that

small islands have inherently, naturally, structurally, and systemically vulner-

able societies, economies, and environments (Moore 2010: 122; cf. Kelman

2010, 2015). As the Nature Museum epigraph toward the beginning of this

chapter suggests, Yambaru’s “diverse environments” do “change in a variety

of ways,” none of which can be adequately understood without analyzing

how Okinawa’s vulnerabilization by external forces throughout the nine-

teenth- and twentieth-centuries. Colonization and conﬂict, both fast and

slow, have shaped the archipelago’s political economy and have inﬂuenced

the conditions of possibility for natural heritage conservation, as well as the

problems of environmental vulnerability and tourism dependency today.

Notes

1. In the context of animal species identiﬁcation, endemic means “restricted to a locality or

region.” “Endemic” is similar to “indigenous” or “native,” but the latter two terms imply

that a given species also originated in the place where it is currently found. The habu (pit

viper), for example, is considered “native” to Okinawa but can also be found in Taiwan.

2. In Okinawan, kariyushi means “gift of happiness” or “harmonious with nature.” “Kariy-

ushi Wear” refers to the button-down ﬂoral-pattern Hawaiian-style shirts frequently worn

by Okinawan men. Eisaa is a dance performed for ancestral spirits during Obon, the

festival of the dead (Nelson 2008: 20, 191).

3. Not only is it okay—Okinawa Prefecture oﬀers a bounty for both animals.

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Footprints in Paradise

4. It is more likely that the rail had multiple names (one possibility is Agachi Kimura) that

varied along with the dialects of the Okinawan language spoken on diﬀerent parts of the

main island. Nobody eats the rail today. I asked a friend about the name of the “Restau-

rant Kuina” at a tourist rest stop in Kunigami: “Don’t you get it?,” he laughed. “It’s a pun:

“Resutoran Kuina! (literally “Restaurant don’t eat [the kuina]).”

5. Japanese scientiﬁc nomenclature always uses the phonetic katakana syllabary to describe

plant and animal species. This is also the syllabary used to demarcate foreign loanwords,

including words from the Okinawan language.

6. Courtesy of Michael Lynch.

7. This term is also developed by Umberto Eco (1986), whose concept of “hyper reality” is

located speciﬁcally within the framework of travel. For Eco, the technologically produced

replica is so perfect that it replaces and displaces the original, and displaces the value of its

irreplaceable and authentic uniqueness such that copies live on with a life of their own.

8. Detour Japan is a self-published website that focuses on “selected local issues that can be

shared globally” (n.d.) I cite Mamemachi’s summary of the history of the mongoose not

as a source of historical information (though shared details are correct), but because his

explanation reﬂects key elements of the dominant narrative I encountered in Okinawa.

9. Examples of unintentional but consequential alien species introductions include the Afri-

canized honeybee in Brazil and Asian carp in the United States.

10. ฿ಖὸ୑໾ (Tennen kinen butsu), a national designation that translates directly as

“Natural Commemorative Thing,” encompasses unusual or endangered animals, plants,

topographical features, etc. Other Natural Monuments endemic to Okinawa include the

Pryor’s Woodpecker, the Ryukyu Long-Tailed Giant Rat, and the Jambar Long-Armed

Scarab Beetle.

11. See Chapter 1 for an explanation of alternate historical names for “Ryukyu.”

12. In an amusing, if racist, account of his visit, Leavenworth’s Okinawan boy servant foretells

the habu’s eventual touristic transformation from a scientiﬁc specimen in a wire cage to a

drinkable commodity in a jar: “After we had looked at the squirming, writhing mass for

some little time and were turning away with loathing, the writer’s ‘boy,’ who had been

observing the reptiles, and wondering why so much trouble should be taken by the man-

agement for the comfort of the beasts, queried: ‘They wantchee eat these?’” (Leavenworth

1905: 45).

13. 100 sen = ¥1.

14. Ross Gast, author of the 1945 wartime informational pamphlet from which Morrow’s

account is excerpted, labels Perry’s expedition as the United States’ “First ‘Invasion’ of

Japan” (Gast 1945: cover page). At the time of its publication, this sensationalized char-

acterization of Perry’s visit would have connected the United States’ impending invasion

of Okinawa to a much longer history of U.S.-Ryukyu contact that was less well known

to Gast’s widespread American and military readership. The timeliness of the pamphlet

is palpable: a last-minute insert reads: “As this booklet is being made ready for the press,

Tokyo reports the invasion of the Kerama Islands oﬀ the coast of Okinawa. This move has

not been conﬁrmed by American authorities, although Admiral Chester Nimitz tells of

heavy bombardment of Okinawa by a United States ﬂeet” (1945: 16).

15. Kerr’s Okinawa: The History of an Island People (1958) is still regarded as the most compre-

hensive English-language text on the history of Okinawa (Nelson 2008: 222). For more

recent contributions, see Molasky (1999) and Hook and Siddle (2003).

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Slow Vulnerability in Okinawa

16. For a comprehensive history and political economy of sugar cultivation in Okinawa, see

also Matsumura (2015).

17. The Battle of Okinawa is called “Okinawa-sen” in Japanese and “Uchinaa ikusa” in

Okinawan.

18. I have simpliﬁed these routes for the purpose of comparison. The mongoose and the U.S.

Army Corps pushed south as well, and some U.S. forces changed directions over the

course of the battle.

19. This is the title of a chapter in Morris’s book Okinawa: A Tiger by the Tail (1968). Writing

during the late U.S. occupation, Morris characterized Okinawa as a “tiger by the tail” for

every foreign invested government, wherein each state strives to “maintain a ﬁrm grasp

on a vital situation from which it would truly rather be free” (8). Other chapters written

about Okinawans are “The Gentle People” and “China, the Befuddled Dragon.”

20. This booklet was still being drafted by KUTA during my ﬁeldwork, and the ﬁnal pub-

lished version does not include any information about the U.S. military. Rather, it empha-

sizes the presence of poisonous snakes and the forest’s inaccessibility to “ordinary people,”

due to its unusually dense growth and humid subtropical climate, as the primary factors in

the survival of Yambaru’s “precious creatures.” The 2008 document draws on information

from an Okinawa Prefectural textbook called “The Untouched Forest” (w൭ƇŮŽƑ

೦xğ㢽䍵㼖).

21. For a parallel tale of snakes’ “power” to alter human and nonhuman uses of the landscape,

see the Epilogue of Laura Ogden’s Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in

the Everglades (2011).

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Chapter 3

KNOWING AND NOTICING

All knowledge is local, no matter what its pretentions.

—Renato Rosaldo, “A Note on Geertz as a Cultural Essayist”

Local people don’t know, but local people notice.

—Professor Kenji Arasaki

Ecotourism Lecture, 6 January 2011

Introduction

Okinawan scholars, elders, and nature lovers today are self-consciously con-

cerned with the preservation and dissemination of local knowledge.1 Profes-

sor Yokota, an Okinawan scholar who advised me throughout my ﬁeldwork,

refers to this phenomenon as jimotogaku or “placeology”: the study of place,

based on “the principle that knowledge of place equals knowledge of self.”

The question of what constitutes “local” and “knowledge,” and the ongo-

ing negotiation of these intellectual categorizations, are the subjects of this

chapter.

Ethnographic study of ecotourism in Okinawa provides a useful lens

through which to examine discourses of local knowledge production because

ecotourism discourse frequently distinguishes between those who know and

those who don’t know. For example, on every tour there are novice customers

and expert guides (e.g., peace guides at memorials in the south and nature

interpreters in the north). My ﬁeldwork revealed that the “knowers” are not

necessarily local residents and the “non-knowers” are not visiting tourists.

The ﬂuidity of these identity markers and their associated bodies of knowl-

edge in the context of ecotourism, and with respect to the politics of knowl-

edge production more generally, calls into question the place of knowledge

assumed to be local. The shifting positionalities of many of my informants

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Knowing and Noticing

blur the classical anthropological distinction between “experience-near” and

“experience-distant” (Geertz 1983) forms of knowledge by shrinking the dis-

tance, both geographic and conceptual, between the experiences of nearby

locals and distant researchers.

In this chapter, I demonstrate the pervasive power of the intellectual

distinction often made between these categories of social actor, despite its

failure to adequately sort the people making the distinction. I analyze how

certain kinds of knowledge about the environment are actively made and

kept local through intentional community engagement, and conclude by

revisiting the local/researcher binary in order to consider the place of local

knowledge within the academy.

When I began my ﬁeldwork, I quickly developed the impression that

those who work in ecotourism wear many diﬀerent hats. I saw ecotour guides

at Ministry of Environment–sponsored town hall meetings, and once shared

a kayak with the director of the Naha branch of the ministry while on a

community-oriented ecotour of the Gesashi River in Higashi Village. One of

my senior colleagues at the University of the Ryukyus commuted nearly four

hours most days of the week so that she could teach in the Department of

Tourism Sciences while living in Yambaru and keep up her activities with the

Kunigami Tourism Association and the Forest School. Though each business

card I received designated a diﬀerent occupational title, the collaborations I

witnessed suggest that people’s practical roles and functions in these social

circles were much more nuanced and frequently overlapped.

Two of the most common categorical divisions I encountered were re-

searchers (scientiﬁc experts, often from mainland Japan or abroad) and locals

(Okinawans). The following discussion of the intellectuals involved in pro-

moting diﬀerent aspects of nature-based tourism provides a sense of the in-

tellectual landscape that informs discourses of cultural and natural heritage,

as well as environmental knowledge production in Okinawa. The following

three conversations reveal how the distinction between local and researcher

is problematized by the positionality of the speaker.

Researching Locals

I sat in a white-walled lecture hall at the Okinawa International Center (OIC)

in Urasoe listening to Professor Arasaki discuss the roles of various actors in

Okinawa ecotourism promotion. His lecture was delivered in English to a

group of recently arrived JICA trainees from CARICOM countries includ-

ing St. Lucia, Grenada, and Belize. The twelve trainees all worked for the

tourism industries in their home countries in positions ranging from strate-

gic marketing to parks management.

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In his Powerpoint presentation, Professor Arasaki grouped the key players

as follows: locals/interpreters, travel agents, administrators, and researchers.

His explanation of why researchers are crucial to the development of eco-

tourism in northern Okinawa caught my attention: “Local people don’t

know, but local people notice.” By this he meant, for example, that Oki-

nawans may not historically have known the Yambaru kuina’s biodiversity

signiﬁcance, “but local people notice”—that is, most people living in Yam-

baru would be able to tell you roughly where to ﬁnd one or at least pick out

its call amidst the biosymphony of the forest.

Professor Arasaki emphasized the need for collaboration between “notic-

ing” locals and “knowing” researchers who hold critical new and marketable

information about the biodiversity and signiﬁcance of Okinawa’s semitrop-

ical forests, oceans, and rivers. Ideally, he explained, researchers, whom he

described as academic advisers on local resources and management, would

team up with nature interpreters2 to create the most informative, enjoyable

tours possible. When describing locals, he explained their value by stating

that “they are very near,” as opposed to the others involved. This statement

seems obvious when taken literally, but beyond geographic and physical

closeness, his words also imply a certain psychological and spiritual intimacy

between locals and nature.

Arasaki bridges the role of researcher and local; born and raised in north-

ern Okinawa and educated in Okinawan universities, he became a scholar of

tourism science and frequently presents at academic conferences in mainland

Japan. His professional objectives are to educate groups of foreigners about

Okinawa’s contributions to the practice of ecotourism and to learn about

diverse international sustainable tourism development strategies in turn. In

short, he is a local who both knows and notices.

In a speech at Nago Museum in March 2011, Mr. Yamato, a researcher

and dolphin expert at the museum, made the statement, “We don’t notice

but others notice.” At ﬁrst glance, these words seem to directly contradict

Professor Arasaki’s characterization of locals. Both men are highly educated

scholars who grew up in Yambaru. By “we don’t notice,” Yamato was lament-

ing his observation that many residents of the area are unaware of the value

of the natural and cultural resources found in their own backyards. In this

case, the “others”—those who do notice—are visitors or outsiders who are

much more likely to remark on the stunning red blossoms of the Deigo tree

(Pinus luchuensis, Indian Coral Bean) or be surprised by the sight of what

they view as the “cute” mongoose dashing across the road in broad daylight.

Like Professor Arasaki’s work on ecotourism, Yamato’s knowledge of dol-

phin hunting, a northern Okinawan practice found only rarely in other parts

of Japan (discussed in Chapter 4), is what constitutes him as a researcher. By

his own deﬁnition, his knowing and noticing dolphins, and his formal pub-

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Knowing and Noticing

lication of that knowledge in a book on the history of whaling in Okinawa,

make him less local. Both scholars articulated an aﬀective diﬀerence between

the environmental sensibilities of a Yambaru resident who has heard of or

seen a plant or animal around town, and one who regards the same biota as

a meaningful cultural or natural resource to be shared with and preserved for

the next generation (and for tourist consumption). Their mutual concern

with identifying who is doing the noticing of these resources reiﬁes the dis-

tinction between local and researcher also problematized by their own mixed

identities.

The Localized Researcher

My experience is diﬀerent from your experience.

—Dr. Karen Magik, coral activist

Interview, 15 January 2011

Dr. Karen Magik is an American environmental activist, marine biologist,

and self-described “scientiﬁc consultant” who lived on Okinawa ﬁghting to

save coral and Fukugi (Garcinia) trees for more than twenty-ﬁve years. Magik

is well known throughout the island for her vehement proclamations about

the need to protect Okinawa’s coral reefs. We met on a sunny winter day at

the Churaumi Aquarium, one of Okinawa’s most popular tourist attractions,

where she worked as the only foreign researcher in an oﬃce full of mainland

Japanese and Okinawan marine scientists.

We sat on the steps outside the front entrance to absorb the subtle warmth

of the sunshine, and I asked her to tell me more about her lifelong love of

diving. She stated conﬁdently that, when underwater, “My experience is dif-

ferent from your experience.” Magik was referring to hobby and tourist div-

ers in general, but she gave the example of Okinawan divers in Onna-son, a

relatively tough northern village that is home to many underemployed “hoo-

ligans” with bleached blondish hair and even the occasional taboo tattoo. For

these divers, she asserted dismissively, the leisure recreation activity was more

about showing oﬀ their new gear than it was about experiencing the wonders

of underwater life “up close and personal.”

Magik did not see all subjective diving experiences as equal. In her view,

her qualiﬁcations as a researcher—her formal training and academic ex-

pertise on coral—are what granted her access to this privileged, awestruck

experience of nature. She had lived in Yambaru longer than most of the

local divers had even been alive. She knew where the country back roads

went, where to buy the freshest umibudō (Okinawan seagrapes, also known

as “poor man’s caviar”), and which beaches were least frequented by tourists.

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In many ways, this American researcher was a local. But Magik, who delin-

eated a clear experiential hierarchy in relation to scuba diving, identiﬁed two

salient diﬀerences between herself and most Okinawan: 1) level of familiarity

with particular forms of scientiﬁc knowledge about the natural world and

2) degree of comfort moving in the scholarly communities that generate this

knowledge.

The examples of Arasaki, Yamato, and Magik illustrate the clearly con-

structed yet pervasive distinction between researcher and local in Okinawa.

Each of these informants’ worldviews hinged on their acceptance of this

categorical divide to express his or her viewpoint—despite embodying ele-

ments of both identities. Professor Arasaki constructed his distinction along

a dichotomous scale of awareness of a particular plant’s or animal’s physical

location versus understanding of its global scientiﬁc signiﬁcance. Mr. Yamato

used his knowledge as a researcher to advocate for a grassroots revitalization

of characteristically “local” activities, such as dolphin hunting, for the pur-

pose of maintaining a sense of community pride in the city of Nago. And

ﬁnally, Dr. Magik articulated the local/researcher divide in terms of the qual-

ity she attributed to the dive experience.

Locating “Local Knowledge”

In December 2009 I attended a Yuntaku-kai or “community chat” session in

the Hiji neighborhood of Kunigami Village. A Tokyo-based environmental

consulting and research group specializing in environmental impact assess-

ment, environmental surveying, and environmental planning and design

had been hired by the prefectural oﬃce of the Ministry of Environment to

coordinate a series of facilitated chats in Yambaru. We met on an unusually

stormy night, and the rain beating against the glass windows of the town hall

gave the otherwise sterile multipurpose room an almost cozy feel.

I sat at a round table with roughly ﬁfteen male retirees and one woman

who had gathered to review a map they had created during a nature walk

that fall. The colorful, hand-drawn map was the size of a large poster and

was taped to a whiteboard at the front of the room. On the map were tacked

cutout images of the plants and animals the group had identiﬁed during the

walk. Taketo Tsuchiya, one of the consultants from Tokyo, stood next to the

map and moved the images around as if to complete Nature’s jigsaw puz-

zle. The volunteers directed his placement of each piece as they collectively

re-created memorable sightings from their walk. Once the many hand-drawn

and photographic images of plants and animals were overlaid on the village

map, participants were asked to share what they knew about the ecological

collage. This discussion did not take the form of a question-and-answer ses-

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Knowing and Noticing

FIGURE 3.1 • Northern Okinawans Dine and Chat During Community

Gathering, Kunigami

sion between consultant and local; rather, the participants talked freely to

one another by telling stories that inevitably harked back to their youth.

“We used to eat that!”

Over the course of the discussion, one of the most frequently repeated

phrases I heard was, “We used to eat that!” One particularly jovial older man

told a story about pigs: “We used to use their bladders as volleyballs at end-

of-year parties. The only times when anyone could aﬀord meat were big

festivals, Obon3 and the New Year. We didn’t throw anything away! We ate

everything. There wasn’t much to eat, so we ate it all.” Another man re-

counted eating the Ryūkyū Kōmori, a bat so big its English name is “Ryukyu

Flying Fox.” This left everybody rolling in nostalgic laughter.

With these stories emerged a distinct mode of speaking. Many of the

participants used the Okinawan names for the plants, animals, and places

they discussed, such as atemoya (sugar apple) or goya (bitter gourd), and

included speciﬁc northern Okinawan dialect variations such as hiitu (short-

ﬁnned pilot whale), pronounced “pitu” elsewhere in Okinawa, and Kunjan

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Footprints in Paradise

(Kunigami Village). Mr. Tsuchiya wrote frantically on the board to keep

track of the local vocabulary as it emerged, and his boss took backup notes

from the side of the room. The group debated the etymologies and proper

“old-fashioned” usage of these words, and I sensed their bittersweet frustra-

tion over trying to recall parts of a language that they had heard as children

but could not speak as adults. By the end of the session, the walking map was

overwritten with terms from the Yambaru dialect of Okinawan.

As the discussion drew to a close, two participants reﬂected that the mi-

nutiae of their daily lives today were sometimes diﬃcult to remember—but

the past was very clear. They jokingly attributed this to the aging process, but

in a more serious vein one man added: “This is why it’s especially import-

ant to conduct some kind of oral history with the elders, even if they may

be going senile.” Another man mentioned the recent loss of a particularly

knowledgeable older woman in the community, noting the urgent need for

participants to chat with folks even just ten years older than themselves. He

wanted to keep this natural history alive for tourists, visiting Japanese stu-

dent groups, and especially Okinawan schoolchildren. Just as the group fell

silent in reﬂection, a man in his sixties pointed to the only forty-something

man in the circle, teasing him: “… because the only thing you’re going to re-

member is video games!” The laughter continued into the night as we dined

on piping hot Okinawan-style oden (a hot pot dish of sweet-salty broth

served with pig’s feet, greens, and chunks of giant white radish, ﬂavored with

spicy American-style mustard) and muuchi (a bright purple yam- or black

sugar-infused Okinawan version of Japanese mochi, pounded glutinous rice

cakes).

The participants’ chat expressed the deep linkages they perceived between

knowledge of place, in the form of local plant and animal identiﬁcation,

and knowledge of self, through language and history reclaimed. Locals were

tasked with ﬁrst noticing the details of the natural world around them and

then providing the experiential context that turns these details into legible

cultural knowledge. In many ways, however, the format and framework for

discussion felt imported. During a planning meeting for these sessions, a

Yambaru Wildlife Center employee expressed concern over the number of

English loanwords being used to explain the chatting process to participants

past sixty years of age. Examples of potentially obscure words included: ȅ

✣ǅǍǽǙǭ (workshop), ǜ✣Ǵ (theme), ƸƺǝƸ (idea), ǉǷȉǞ

(comment), ƸƺǏǬȂƺǅ (icebreaker), ǴƺȉǟǴǙǭ (mindmap),

and ǃ✣ȅ✣ǟ (keyword), many of which, she pointed out, had perfectly

good (if less fashionable) Japanese equivalents. The consultants facilitated

the discussion but, as outsiders, were also there to learn. Local knowledge

was reconstituted through conversations and cross-comparison of childhood

memories, but also beneﬁted outside researchers. The deliberate process by

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Knowing and Noticing

which this local knowledge is achieved demonstrates how knowledge is kept

local, much as scholarly knowledge is self-consciously produced to address

more “global” concerns.

Chatting for the Future

In March 2011, I attended the fourth and ﬁnal community chat session in

the series sponsored by the Ministry of Environment. About twenty-ﬁve res-

idents of Kunigami County gathered to discuss environmental and commu-

nity health challenges faced by the area. At the top of the list were long-stay

tourist recruitment, youth retention, and employment strategies (discussed

in Chapter 5). Participants were mostly retired men, but there were also a

few women and a few young male public employees.

The approximately three-hour meeting was replete with ﬂow charts, bullet

points, and broad objectives related to community growth and sustainability.

The assembled group was quiet until one man volunteered the words of his

99-year-old neighbor: “To restore the region is to love the region.” Machiko

Kakazu, a Ministry of Environment employee who works at the Ufugi Na-

ture Museum in Kunigami, seamlessly linked community restoration and

tourism by building on his comment: “We must take it as our premise that

we want tourists to come, and we want their presence to turn into work for

the youth.” The retiree nature interpreter who had led me on a Treasure Box4

tour of the Yambaru forest the year before added, “There is something spe-

cial about every place, and I really want this island’s people to learn how to

speak well about its unique traits.” Each of these reﬂections advocated a sort

of grassroots pro-tourism attitude meant to encourage community members

to know their village as a guide does, and to notice their surroundings as a

tourist does.

Mr. Oku, director of the Naha Division of the Ministry of Environment,

concluded the formal meeting by talking about the importance of imple-

menting environmental regulations in the area: “This is a good place, so

let’s protect it. We should take hold of nature as a resource and use it well.”

He stressed that his purpose was not to push the Ministry of Environment’s

agenda on the area, but rather to listen to the objectives of locals and assist

them in taking action by training guides and making rules. He summarized

three key themes from the meeting as follows: community power, connec-

tions (between rivers, oceans, and mountains), and consensus building.

Afterward I was asked to share my impressions as an outside observer.

I noted politely how passionate everyone seemed to be about serving their

community, but I later admitted privately to Mr. Chinen (director of the

Kunigami Environmental Education Center’s Forest School, also aﬃliated

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Footprints in Paradise

with the Kunigami Tourism Association) that I had not really followed the

ﬂow of the meeting. The ﬁrst community chat I attended was much more

straightforward in its purpose: to sketch the cultural and natural landscape

of the area by creating a walking map of Hiji Village. Chinen took me aside

and in low tones told me:

In my opinion, here is what’s really going on: one, the town oﬃce’s job is to make

money, and two, the Ministry of Environment’s job is to make rules. But no

matter what happens, this village will go on. These people are just trying not to

lose the wisdom of the area. We are doing this to preserve the knowledge (chie wo

nokosu tame ni yatteiru). We have joined up to keep this village going. If you think

of it this way, this meeting becomes much easier to understand.

Soon the traditional Okinawan feast that concluded most community

meetings I attended appeared, and I knew that people’s tongues would loosen

up as they drank beer and awamori. We passed the microphone around the

table as we ate, listening to short speeches, individual reactions to the group

chatting experience, and a few jokes. Among the most poignant of the senti-

ments to emerge from this jovial roundtable were “Of course you go crazy when

you can’t feel nature! (Yappari, shizen ni furenai to atama ga okashikunaru!),”5

“We want to keep the population up! Keep the young people here,” and “Let’s

work to raise up the village, but without destroying nature.” Mr. Teruya,

another Ministry of Environment employee, added, “Most people stay for

just one night … we want six-night stays in Kunigami!” A sixty-something

woman from nearby Sosu Village chimed in: “Please can someone in charge

bring us a bus? There’s no bus between Kunigami and Sosu. We want to im-

prove Sosu, and then visitors can come to Sosu too! It’s an amazing place!”

“Aha also has great views!” someone from Aha echoed. One man likened the

villages in Kunigami area to the contents of Cup Ramen: “Mixing many dif-

ferent ingredients together makes for an interesting place.”

Soon people were laughing loudly and talking amongst themselves, not

pausing to listen to whoever held the microphone. Teruya stood up and

declared, over the hum of eager chatter, “Most people think of ecotourism

as going into the mountains or looking at a Yambaru kuina, but we at the

Ministry of Environment also think about the culture connection. We are

concerned with protecting the environment, and one way to do that is to

keep people out entirely. Another way is to regard nature as a resource, a

tool. Who would destroy their own car? Or house? We must think of nature

in the same way.”

Mr. Chinen spoke next, and gave a direct response to what he called my

“naive question” about the purpose of the gathering. On the subject of not

seeing the “big picture” context for these community meetings, he reﬂected

that “Eight years ago we began talks about building the Forest School,” and at

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Knowing and Noticing

that time a student had asked, ‘Why is nature important?’ Well, in Yambaru,

nature equals culture,” was Chinen’s response. He acknowledged the ups

and downs of the nationwide village revitalization movement (mura okoshi

undō), but added proudly that “there is no minus for the village caused by

the Forest School.” He concluded by calling for a community-based, grass-

roots approach to revitalization: “It’s not the national government, it’s not

the prefectural government—we do it!” Everyone applauded.

Chinen introduced me to Ms. Hamakawa, another mainland Japanese

environmental consultant who had been hired to sit in on the meeting. Ha-

makawa compared Yambaru to the Ogasawara Islands, a UNESCO World

Heritage site6 also combating invasive species. She began speaking in meta-

phor: “There is something in the wind and the waves, the wind is blowing,

you can feel it really strongly, something is lost.” She reached her hand down

in front of her chest as if plumbing her core and said, “We need to pull

this [spirit] out from our DNA, to get back our unique character for all of

Japan.” I encountered the deep feeling that “something is lost” frequently

when speaking with informants over the age of ﬁfty, who tended to frame

their concerns in reference to the health of the ocean.

Hamakawa never used the term “globalization” to describe the regional

and national loss of Japanese character, but she implied that some form of

worldwide phenomenon was to blame for this change. When I went to

ask her more about what she meant by “unique character,” as if on cue,

two young, slightly inebriated town workers interjected with an Okinawan

language lesson for me: “Andii-san, ‘Icharibachoodi!’ Do you know what it

means? ‘Once we’ve met we are siblings.’” In this small moment, through

this small gesture, they fought the loss of an endangered language by invok-

ing the informal friendliness often thought to distinguish Okinawans from

mainland Japanese.

Though I could not follow every discussion, I found the meetings helpful

for conceptualizing the formalized spaces through which residents of Yam-

baru come together to tackle social and environmental problems in their

communities. Chinen’s explanation of the gathering led me to conclude that

simply assembling a group of concerned citizens and engaging them in con-

versation, argument, and laughter with one another was just as vital to keep-

ing the village going as any consensus-based grand conclusion or resolution

that might result from the meeting.

Meta-anthropology

Is local knowledge production simply a matter of collecting new and old

things? By what process does noticing become knowing, and who beneﬁts

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Footprints in Paradise

from the production of this knowledge? I ask these questions of myself as an

outside researcher and of my local informants, who further complicated these

social and political categories for me when I noticed them doing my job.

Mr. Yamato invited me to attend what I thought would be a nature walk

through the neighborhoods of Nago City. I turned up at the Nago Museum

on a Wednesday afternoon in March wearing my yoga pants and a pair of

hiking boots. I was ready to experience nature. I entered the lecture hall

where everyone was gathering to ﬁnd neatly ordered rows of chairs ﬁlled pri-

marily by older men, a few women, and a few younger males dressed in the

light green jumpsuits worn by city workers. Everyone faced forward, glued

to a Powerpoint projection at the front of the room that read “Everyone

Learns Together in Nago.” Four well-dressed men from the Yambaru villages

of Ginoza, Higashi, Oku, and Nakijin sat in the front row, going over their

presentation notes.

The meeting was not a walk, it turned out, but a summary review of

the last two community walks that had been organized by the museum.

We began with a silent prayer for the victims of what would soon come to

be known as the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster,7 which had struck

just a few days before on 11 March 2011. Before the prayer, the organizer

added that in addition to the tremendous loss of human life, many precious

historical archives had been washed away by the tsunami that followed the

earthquake in northeastern Japan.

The ﬁrst presenter opened by asking, “How should we understand this

vast Yambaru? Even in our own heads, there are many diﬀerent ways to

think about the area.” This question was surprisingly similar to the one I

was formulating: “How do they understand this vast Yambaru? Even in their

own heads, there are many diﬀerent ways.” Strange as it felt to become just

one more brain in a room full of placeologists, I was relieved to be in good

company.

The neighborhood walking project had been conceived as a grassroots

experiment to determine the “scenery we want to pass on 100 years from

now,” as well as an opportunity to educate local youth who “don’t notice”

the intrinsic or touristic value of their surroundings (although Yamato noted

that it was primarily retirees in their ﬁfties and sixties who participated in

these kinds of museum events). Volunteer walkers were asked to identify

and record the presence of buildings, rocks, and other natural things in their

respective villages. Charming historic sites were not the only places of inter-

est; as if in disbelief, one walk leader asked his group, “What is this building

doing here?” He pointed toward a new and controversial chain mall just

completed in Nago.

In a play on words, these walks were cleverly referred to as “Aruki,” which

means both “to walk” and “to write something down.”8 Participants were

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Knowing and Noticing

encouraged to record the stories of older residents and to borrow the black

and white photographs they encountered along the way. They were further

asked to determine the types of resources they found and to report back to

the museum. The walls of the lecture hall where we sat were covered with

these old photographs, alongside photographs of the walk itself. Gazing at

the collection, one late middle-aged participant commented wistfully, “All I

can say is I’m feeling nostalgic.”

The methods of inquiry the village walkers described are familiar to any

social anthropologist: circle the village, borrow the photo albums of people

living in the area, and actually go to the place and walk around. One pre-

senter even used an English loanword, calling what they were doing “Fiiru-

dowaaku” (ﬁeldwork). Cliﬀord Geertz (1983: 167) has called ethnography

a “to-know-a-city-is-to-know-its-streets approach to things,” and my infor-

mants had embraced this technique. I suddenly found myself tasked with

constructing a story about people constructing stories about themselves.

During his summary presentation, the Ginoza Village Museum repre-

sentative stood and remarked, “We’re working to train the imaginations of

participants in the walks so they can eﬀectively show how things used to be

here.” “We discovered that the resources of this region are still asleep,” the

representative from Oku Village added. One of the key concerns voiced was

that, in as few as ten to ﬁfteen years, the things they had discovered might no

longer be there. One woman suggested transferring their ﬁndings to a DVD

that also documented their methods, in addition to putting their walking

data on the town website as a form of living history. This comment sparked

a collective brainstorm that erupted into debate over how to involve more

young people: “They use computers, and could listen to the older people’s

stories while also teaching them how to use the computer,” another woman

oﬀered. Those present agreed that it would be a good chance to share infor-

mation between diﬀerent generations who might not otherwise communi-

cate about the past.

A second objective of the walks was to connect Yambaru’s village museums

with a broader audience. Yamato reminded everyone that the self-selected

group in the room, which included faithful museumgoers and a number of

academics, was not typical with respect to its level of concern for and interest

in cultural and natural preservation. With this sobering comment, the two

hours allotted for formal presentation and discussion were up, and we began

rearranging the chairs and tables to allow for the much-anticipated banquet.

In a matter of minutes, and with the help of awamori and Orion Beer,

the mood in the room shifted from quiet and contemplative into jovial and

joking. As I munched on boiled leeks and juushii fried rice balls mixed with

boiled vegetables, a young female museum intern sat down beside me and

asked me, “What’s the diﬀerence between a museum and a vegetable stand?”

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Footprints in Paradise

I thought perhaps this was the beginning of a bad joke, but she was suddenly

very serious and concerned: “Whether they sell things, and freshness! What

do you want to do now? What do you want to know now?” She called Jap-

anese museums “stoic,” and praised American museums for doing a much

better job of appealing to a broad range of people, especially children, and

for being interactive.

Yamato asked me to introduce myself to the group, and when I men-

tioned that I was studying ecotourism the conversation quickly turned to a

discussion of tourism and museums. One Nago resident argued that, unlike

the typical mass tourism scene in the south (he was alluding to Naha and

the southern World War II memorial circuit), “Yambaru still has a lot of

potential for development.” Yamato quickly interjected: “Yes, but if you do

not have a purpose, things become unclear. This purpose is jumpstarting

tourism as a resource. We must connect with tourism, but our research, our

work must come ﬁrst. Otherwise, we have nothing to share.”

Walking as Knowing

Movement … is not adjunct to knowledge …

Rather, the movement of walking is itself a way of knowing.

—Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, Ways of Walking

Aruki memory walks make strange the familiar by mobilizing village walk-

ers to notice things new, old, and diﬀerent about their home place. Tim

Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (2008: 2) argue that a way of walking “does

not merely express thoughts and feelings that have already been imparted

through an education in cultural precepts and proprieties. It is itself a way of

thinking and of feeling, through which, in the practice of pedestrian move-

ment, these cultural forms are continually generated.” Hayden Lorimer and

Katrin Lund (2008: 186) similarly emphasize walking as a form of social

encounter, a “complex weave where collecting happens on foot in the midst

of epistemic ambition, and emotional and embodied response.” For my

informants, as for these anthropologists, walking is a profoundly creative

and social activity.

Aruki village walkers strive to know their own ordinary surroundings by

noticing new things amidst an everyday perspective. These walkers collect

experiences, memories, and material objects through dynamic movements

speciﬁc to a particular time and place. By placing them in the role of student,

Aruki walks and community chats encourage Okinawans to view their own

everyday environment like a tourist and, in many ways, like an ethnographer.

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Knowing and Noticing

Localizing Scholarly Knowledge

Scholarly language can become so local (i.e., specialized) as to require trans-

lation across disciplines. Cliﬀord Geertz describes ethnography as a “craft of

place” that “work[s] by the light of local knowledge” (1983: 167). If, as Re-

nato Rosaldo (1997) claims in an interpretation of Geertz’s work on cultural

interpretation (an intensely local intellectual engagement), all knowledge is

local, then under what pretense can the researcher’s “etic” interpretation be

integrated with the local’s “emic” experience?9 As discussed earlier in this

chapter: What happens when the researcher is also a member of the commu-

nity s/he is studying? (cf. Abu-Lughod 1986). Perhaps less commonly, what

can we learn about ethnography from a local researcher who is pursuing a

parallel endeavor by practicing a comparable methodology? Geertz likens

“Being There” to a “postcard experience,” but adds that it is “Being Here,

a scholar among scholars, that gets your anthropology read” (Geertz 1988:

130). How do I localize my ﬁeldwork knowledge for you, my scholarly au-

dience? Can I simply circle the library and re-tell the inside jokes of theory?

Or is it all just turtles back and forth?10

Identifying experience-near versus experience-distant11 forms of knowl-

edge is as much a question of locating or grounding diﬀerent perspectives as

it is of distinguishing between subjective phenomena (i.e., love, illness) and

theorized abstraction (i.e., object cathexis, disease). The scholarly experience

of theorizing a social phenomenon also demands an ethnographic context.

In Local Knowledge, Geertz (1983: 16) writes that it is from “seeing ourselves

amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken,

a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, with-

out which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes. If

interpretive anthropology has any general oﬃce in the world it is to keep

re-teaching this fugitive truth.” The dual positionalities of Professor Arasaki,

Mr. Yamato, and Dr. Magik can be reconciled if we consider them local ex-

amples of the forms scholarship has locally taken (and by “we” I mean myself

and my imagined community of scholarly readers).

Part of my interest in the politics of place-based knowledge production

in Okinawa derives from my anxieties over placing the universally particu-

larized forms of knowledge produced by anthropologists. I bring this dis-

cussion to bear on the community practices I observed during ﬁeldwork

in order to attempt Geertz’s call for a “largeness of mind” (1983), without

which the limits of locality might evade reﬂexive interrogation. Historian

Robert Kohler (2006, quoted in Ogden 2011: 112) develops the term “resi-

dential knowledge” to distinguish between the “global” and “particularistic”

forms of knowledge that tend to dominate scientistic and rationalized global

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Footprints in Paradise

discourses of natural history. Residential knowledge creates a space for an

“experiential epistemology” that diverges from scientists’ theory-producing

knowledge because it can come only from “living in a place”—from “living

there.” Ethnographic research, I learned, is not the exclusive purview of the

anthropologist; communities can conduct ﬁeldwork that integrates globaliz-

ing themes of cultural and biological diversity. Even the most universalizing

theory has its place.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have problematized a dominant discourse that informs

ecotourism development in Okinawa: that local knowledge is the domain of

locals who depend on outside researchers for the veriﬁcation and valuation

of this knowledge in a more global context. Following Celia Lowe (2006:

162), I have tried to avoid the temptation to “read nature and identity as a

determining relationship … or as a carceral relationship, for example in the

ﬁgure of the ‘local person.’” I have also tried to transcend the value-laden

poles of “science” and “indigenous knowledge” (Walley 2002) by presenting

ﬁgures who occupy both spheres of thought. Lowe (2006: 163) explains

that her informants’ “nature-making” means “tracking emergent rationalities

and practices of thought rather than codes found in the mind.” I muddle

the binaries of local/non-local, knower/non-knower in a similar fashion by

illustrating, from the ground up, the intentional (re)production of these cat-

egorical identities and their associated bodies of knowledge.

Sustainable development specialist Tighe Geoghegan’s analysis of commu-

nity-based resource management discourse oﬀers an important critique of the

practices of consulting ﬁrms and governing institutions such as the Ministry

of Environment. Geoghegan sees a danger in importing outside concepts

designed to enhance a community’s capacity for certain forms of tourism

development: these models further a misleading discourse of the “global en-

vironment”—a world in which “all people have a right to participate in deci-

sions about the future of the world’s natural patrimony” (Geoghegan 2013:

115). Even models designed to increase stakeholder participation, such as

the community chats, risk weakening stakeholders’ voices by undermining

informal networks in favor of new and less eﬀective participatory organiza-

tions (128). While such possible outcomes must be considered, my ﬁndings

suggest that the community and development models put forth by consul-

tants and Japanese government oﬃcials resonated with Okinawan partici-

pants’ familiar cultural and commensal practices. Chatters and walkers in

Yambaru exercised their agency by personalizing prescribed activities with

enthusiasm and a sense of community and personal empowerment.

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Knowing and Noticing

Geertz (1983: 58) writes that “the ethnographer does not, and … largely

cannot, perceive what his informants perceive. What he perceives, and

that uncertainly enough, is what they perceive ‘with’—or ‘by means of,’ or

‘through’ … or whatever the word should be.” By examining the commu-

nity processes through which local knowledge is aggregated, I have shown

how many Okinawans’ self-understanding is shaped (at least in part) by the

tourism imperative.

Existentialist Michael Jackson (1998) compares the act of ‘“storying”’

(chatting) to ‘“journeying”’ (walking), suggesting that, while storytelling is

motivated by “self-expression,” stories are by deﬁnition “relational” and inter-

subjective (Jackson 1998, quoted in Skinner 2012: 14). Self-understanding

in Yambaru is cultivated through performative acts of chatting and walking.

Placeology in Okinawa is practiced through facilitated engagement with the

natural environment, rather than by less ﬂuid factors such as geographic

proximity, ethnic background, or educational level. In the next chapter, I ex-

plore the problem of creating and negotiating interspecies intimacy through

touristic forms of engagement with nature.

Notes

1. “Local knowledge” was most commonly referred to as “local information” (jimoto no chi-

shiki) or “local wisdom” (jimoto no chie).

2. For further discussion of nature interpreters, see Chapter 5.

3. Obon is a Buddhist All Souls Day during which families reunite to honor departed ances-

tors. Throughout Japan it is generally celebrated for three days in mid-August based on the

solar calendar. Okinawans follow the lunar calendar, so their festivities fall at a diﬀerent

time each year.

4. For a description of this community-based ecotour, see Chapter 5.

5. For further discussion of the human need for nature, see the section “Biophilia” in Chap-

ter 5.

6. As of late 2016, Japan’s Ministry of Environment is in the process of registering Yambaru

as a UNESCO World Heritage site for natural assets. By 2018, the 17,300-hectare na-

tional park should be able to enforce a 790-hectare special protection zone banning plant

and animal collection, along with a 4,402-hectare special zone free of building develop-

ment (Jiji 2016).

7. In Japanese, the 2011 triple disaster (which included an unprecedented 9.1 magnitude

earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor emergency) is referred to as ỌКֹٚ෾௜

လ㢽ֹᆑ (Tōhoku-chihō Taiheiyō Oki Jishin). Approximately 20,000 people were killed

(CNN 2016).

8. In Japanese, 㠜Ű (aruki) “to walk,” becomes ťƮὸ (also pronounced aruki) “to write

something down.” These guided walks are reminiscent of the 1980s student peace educa-

tion program outlined in an alternative tour book for bases and battleﬁelds called Aruku,

miru, kangaeru Okinawa (“Okinawa to Walk, Look At, and Think About” (Figal 2012:

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Footprints in Paradise

72). This book, authored by the Okinawa High School Teachers’ Union and the Peace

Education Research Committee, was designed for mainland Japanese students on what

are now extremely popular, largely standardized school ﬁeld trips known as ‘“peace study

ﬁeld trips”’ (heiwa gakushū). Other common destinations include the sites of the World

War II U.S. atomic bombings, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

9. These anthropological concepts have also been construed as inside/outside, ﬁrst person/

third person, phenomenological/objectivist, and cognitive/behavioral (Geertz 1983: 56).

10. Of course, Geertz’s (1973: 29) original allusion to the interpretation of cultures is that it

is turtles “all the way down.” Here I change directionality to avoid implying a hierarchical

relationship among emic and etic forms of knowledge, whose diﬀerences are not meant to

be “normative” in the ﬁeld of anthropology (Geertz 1983: 57).

11. Geertz adopts psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1971) terms, “experience-near” and “ex-

perience-distant,” when he writes: “An experience-near concept is, roughly, one that

someone—a patient, a subject, in our case an informant—might himself naturally and

eﬀortlessly use to deﬁne what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine, and so on, and

which he would readily understand when similarly applied by others. An experience-

distant concept is one that specialists of one sort or another—an analyst, an experimenter,

an ethnographer, even a priest or an ideologist—employ to forward their scientiﬁc, philo-

sophical, or practical aims” (Geertz 1983: 56).

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Chapter 4

ECOLOGIES OF NEARNESS

Touch ramiﬁes and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring for,

being aﬀected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions;

these mundane, prosaic things are the result of having truck with each

other. … Touch, regard, looking back, becoming with—all these make

us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape. …

Touch and regard have consequences.

—Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

Introduction

The question of propriety in interspecies nearness pervades ecotourism dis-

course: How close should we get to animals? How close can we get to nature?

How close are we already? This chapter examines tourist and volunteer activ-

ities designed to facilitate human nearness to a diversity of marine life to ask

how interspecies aﬀective relationships are cultivated through the slippery

phenomenological moments we sometimes call “experience.” Sometimes the

quest for remarkable experiences entails traveling great distances: Much like

humpback whales, tourists from the north migrate south to warmer climes

in December and January. The opportunity to watch whales breeding in

their natural environment is a seasonal delight available to any ecotourist

with seeing eyes and access to Dramamine. Swimming with dolphins, while

controversial, gets us even closer because we can watch, touch, feel, and even

kiss them, all from the comfort of a human-scale swimming pool. Coral

transplanting, on the other hand, is a much more involved activity that takes

us out of our terrestrial habitat and plunges us into theirs. The practice is

meant to attract the “ethical tourist,” someone who volunteers (and in many

cases pays) for the chance to see and touch coral, to transplant new life, and

to learn the realities of coral degradation by getting up close and person-

alizing reefs.

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Nearness is not only a problem of achieving physical proximity to an-

other being. As I discussed in Chapter 3, for humans getting close and “be-

ing there” (Geertz 1988) entails a psychological, aﬀective, sometimes even

spiritual engagement with other life forms. Nature-based tours gain mean-

ing through the anthropomorphism of animals, and by oﬀering interspe-

cies contact predicated on the delicate negotiation of looking, feeling, and

touching for experience.

Proximities of Nearness

In 1998, a group of visitors to Okinawa climbed and clustered around a

giant looking glass tree (an evergreen mangrove with an umbrella-shaped

crown and above-ground roots that radiate from its base like wooden rib-

bons). Tourists wrapped themselves around the tree, leaning up against it

and feeling its bark with their bare hands. In 2004, a diﬀerent group stood

near the same tree but were unable to touch it. A small fence had been built

around this “arboreal monument” (Ogden 2011: 108) to protect the tree

from the thousands of tourists who encircle it every year. Professor Arasaki

opened his lecture on ecotourism by comparing photographs of these visits

to illustrate how restrictions on tourist access to Okinawa’s natural beauty

were tightening as the number of annual visitors rose.

Next, Arasaki showed a promotional video about ecotourism in Higashi to

a room full of JICA Sustainable Tourism trainees. The ﬁlm centered on Keiko,

a Nature interpreter who, like many of the guides I met during ﬁeldwork,

had transplanted herself from mainland Japan to pursue a more meaningful,

“grounded” career. Followed by the camera, she guides two young girls on a

rather tame kayaking trip down the Gesashi River. Upon noticing that the

girls aren’t having much fun, Keiko paddles closer to the shoreline and shows

them how to lean back in their kayaks and glide underneath the mangroves,

leaving only a few inches between their faces and a maze of twisting brown

roots. Soon the girls are giggling and squealing with delight, as intended.

I was once that bored customer, paddling aimlessly down the river until

our guide directed us toward a mangrove and invited us to taste its salty

leaves. Upon closer examination, I could actually see the leaf ’s color grada-

tion change from green to yellow, indicating how far up the saltwater had

been absorbed. It was the taste of the salt that ﬁnally alerted my senses and

drew me into the tour experience.

You just read an anecdote describing a lecture that contained photographs

of trees and a ﬁlmed clip of an Okinawan ecotour guide trying to bring

her customers closer to nature. Did you feel anything? What was your ex-

perience of mine? Surely the jarring impropriety of a “close-up” paragraph

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Ecologies of Nearness

such as this—one in which I, the writer, directly address you, my reader—is

bringing you uncomfortably close to this experience. How close is too close?

How close is close enough?

Experience Near (But Not Too Near)

How do you convince someone that she is aﬀected

by something if she can’t feel it?

How do you teach her how to feel it?

—Dr. Karen Magik,

coral activist

When we watch the whales in action, we are very moved or excited.

—Zamami Whale Watching Association,

English-language brochure

When I met with Karen Magik at the Churaumi Aquarium, one of the ﬁrst

things she said to me was, “I think the key [to education] is through expe-

rience. People don’t care [about an issue] until it aﬀects them.” She spoke

broadly about public awareness of the many environmental issues faced by

Okinawa: red soil run-oﬀ and erosion, ocean pollution, and the loss of bio-

diversity. Her question about how to “feel” a problem rather than simply

studying it or noticing it left me pondering the “world’s largest” circular pane

of curved glass that separates visitors from the enormous whale shark (jinbei-

zame) and manta rays on display at the aquarium. The glass was designed to

enable spectators to get closer to the animals, and to simulate the experience

of aquatic immersion by providing them with panoramic views from above

and below. Of course we could not touch them, but were we close enough

to feel them?

According to marine tourism specialist Carl Cater, no. Cater suggests that

the experientially oriented “new tourist” (see also Krippendorf 1987 and

Poon 1993) seeks a particular form of intimacy premised on the anthropo-

morphosis of certain animals both on and “in our own terms” (Cater 2010:

135). We emphasize the maternal relationship between dolphins and their

calves, for example, seeking a sort of mammalian kinship. We want to get

closer: psychologically, emotionally, and physically, as we try to understand

animals. Despite our substantial diﬀerences, charismatic megafauna be-

come “constructed as ‘near’ to us, while those we know little about [are con-

structed] as the ‘others.’” One of these “others” is coral, a species most of us

would struggle to relate to, save for appreciating their natural beauty. Our

non-human “others” need not be alien to our everyday life, however the

educational experiences aﬀorded by marine aquariums and other sea life in-

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Footprints in Paradise

teractions may send us home knowing “more about dolphins than chickens”

(136).

How do we establish interspecies closeness in the twenty-ﬁrst century?

For many travelers, sightseeing—seeing sights, seeing the sea—is no longer

enough. Tourists are increasingly doing things “with their own bodies, with

embodied objectives such as ﬁtness, thrill, spirituality, risk, sensual connec-

tion, sexuality, taste, inscription and ﬂow” (Franklin 2003: 213). As ecotour-

ists, “sharing a breath with a whale from an observation boat, hearing dolphins

communicating underwater while diving, or feeling the warmth in one’s arms

after kayaking” (Cater 2010: 138) allows us to feel these experiences.1

Watching Whales Watching Us

In Okinawa, there are at least three ways to feel a cetacean: you can watch

one, you can play with one, and you can eat one. Perplexed by the merits

of Dolphin Therapy and ambivalent about dining on Flipper (I discuss this

moral quandary later), at ﬁrst I opted to simply watch. On a frigid (for Oki-

nawa) Tuesday morning in late January 2011, I joined program coordinators

from the Okinawa International Center, Okinawa Environment Club staﬀ,

and JICA CARICOM trainees at Tomari Wharf in Naha. We popped our

motion sickness pills and boarded a giant ferry headed for Zamami Island,

part of the beautiful Kerama Archipelago about 30 km west of Okinawa

Island. Our guide met us at Zamami Port and ushered us into their wel-

come center. “Momo,” a very energetic and sprightly woman in her forties

nicknamed for a peach, spoke good English but relied on Weasel2 (the oﬃ-

cial JICA interpreter) to explain the remarkable anatomy of the humpback

whales (zatō kujira) we were about to see. She held up a stuﬀed whale toy

to illustrate diﬀerent physical characteristics. Males and females, I learned,

are the same size so one has to locate their sex organs to determine which is

which (no small task).

Unaware of the rhythmic nature of whale watching, I had always assumed

that any sightings were fairly sporadic if not altogether random. I asked

Momo how often they fail to see any whales, and she replied that only once

in her ten-year career had they missed the whales entirely. They have spotters

who watch for familiar whales, who are often annual visitors, and the short

boat ride out into the bay is canceled if the whales do not show up on any

given morning during the late winter/early spring breeding period. Once

the tour group is out in the water, it is fairly easy to predict when—though

not where—the humpbacks will emerge. Whale breathing is periodic, and

though they can cover quite a lot of territory in the interim, each individual

resurfaces every seven, eight, nine or even twelve minutes to take another

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Ecologies of Nearness

breath. To improve our odds of sighting them each time, we divided our boat

into quadrants. Half of us stood on one side, half on the other, and as we

looked out across the water we shouted, “Twelve o’clock!” or “Five o’clock!”

and so on to indicate which direction the others should turn.

Most of the JICA participants were eagerly snapping their cameras in all

directions, trying to capture any part of a whale’s breach, the stunning pose

where they rise up on their backs and then slam back down into the water.

Capturing the experience on ﬁlm, as opposed to merely watching the whales,

appeared central to this experience. For most of this group, the most reward-

ing and entertaining activity was to capture images of the whales digitally—

for immediate sharing with friends, family, and (eventually) for posterity. I

found the process of searching for the whales through a camera lens, while

balancing on a rocking boat, dizzying and disorienting. I decided just to

take in the three solo whales and one pair with my naked eyes, and hoped to

remember what I saw.

Each whale that comes to Zamami is assigned a number and given a

nickname based on the diﬀerent patterns and markings on its ﬂukes. Each

tail has a unique combination of gray and black patterning with splotches

of white, and watching for them was like taking a prehistoric Rorschach test

writ large: one individual ﬂashed the pattern of a butterﬂy, another a ﬂeur

de lis. “The Mayor,” so named for the regularity of his visits to the same spot

over many years, gave us multiple splashing encores.

We returned to the Welcome Center, our freezing bodies and faces warmed

only by windburn, and the Director of the Zamami Whale Watching As-

sociation greeted us and gave a short lecture on the activities of Zamami

tourism as we thawed. I asked about the most evocative or emotive experi-

ence tourists report from their visits, and without hesitating he replied that

mother-calf sightings never fail to astound whale watchers. He qualiﬁed this

statement by adding that it is now illegal to follow these precious pairs be-

cause the calves tend to get overly curious about the vessels and often come

too close, wanting to play. “It is considered stressful and disruptive, and

potentially dangerous for the baby whales that risk getting caught in the

engine,” he explained. He said that just seeing the whales breach is enough

to bring some people to tears, but the most exciting moments are when the

adults come very near the boat, occasionally even swimming underneath it.

“How to watch whales watching the boat.” This loosely translated head-

ing from the English-language Zamami tourist orientation pamphlet I was

handed invites watchers to ponder what Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (1998)

call the “ultimate animal question”—Who’s doing the watching? (quoted in

Cater 2010: 144, my emphasis). Whales swimming toward the boat pro-

duced a sudden and thrilling nearness—an exhilarating reminder that per-

haps we were being watched, too. The whales also wanted to get closer.

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Footprints in Paradise

Experiencing Dolphins

When I ﬁrst heard about dolphin therapy in Okinawa, I wondered who ex-

actly was being healed. I tracked down Dr. Nakasone, a diminutive middle-

aged man sporting spiked black hair and a white lab coat. He directs the

dolphin therapy program at Wellness Village Motobu (Motobu Genki Mura)

in northern Okinawa. The Wellness Village oﬀers a variety of dolphin ex-

periences to accommodate a range of time frames and budgets. Activities

range from the ﬁfty-minute Training Workshop, where tourists pay ¥3,000

($35) to watch dolphin trainers do their job, to the ﬁfty-minute Dolphin

School, where for ¥6,500 ($75) customers can kiss a dolphin and feed it

vitamin-laced ﬁsh.

After perusing the list of oﬀerings, however, I still was not sure how this

qualiﬁed as “therapy.” Noting my confusion, Professor Nakasone explained

that two other programs oﬀered: one is the experience (taiken) program; the

other is intentionally therapeutic. When I asked him about the salient dif-

ference between the two, he smiled and explained that, in fact, “The content

is completely identical.” Rather, it is the outcome that varies: “Those in the

Experience course might go home and say, ‘That was fun!’ while those in the

formal Dolphin Therapy Program might say ‘That was fun and my heart has

grown lighter.’”

“In either case,” he continued, “you are only spending 1–2 hours per

day with the dolphins, trainer, and psychologist.” (Only the therapy course

involves a psychologist.) The most important diﬀerence between the two

programs is goal setting: Those who choose Experience do not associate their

experience with a strategic healing objective, while those opting for Ther-

apy do. Participants’ therapeutic objectives are formally outlined and docu-

mented before, during, and after the program.

The dolphin therapy program is also lengthier than the experience course.

It lasts ﬁve days and costs roughly ¥400,000 ($4,700). I was still unclear; if

the content of both programs was the same, then what did Dr. Nakasone

mean by “therapy”? His grin widened as he explained that simply being with

the dolphins and communicating with them can be therapeutic for autistic

and depressed children, and for adults who suﬀer from mental illness (men-

taruteki na byōki).3 He produced an elaborate photo album documenting the

program. I grew a bit teary-eyed when he turned to the image of a small boy

who was recovering from the psychological trauma of a car accident. He was

petting a dolphin and then coaxing it to jump over a white-and-red stick that

he held out over the side of the tank.

The somewhat arbitrary categorical distinction between “therapy” and

“experience” became clearer to me when he compared dolphin therapy to

horse therapy: “It’s just riding horses, you know.” Dr. Nakasone gestured

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Ecologies of Nearness

playfully like he was taking the pulse and temperature of a dolphin, and then

a horse. Or perhaps he was mimicking a dolphin or horse trying to take his

temperature? I could not quite tell. “You can’t do this,” he smiled. “You can’t

do this kind of [medicalized] therapy with the animals.” He was making

light of the directional ambiguity of the phrase “dolphin therapy.” I asked,

“What makes this health tourism?,” still stuck on the hybrid travel category

he had outlined earlier. “Most participants come from outside Okinawa

Prefecture and stay at local hotels for the week. That’s why we tack on [call

it] ‘Tourism.’ And once the therapy [session] is over they are free.” Adult

participants are released to do other sightseeing activities for the rest of the

day.

I opted for the “Dolphin Adventure” course, settling on a sort of discount

therapy where, for ninety minutes and ¥13,000 ($150), I could experience

all of the above as well as the opportunity to be ferried (or, in some cases,

dragged) by a docile dolphin across an enclosed swimming tank. At the

Wellness Village, a friend and I joined a family of four visiting from the

Tokyo area. We changed into the wetsuits and rubber slippers provided and

then sat baking in the sun like sea lions as we waited for the program to

begin. The thick suits seemed rather cumbersome and unnecessary given the

sunny weather in late February. This marine outﬁtting was a required feature

of the Experience.

Our twenty-something guide, who introduced herself as Kokoro (“Heart”

or “Spirit”) began the tour by giving us a cursory introduction to small Oki-

nawan sea life. She led us into an artiﬁcial wading pool and taught us how to

tell the diﬀerence between a sea cucumber’s bottom and its mouth. I found

myself feeling underwhelmed, but the eight-year-old girl standing next to

me was clearly both disgusted and delighted by the prospect of touching the

slimy black, sand-ﬁltering loaf.

Kokoro introduced us to a few small banana ﬁsh (Gurukun)—popular

bright blue and yellow animals that turn a pinkish red when deep fried and

are a staple of the northern Okinawan diet—and a few large Deigo trees. She

then led us into a lecture room where she pulled out a large colorful chart

of “Cetaceans of the World” found in Okinawa. Kokoro held up a small

rubber dolphin and challenged us to point out which species we were about

to meet. Bottlenose (Bandō iruka) was correct: “Seikai!” she exclaimed, clap-

ping excitedly for the little girl. I stupidly asked where the whale sharks were

on the family web, to which Kokoro kindly replied that the animals that had

mesmerized me at the aquarium were, in fact, sharks (not whales). There was

no applause.

My heart sank as Kokoro enthusiastically explained that all of the dol-

phins housed at the Wellness Center are transplants from Taiji, Japan. My

ears immediately fogged over, and I could hardly hear to her explanation

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Footprints in Paradise

of how the dolphins are carefully selected, then wrapped up and shipped

south via airplane and boat in what to me resembled crude coﬃns. Having

watched the movie The Cove the year before, I was devastated by this revela-

tion. I felt immediately complicit and profoundly ignorant for failing to ask

in advance one of the most basic questions: “Where do the dolphins come

from?” I lived just a few miles down the road in Nago, where drivers entering

the city are greeted with a giant gray marble sculpture of a bottlenose dol-

phin that reads “Welcome to the Safe Dolphin Village.” I had just assumed

that the animals were captured locally. I debated whether I should quit this

Experience early and ask for a partial refund, but I did not want to alienate

or oﬀend my hospitable informants. I stared at the colorful photographs of

shrink-wrapped dolphins being sloshed about by large cranes, and felt a little

too guilty a little too late. Kokoro called for me to join the others as they

headed toward the dolphin tanks, and I followed.

Kokoro introduced the dolphins individually, calling them forward to tell

us their names and asking us to remember them because “each one is diﬀer-

ent.” First we stuﬀed vitamins into dead ﬁsh and fed them to the dolphins.

They did a variety of tricks, each time rewarded with another ﬁsh and ample

praise. They fetched and bounced balls with their noses, leapt over my out-

stretched candy cane pole, and clapped their dorsal ﬁns as if mirroring our

loud applause. One even surfaced to give me a kiss on the lips, a behavior

naturalized in many dolphin depictions across Motobu (see Figure 4.1). The

whole time we were with them I felt anxious and confused about what I was

doing with (to?) these highly intelligent cetaceans.

The only activity during which I was able to temporarily forget my own

quandary, and lose my self-consciousness was the swim. Kei-chan swam up

to the edge of the tank and waited for me like a ﬂoating taxi. I was elated

when I successfully latched on to her dorsal ﬁn by clasping my right hand

over my left, and she shot across the pool with me on her back. The little girl

in our group needed a lot of coaxing and encouragement, but on her fourth

try she grabbed onto Kei-chan and away they went. We emerged from the

water and began to towel down. I wrestled with my petite wetsuit, and my

conscience. Was there any sense in which this was not cruel? Dolphins are

trained through positive reinforcement and motivated by praise and love,

just as humans are, we were told.

Swimming with dolphins has been correlated with the relief of depres-

sion, but the mammals’ “healing properties” (Antonioli and Reveley 2005:

1233; Frumkin 2001) may derive from the aﬀective boost that humans gain

through this unusual sensorial interaction. Marino and Lilienfeld (2007:

243) hypothesize that the therapeutic beneﬁts are attributable less to the

presence of the dolphins themselves than to factors such as the size and touch

of the animal, and the opportunity for human interaction with them. Autis-

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Ecologies of Nearness

FIGURE 4.1 • Dolphins Kiss in Caricature at Wellness Village, Motobu

tic children beneﬁt from learning to communicate both with and through

dolphins. Curiosity about these kinds of alternative healing programs drew

me to researching dolphin therapy, and I would have been content to pursue

only the human perspective on such encounters had The Cove not suggested

that the dolphins might be depressed, too.

Changing Perspectives: A Tale of Two Films

Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we

hold them. It is proportional to this disdain. It is in proportion to being rele-

gated to irresponsibility, to the inhuman, that the animal becomes worthy of the

human ritual of aﬀection and protection … [Ecological] sentimentality is noth-

ing but the inﬁnitely degraded form of bestiality … in which we ridiculously

cloak animals to the point of rendering them sentimental themselves.

—Jean Baudrillard (1994: 134)

The Cove

The Cove (2009) is a highly politicized documentary produced by the Oce-

anic Preservation Society and starring Rick O’Barry, the world-famous dol-

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Footprints in Paradise

phin trainer and activist. The ﬁlm won the 2010 Academy Award for Best

Documentary Feature for its controversial exposé of dolphin slaughters in

the mainland town of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture. Images of Taiji resem-

ble images of Nago: both towns are chock full of dolphin motifs painted

on signs, woven into fences, grown into elaborate ﬂower formations, and

prominently displayed in statue form (see Figure 4.1). Unaware of Nago’s

history of dolphin hunting when I ﬁrst arrived, I assumed that the many

colorful, caricatured images of dolphins I saw were a celebration of a local

animal tourist attraction and an advertisement for the Churaumi Aquarium.

My initial impression of Nago matched Rick O’Barry’s in Taiji: “You would

think this is a town that really loves whales and dolphins.”

Toward the beginning of the ﬁlm, O’Barry declares that human beings

are entering a new era of human-animal relations: “It’s all about respect now,

not exploitation.” One of his primary objections to dolphinariums is that the

dolphin’s quality of “self-awareness” makes them unﬁt for captivity. In con-

trast, Japan’s International Whaling Commisson (IWC) representative Jōji

Marushita (who quickly becomes the ﬁlm’s scapegoat) is quoted as saying:

“We have never heard a convincing reason why this species is so special.” Put

another way by the Taiji ﬁshermen: “You eat cows. We eat dolphins.” This is

precisely the same rationale I heard from the trainer Kokoro at the Wellness

Village when I asked her how she felt about the ﬁlm.

O’Barry became internationally famous for his work training lead dol-

phins for the popular 1970s US television show Flipper. O’Barry tells the

story of how Cathy (one of a few dolphins that played Flipper during the

course of the show) “committed suicide” in front of him when she stopped

breathing. (Unlike human beings, he explains, dolphins are conscious

breathers and can choose to stop at any point). He attributes this act to her

unhappiness and suﬀering while in captivity.

At one point the ﬁlm attempts to shift perspectives from human to dol-

phin by pointing out the inadequacy of using a variation of sign language

to communicate with dolphins (who have no hands). One trainer asks, “We

can teach them, but what about what they can give to us?”

O’Barry even implies that in some senses the dolphins possess greater

(self-)awareness than the ﬁshermen: “It’s not about intelligence, it’s about

consciousness. They are self-aware, like humans are self-aware. I don’t believe

that the ﬁshermen here are aware of that.”4

Questions of animal agency and self-awareness (not merely “Who’s doing

the looking?” but also “Can they suﬀer?”) have been explored across time,

geography, and disciplines. Philosopher Jacques Derrida, in a treatise critiqu-

ing the Cartesian distinction between “thinking human” and “every other

living species,” reaches back to the sixteenth century to quote Michel de

Montaigne on the problem of perspective in our relationships with animals:

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Ecologies of Nearness

‘“When I play with my cat … who knows if I am not a pastime to her more

than she is to me?”’ (Derrida and Mallet 2008: 7). In Japanese literature,

Sōseki Natsume’s I Am A Cat (2002) oﬀers an equally playful role reversal in

which the life story of the owner is told by “his” cat, from the rather haughty

cat’s perspective.5

Gregory Bateson’s (2000: 371–72) work on communicational theories

argues against the notion that dolphins might possess anything a linguist

would call language. Rather, he suggests that, like humans and other mam-

mals, “[Dolphins] are preoccupied with the patterns of their relationships.”

Bateson writes: “The cat asks for milk by saying ‘Dependency,’ and I ask

for your attention and perhaps respect by talking about whales. But we do

not know that dolphins, in their communication, resemble either me or the

cat. They may have quite a diﬀerent system” (372). Bateson’s groundbreak-

ing work on animal communication transcended the language question and

paved the way for social scientists to grapple with the problem of cross-

species relationships broadly construed.

Sociologist of science Bruno Latour (2004) asks whether animals can

intervene in their own representations, while historian of biology Donna

Haraway in When Species Meet (2008) philosophizes about dogs and other

“companion species” by alluding to Geertz’s turtles: “We are in a knot of

species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the

way down. Response and respect are possible only in those knots, with ac-

tual animals and people looking back at each other, sticky with all their

muddled histories” (Haraway 2008: 42). Haraway’s studies of aﬀect between

human and nonhuman animals theorizes these relationships as intrasubjec-

tive rather than the more conventional intersubjective; she re-conceptualizes

human-animal inter-actions as mutually constitutive “intra-actions” (2008:

262) that are hermeneutical rather than dyadic. This alternative view of non-

humans, in which the human species is always already entangled, may be

part of why proponents of The Cove interpret respect for dolphins as freedom

for dolphins.

Dolphins and the People of Nago

The “muddled history” of human-dolphin relations in Okinawa is sum-

marized in a 2010 Okinawan documentary ﬁlm made for Japan’s Nation-

wide Whale Forum (Zenkoku Kujira Fuoramu). Dolphins and the People of

Nago6 opens with many black-and-white photos of pre–World War II dol-

phin hunts, rolling through tranquil images of old ﬁsh markets and small

children helping to pull landed dolphins in to shore with single ropes tied

around their tails. Still images then transition into full culinary color as vid-

eos of people cooking in groups and dancing in traditional performances

that center around ritualized dolphin hunts. Unlike The Cove, which delivers

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Footprints in Paradise

many fast-paced, bloody action scenes accompanied by a dramatic dooms-

day soundtrack, the background music in this promotional ﬁlm is soft and

mellow.

First hunted in Okinawa during the Meiji period (1868–1912), dolphins

were considered a favor or blessing from God (kami no onkei). Opinions

vary as to why Pitu7 ﬁrst migrated into Nago Bay, but stranding is the most

likely reason. Mr. Yamato (the whaling expert introduced in Chapter 3), is

interviewed throughout the ﬁlm and notes that the people of Nago inter-

preted this accident of nature as a “yuimun” (in Japanese: yorimono), a gift

from god that comes near, that comes to you. The narrator is nostalgic: “We

took Nago’s rough [stranding] waters as charity from the sea. It was an era

in which we took them together, we divided them together, and we used the

leftovers to be sold.”

Dolphins follow the Kuroshio (Black Current), a warm Paciﬁc Ocean cur-

rent that moves northward from the Philippines and passes in and around

Okinawa in a northerly ﬂow toward mainland Japan in February and March.

Before World War II, Okinawans used the roundup (oikomi) method still

used in Taiji to trap dolphins. In the ﬁlm, Yamato describes this period as

one of heroic gestures, including hunting dolphins for survival. The immedi-

ate postwar period was, he told me, “a time with no protein.” Thus, dolphin

became an even greater luxury.

The whaling industry in Japan developed signiﬁcantly during the “Golden

Age” of the 1950s, as technologies for hunting larger whales improved. The

roundup method was outlawed in Okinawa in 1991, in accordance with

larger global trends to limit whaling. Today ﬁshermen in Okinawa are re-

quired to hunt with a crossbow that allows them to take only one dolphin

at a time, which is why therapy and show dolphins are imported from Taiji.

Taiji ﬁshermen use the round-up method, allowing for the entrapment of

a vastly greater number of animals at one time. As of 2010 only 105 dol-

phins can be taken annually in Okinawa (the Taiji ﬁgure alleged in The Cove

is 23,000). Fishermen have diﬃculty attaining these restricted numbers

because, according to Yamato, the dolphins “don’t come around as much

anymore.”

“It’s a food culture that you can’t enjoy unless you’re from here.”

The latter part of Dolphins and the People of Nago showcases the many ways

that dolphin can be prepared. Colorful images showing the dark purple meat

being stir-fried, sautéed, and chopped into dolphin rib soup are meant to

leave the viewer salivating. The narrator emphasizes the need to ﬁnd exciting

new ways to cook these traditional foods in order to keep young people in-

terested in eating them. Nago’s diverse dolphin food culture must go on for

the vitality of the city, the viewer is told. The ﬁlm concludes with Yamato’s

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Ecologies of Nearness

declaration: “We must manage our resources while advocating for a symbio-

sis between things we eat and things we observe.”

In pre-war Nago, dolphins were for eating but humpback whales were, as

they are today, a sight to behold. According to Yamato, humpbacks that en-

tered Nago Bay were also originally regarded as yuimun, but unlike the smaller

dolphins this enormous “gift from god” was also regarded as a god that could

not be eaten (or, from a more practical standpoint, could not be taken). By

the end of the war, however, these whales were “worshipped” for a diﬀerent

reason: Okinawans were starving. This was a time when the post-meal Jap-

anese saying “Gochisōsamadeshita” (literally “I feasted,” but meaning “Thank

you for the delicious meal”) was frequently replaced by the Okinawan phrase

“Tarajishimashita” (“More please” or “This was not enough”). Hunting tech-

nologies had advanced such that hunters could now land the larger whales.

But even a yuimun can come too near. In southern Okinawa, ﬁshermen

regard dolphins as pests on the order of the mongoose. There is no strong

history of dolphin hunting in southern towns because there is no bay in

which to trap them easily. Some older divers in the southern town of Itoman

told me that dolphins pose a major problem for local tuna ﬁshermen. Sharks

will eat one bundle of ﬁsh bait (used to catch the tuna) and then move along,

but dolphins can hear everything: the clinking of ﬁshing wires as deep as

ﬁve hundred meters, the approaching ﬁshing boats, humming engines. They

recognize these underwater mechanical sounds as “chow time” and follow

the boats relentlessly to catch the catch.

In a follow-up interview with Yamato, I asked him what he thought about

the future of whaling in Nago. His prediction, that the industry would most

likely shift away from hunting and more toward dolphin and whale watch-

ing, echoed other stories I had heard about Okinawan ﬁshermen. Some re-

sponded to the rapid decline in ﬁsh stocks over the last couple of decades by

converting their vessels into touring and diving boats. An empty ﬁshing boat

might depart and return empty on wasted fuel, but a tourist-ﬁlled vessel was

sure to provide a reliable “catch.” In the end, Yamato turned my questions

back on me: “So, which story do you believe? Mine or theirs?” (referring to

The Cove). Trying to be diplomatic, I replied that I thought both ﬁlms made

important points about changing dolphin culture in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

“Both?” He balked, incredulous.

On my way home from the museum, I passed an older woman hunched

over picking wildﬂowers next to a placard that described the history of whal-

ing in Okinawa. I could read the Japanese portion, but I asked her to ex-

plain the Okinawan expression “Hiitudooi!” (in Japanese: “Irukadazo!”). She

told me that when she was small, the whalers would shout this out when a

dolphin was spotted. Everybody, including children, would run from their

schools, homes, and workplaces toward Nago Bay to help land the animal or

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Footprints in Paradise

at least catch a glimpse. “So you grew up eating dolphin?” I asked. “Yes, of

course. Dolphins are Nago’s specialty,” she replied. Yamato had told me that

I should still be able to ﬁnd dolphin sold in most local grocery stores, but

this woman said it was harder to come by these days. I followed up at four

supermarkets in Nago but was unable to ﬁnd any meat labeled “dolphin,”

and store employees told me they did not carry it. Even the surf ’n’ turf menu

at Restaurant Flipper—a popular dining establishment with a blissful-look-

ing cartoon dolphin on its sign—was limited to deep fried shrimp and steak

(see Figure 4.2).

FIGURE 4.2 • “Restaurant Flipper” Invokes Okinawan Culinary Tradition, Nago

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Ecologies of Nearness

The purpose of this discussion is not to promote or criticize the practice

of whaling or the consumption of cetaceans.8 I aim only to compare two

distinct perspectives on what it means to “respect” nonhuman animal spe-

cies, speciﬁcally whales and dolphins. I divulge my own gut responses to

uncomfortable ﬁeldwork experiences to illustrate the surprising and small

ways in which tourists and ethnographers are occasionally challenged to re-

orient pre-existing beliefs and political commitments. The ethics of nearness

is complicated, perhaps even deﬁned, by a globalizing environmental politics

that inﬂuences our attitudes toward certain charismatic animals—or what

Jean Baudrillard (1994: 134) would call our disdainful “sentimentality.”

Today the opportunity to touch, ride, and eat a dolphin is a tourist nov-

elty. Dolphin consumption is rare in mainland Japan; when Yamato’s To-

kyoite nephew overheard us chatting he blurted out, “You eat dolphins?!”

Regardless of whether they are for eating, touching, or watching, dolphins in

Okinawa (as with many places) are popularly portrayed as cuddly creatures

close to human beings. Indeed, humans and dolphins are both mammals; eat

at the same level of the food chain; and respond to whistles. Still, my facili-

tated encounter at the Motobu Wellness Village only served to increase my

awe for these cetaceans. In the next section I consider the pursuit of nearness

to a tiny animal so “other” that we have to transform our most fundamental

human traits just to get close.

Aquatic Adaptation

What does it mean, in the fullest sense of the phrase, to be absorbed by nature?

—Rob Nixon (2011: 185)

All the divers I met during my ﬁeldwork were seeking an unmediated, or at

least under-mediated, experience of an underwater world. Some were pay-

ing customers in search of the world’s most colorful, ﬁsh-ﬁlled reefs. Others

were volunteers intent on ameliorating the reef damage wrought by human

beings and other natural disasters. I talked to Japanese dive guides who had

swapped their pantsuits for wetsuits to escape the corporate world in Tokyo,

and former U.S. Marines intent on transferring their amphibious reconnais-

sance skills to the leisure sport of postwar wreck diving.

If you swim too close, however, scuba diving can make you somebody’s

lunch. Every time a leisure diver is killed by a shark or pierced by a stingray,

we are reminded that we do not, in fact, own the ocean. These shocking

news stories remain so because we forget that, when underwater, human

beings quickly become “matter out of place” (Douglas 2003). In two years of

diving in Okinawa, I was never attacked or harmed by anything underwater

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Footprints in Paradise

(the brown reef sharks I encountered stayed hidden in the shadows beneath

the coral). All of my cuts and bruises were sustained during the precarious,

pre-weightless periods I spent entering and exiting the water amidst pro-

truding shallow reefs. Most diving accidents actually occur before the diver

is even in the water, and Okinawan divers typically wear felt-soled booties to

prevent slippage on algae during rocky beach launches.

Underwater safety is a matter of preparation. SCUBA, an acronym that

emerged in the 1950s, stands for “self-contained underwater breathing appa-

ratus.” Air tanks made from aluminum or steel attach to your back through

a buoyancy control device (BCD)—an inﬂatable vest that regulates above-

water ﬂoatation and aquatic buoyancy. Rubber ﬁns strapped onto your feet

help you propel yourself through the water using the “frog kick.” The wet

(or dry) suit simulates seal blubber. During the winter, my wetsuit served the

functional purpose of insulating me against the chill of cooler waters. During

the summer we were advised to wear a “shortie” (short-sleeved) wetsuit, but

were strongly encouraged to continue in our full-length gear for complete

protection against the scraping coral and stinging jellyﬁsh down below.

Haraway (2008) does not see these kinds of technological appendages as

mere “mediations” or extensions between cohesive beings such as humans,

animals, and plants; rather, she writes that “technologies are organs” co-

terminous with our physical bodies (Haraway 2008: 249). Our biophysical

eyes, our underwater cameras, and our masks all become semiotically active

“technological eyes” (250). David Picard (2013: 102) uses a technological

metaphor when he compares the disorienting visual experience of diving in

“magic” coral gardens to the eﬀect of a high aperture in photography. Objects

of diﬀerent distances come into focus in the same frame, whereupon a group

diving experience is enhanced by each diver’s altered sensory perceptions.

Learning to Dive

Of the many forms of nature-based tourism I explored during my ﬁeldwork

in Okinawa, coral transplanting was the only activity that required special

training. According to the international diving license in my wallet, I am an

“advanced intermediate diver” because I have logged more than ﬁfty dives

under the supervision of certiﬁed scuba instructors. During my open-water

certiﬁcation scuba-diving lessons in the summer of 2009, I was taught never

to touch anything living in the water. As a beginning diver, I had unsteady

buoyancy and balance, and I was terriﬁed of crushing a living thing with my

tank, or underﬁn. The ﬁsh I did not worry about; they came and went freely,

quickly darting away before any part of my clunky apparatus could assault

them. The poor corals, however, could not escape my plunging clumsiness.

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Ecologies of Nearness

Once I was certiﬁed, I joined a Sunday dive club to practice my under-

water skills and prepare me for future coral transplanting. I copied the senior

divers, many of whom volunteered for the non-proﬁt organization (NPO)

Reef Check, and began wearing cheap white cotton gloves on our underwa-

ter outings. The gloves appeared to serve a dual purpose: to protect me from

the corals and to protect them from me. They certainly did not provide any

warmth.

Coral’s sensitivity to human touch is debated. Dan Brendt, one of my

American ex-military dive instructors, told me that it is actually quite hard

to kill a coral this way (though problems can arise from too many hands

lightly touching the same reef on any given day). Divers are taught not to

touch anything in order to cultivate a more cautious attitude in the water. In

Australia, in fact, gloves are prohibited precisely to dissuade touching. Pro-

fessional and advanced amateur divers often swim with their arms crossed

in front of them, both because they have achieved perfect buoyancy without

ﬂailing their arms about (as beginners do), and to remind less experienced

divers to keep their hands to themselves.

When one is studying the contents of the ocean, however, the rules of en-

gagement change entirely. By January 2011 I was more advanced, so I began

diving with a group that had been diving together for ten years in northern

village of Henoko. The leader always maintained that he only dives as a

hobby, “because it’s fun,” and claimed to be uninterested in monitoring or

reef cleanup activities. Nonetheless, he regularly facilitated the research proj-

ects of marine biology graduate students from the University of the Ryukyus,

who latched onto him to use his boat and access the resources he provided to

the greater diving community in Oura Bay.9

When I dove with Diving Team Snack Snufkin (so named for their lead-

er’s resemblance to a Swedish anime character popular in Japan), we all pitched

in to help one student with his project examining the eating habits of small

conch (tōkamuri, a marine mollusk with a spiral shell). We gathered in a

shack-turned-meetinghouse in Mr. Snufkin’s backyard at nine o’clock on a

cool Sunday morning. The space was littered with miscellaneous dive gear

and empty beer cans (for post-dive consumption only) and plastered with

fading color photographs chronicling Snufkin’s lifetime of diving adventures.

We sat in a circle around a ﬁre pit, introducing ourselves as smiling late-

comers rolled in. The day’s leading researcher, Pakuchi (a postdoctoral stu-

dent nicknamed for his unusual love of cilantro), explained his project. We

were each handed a small, lidded plastic jar, a special notepad for writing

underwater, and a regular mechanical pencil attached with Velcro. Much to

my surprise, most of the materials required for this sophisticated survey were

purchased at the hundred-yen (dollar) store. Suddenly thinking better of it,

Pakuchi returned to me and asked how many times I had dived. At this point

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Footprints in Paradise

in my ﬁeldwork the number was about thirty. Everyone else was in the high

hundreds if not thousands. As he conﬁscated my materials, he reassured me,

“Maybe next time.” I was both disappointed and relieved not to be skewing

his data on my ﬁrst dive with a new group.

Fingering Eyes

Diving with ten marine biologists was wildly diﬀerent from diving with

tourist pleasure seekers. They touched, poked, prodded, and picked things

up. They uprooted sea grasses and various other plants, examined them, and

replanted them in the sand afterward, glove-free. I found this more “schol-

arly” approach to ocean life exhilarating and liberating, and reasoned that

it might be all right if I touched a few things too. I located a mostly dead-

looking sea slug (though they never move much, this one had begun to

shrivel), ﬂipped it over and began to gently poke at its belly with my gloved

ﬁnger. In my excitement, I began touching all kinds of things with the busy-

ness of bumblebee pollinating ﬂowers. Ostensibly searching for live conch,

I went willy-nilly round the reef, lightly fondling the spiny tips of green

coral and delicately tracing the intricate lined curves of creamy brain coral. I

tittered with a child’s delight as bright purple tentacles of clustered sea anem-

ones instinctively shrank down around my probing index ﬁnger.

Pakuchi had instructed me to stay close to him and his partner, and for-

tunately the unusually clear water that day made it diﬃcult to get lost. Once

my exploratory spree was over, I returned and watched as the others wrote

brief notes to one another on their waterproof pads. I had not managed to

locate any conch shells (most of us surfaced empty-handed that day), but

I wanted Pakuchi to see the glorious, swirly mountain of gray sand I had

found plopped perfectly, like a dollop of soft serve, on the muddy bottom of

the bay. Surely this mound housed something of interest! “Unchi,” he scrib-

bled on his pad. I had discovered worm poop.

After the dive we were all freezing. We returned to Snufkin’s house, where

the students took turns showering and used an outdoor brick pizza oven to

cook hirayachi (a thin, savory pancake-crepe hybrid made with eggs, ﬂour,

and green onion), fried shrimp, and vegetable crackers in hot oil. Snufkin

drank beer. Nobody reprimanded me for my earlier touching frenzy, but by

this time I had started to feel guilty and promised myself I would not do it

again.

Perhaps Eva Hayward will forgive me. Hayward’s 2010 article “Fingery-

eyes” contemplates the “haptic-optic” of cross-species encounters through a

titular, slightly creepy neologism that refers to the “synaesthetic quality of

materialized sensation” and “transfer of intensity, of expressivity in the simul-

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Ecologies of Nearness

taneity of touching and feeling” cup corals (Hayward 2010: 580–81). Hay-

ward studies cup corals (Balanophyllia elegans) in part because this species

experiences the world non-visually, and conceives of human eyes as “con-

tiguous with—not divisible from—the body’s sensorium” (582). The onto-

logical status of these “sightless” corals stems from a complex haptic-sensory

apparatus comprised of tactile, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive senses, and

Hayward’s fascination with them derives from the fact that they exist with-

out the capacity for sight. Put more simply, “they ‘touch,’ therefore they are”

(577). I had to use my ﬁngeryeyes to get a grip on coral.

Classifying Coral

Corals are weird, gorgeous, magniﬁcent, perplexing, awe-inspiring, unfamil-

iar creatures. Marine biologists have established a rigorous taxonomic system

for classifying corals, but it can be diﬃcult for the untrained onlooker to dis-

cern, based on their appearance, whether corals are rocks, plants, or animals.

Coral’s broadest deﬁnitions—as a hard stony substance secreted by certain

marine coelecterates as an external skeleton, typically forming large reefs in

warm seas; or as a sedentary coelenterate of warm seas with a calcareous,

horny, or soft skeleton—are of minimal help to non-specialists. The subor-

ders within the broadest scientiﬁc classiﬁcation of coral (Anthozoa) include

reef-forming stony corals (order Scleractinia or Madreporaria), soft corals

(order Alcyonacea), and horny corals (order Gorgonacea).

Ordering the “Other”

The privileging of the visible and of the sense of sight over others in the

creation of knowledge is powerfully articulated in Michel Foucault’s (2002)

critique of Linnaeus’s taxonomic classiﬁcation of plants and animals in The

Order of Things. Foucault describes the ﬁeld of natural history as “nothing

more than the nomination of the visible” (144), a ﬁeld in which “sense of

touch is very narrowly limited to the designation of a few fairly evident

distinctions (such as that between smooth and rough); which leaves sight

with an almost exclusive privilege, being the sense by which we perceive

extent and establish proof.” This ordering of things creates a legible system

for accumulating knowledge that simultaneously deﬁnes, through its meth-

odology, natural history’s “condition of possibility” (145). The limitations

of the predominantly visual mode of inquiry, as Hayward (2010) illustrates,

become further apparent when we recognize that eyes come mounted on

moving bodies.

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Footprints in Paradise

Many of my diving companions imagined exploring the ocean as the

“next best thing” to space travel as we often imagine it: technologically (ox-

ygen must be regulated), experientially (buoyancy resembles weightlessness),

and visually (a host of alien life forms await). Marine anthropologist Stefan

Helmreich’s 2009 ethnography Alien Ocean highlights the discourses of oth-

ering and foreignness associated with marine scientists’ attempts to “appre-

hend” and ascribe social meaning to marine microbes, among the smallest

members of an ocean ecosystem. Such recently discovered microbes elude

existing taxonomies and classiﬁcations, in part because the “signiﬁcance of

these life forms for forms of life” is poorly understood (Helmreich 2009:

16). Corals’ function in marine ecosystems is likewise complex but can be

simpliﬁed for human interest as follows: they attract and provide food and

shelter for the ﬁsh we eat. Coral is not new to taxonomies of the sea, yet its

distant, “alien” nature still informs the landlocked human imaginary. Corals

are visible to the naked (though generally masked) eye, but still they are hard

to comprehend. As one of my instructors put it, “Corals hold and protect

squid eggs just as trees hold bird eggs … but because they are not leopards,

lions, or pandas, we tend to forget about them.”

Helmreich (2009: 15) ﬁnds that “marine mascots” have “scaled down

from the nineteenth-century whale to the twentieth-century dolphin to,

now … the sensationally odd and not-quite other.” Like marine microbes,

corals are “neither charismatically mammoth nor wet and cuddly.” The Yam-

baru kuina (introduced in Chapter 2), for example, will always be cuddlier

than an abrasive stony coral, but NPOs such as Coral Okinawa, Sea Seed

Okinawa, and Reef Check are working hard to mobilize this sessile animal

for environmental education and conservationist purposes. Corals are an-

thropomorphized and gain social meaning through the interspecies nearness

produced by human underwater intervention.

Native Transplants

Transplanters’ eﬀorts are not unambiguously beneﬁcial to the ocean. Oki-

nawa, often referred to as the “Galapagos of the East,” is marked as a biodi-

versity hot spot because its reefs are comprised of approximately 380 diﬀerent

kinds of coral. (Florida, by comparison, hosts about 30 species.) In the global

marine science community, discussions of biodiversity often include discus-

sions of “bioinvasion.” Helmreich (2009) deﬁnes marine bioinvasions, in-

tentional or otherwise, as “the human-mediated transport of creatures from

one marine ecosystem to another, an activity that frequently has deleterious

eﬀects on destination waters” (12). Contemporary coral transplanters are

every bit as intentional in their maneuvers as the well-meaning Japanese bi-

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Ecologies of Nearness

ologist who ﬁrst brought the mongoose to Okinawa (discussed in Chapter

2). However, the impact of the coral reef “bioinvasion” on marine ecosys-

tems is less clear. The species discussed in this chapter, table coral (midori ishi

sango) from the genus Acropora, is native to Okinawa, but even native corals

of the same species have diﬀerent genes. Clustering too many cousin corals

together can lead to gene-mixing and spawning that could cause one species

to go extinct. Table coral’s role in the ecosystem is well understood, but

extensive coral transplanting could nevertheless generate an “alien ocean”

comprised of “mixed up lineages” and “those outside, beyond, or within

known oceans” (17). The risk of destroying one species by saving another

complicates the ethics of promoting reef biodiversity through intervention.

Accounting for Loss

Have you ever seen deep inside the ocean?

We sea creatures are living in places you’ve probably never seen.

Please protect us.

In return, we’ll give your children a great gift, beautiful oceans.

We the ocean corals wish to coexist with human beings.

Sea Seed Okinawa (NPO)

“Message from in the Sea”

I can’t count them, but I can tell you there’s less ﬁsh.

—Dan Brendt, Director of Operations

Reef Encounters International dive school

Okinawan adults who I spoke to about the ocean nearly always began by

extolling the rolling beauty of their warm blue-green seas and brilliant coral,

but would quickly qualify all claims to paradisiacal beauty with “… but

it used to be even prettier.” My informants frequently lamented that their

grandchildren and children would never experience the beautiful beaches

they had known. Stories of loss and decline pervade discussions about the

health of all natural environments in Okinawa, but the fate of the ocean of-

ten evokes a peculiar sort of nonspeciﬁc sadness—those who had never been

scuba diving and only rarely swam in the ocean were well aware that marine

ecosystems are degrading rapidly, but their nostalgic descriptions of this loss

were often somewhat vague.

The problems of slow vulnerability and temporal diﬀerence discussed in

Chapters 2 and 3 also pervade coral reef discourse. A 300-year-old coral

killed in hours to weeks by abnormally high sea temperatures cannot be fully

replaced for centuries (Richmond et al. 2007). The phenomenon known as

“coral bleaching” (so named because many corals turn white when stressed),

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Footprints in Paradise

kills much more slowly; the long-term causes of bleaching are less clear, but

researchers often cite climate change and ocean pollution as major contrib-

uting factors. During ﬁeldwork I dived with members of the Okinawa chap-

ter of the international NGO Reef Check Research Group (established in

1997) and the locally based Coral Okinawa (established in 2004), an NPO10

that harnesses volunteer diver skills and labor to monitor the growth (and

regrowth) of six key reef sites on Okinawa’s main island. Volunteer divers

quite literally transplant baby coral polyps on top of bleached coral skele-

tons, using cement and metal cages to protect young corals from common

predators such as the crown-of-thorns (a brilliantly colored spiky venom-

ous sea star) and other echinoderms. The eﬀectiveness of such transplanting

methods remains debatable (Nishihira 2006: 71), but Reef Check’s ongoing

certiﬁcation of survey divers has greatly improved regional knowledge of ﬁsh

and coral species in the East China Sea and Paciﬁc Ocean surrounding Oki-

nawa. Detailed assessments of reefs can be obtained through aerial photog-

raphy and mounted sensors on ships, boats, and submersiles; but the most

reliable sources of information about coral reefs are scuba divers themselves

(Dimitrov 2002: 63). Organizations like Reef Check and Coral Okinawa

are promoting sustainable coral interactions by “transplanting” the divers

themselves from typical tourist sites to reef recovery sites.

Planting Stakeholders

Coral Okinawa11 director Tomohiro Gibu frequently used the English loan-

word “stakeholder” (suteekuhorudaa) to describe high-level corporate and gov-

ernment coral conservation sponsors. In addition to the Ministry of Environ-

ment’s annual contributions, for example, in 2010 Okinawa Prefecture ded-

icated ¥1 billion ($12 million) to transplanting corals in the Kerama Islands

(still considered relatively healthy and vibrant). Roughly ten local businesses,

which all use the same stretch of ocean to conduct proﬁt-based activities rang-

ing from dinner cruises to mozuku12 harvesting, are oﬃcial coral stakeholders.

Divers can also become individual stakeholders, and symbolic gestures,

such as personifying each transplant with a nickname, are intended to en-

courage volunteers to grow attached to the reefs and continue monitoring

their coral’s growth over an extended period of time. In Okinawa, marine

scientists, environmental activists, and volunteer tourist divers have under-

taken not only to document and quantify coral losses not readily apparent to

landlocked eyes, but to intervene in this slow decline by transplanting new

corals atop old.

I call these reef volunteers diving stakeholders, in part because they quite

literally take a stake in the health of the ocean by hammering large silver

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nails into dying reefs to secure young polyps. Nearness achieved through

this kind of intervention gives coral an intimate, moral value for volunteer

gardeners. Divers’ identities as ecological stakeholders are produced, I ar-

gue, through the “slow labor” of harvesting, growing, and transplanting coral

reefs over periods of months and years. Their actions are motivated by in an

international discourse that considers biodiversity loss an “absolute, univer-

sally self-evident evil” that may never be forgiven (Lowe 2006: 158; Wilson

1984). Within this discourse, replacing dead corals with live ones becomes a

rational project replete with careful measurements, standardized procedures,

and photographic evidence of progress. I emphasize this aspect of coral

transplanting because, as I discuss next, the aﬀective rewards of partaking in

this activity derive from the act of “coral gardening”13 much more than from

tracking the incremental growth of coral polyps. For coral gardeners, the

meaning and the feeling is in the doing.

Stakeholders theory contends that people will protect what they value.

The term originated in the business and ﬁnance world, but since the 1980s

the stakeholders concept has broadened to encompass niche enterprises such

as environmentally sensitive tourism intended to educate visitors and local

community members (Honey 1999a: 12). Robert Fletcher takes issue with

one of the underlying assumptions of stakeholders theory—that the primary

incentive for local engagement in conservation initiatives is economic. In

the context of ecotourism (and other forms of nature-based tourism), “stake-

holding” circulates as a discourse with a “relatively coherent and culturally

speciﬁc set of beliefs, values and assumptions” that entails a host of non-

material motivations as well (Fletcher 2009: 271). Following Martha Honey

(1999), Fletcher argues that for the typical ecotourist (described in the In-

troduction as young, highly educated, middle-class), ‘“genuine’ ecotourism

must go beyond simply selling an encounter with ‘nature’ to provide eco-

nomic, social and environmental beneﬁts” (Fletcher 2009: 272). The “con-

dition of possibility” (Escobar 1995; Foucault 2002) for creating value and

meaning through ecotourism is shaped by a particular cosmopolitan cultural

perspective shared by this elite demographic.

What is this perspective? One feature is an emphasis on the consump-

tion of experience as a form of class distinction (Bourdieu 1984), or what

Fletcher (2009: 276) calls the “promotion of a post-industrial approach to

natural resource use, wherein rural landscapes are seen [as] a site for the the

production and consumption of experiences more than the production and

consumption of commodities characteristic of an industrial resource regime.”

As Karen Magik, argued, such experiences are the key to education—another

shorthand term used by ecotourism planners to justify the value of their

labor, and of conservation projects more generally, to local people (Fletcher

2009: 280). Environmental education (what Celia Lowe [2006] might sub-

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Footprints in Paradise

sume under an “analytic of knowledge”) becomes an umbrella term for the

conveyance of what can appear to be straightforward facts and ﬁgures related

to conservation. This kind of learning promotes a particular set of ideologies

about nature that tend to be naturalized by members of the ecotourist demo-

graphic, which includes me and most likely you, too.

Lowe (2006: 23) writes that “thinking of humans as subjects constituted

by knowledge, rather than unconstrained individuals who possess and con-

trol knowledge, is useful for comprehending the identities that emerge from

projects to conserve biodiversity.” In a similar vein, Hayward (2010: 593)

theorizes that the coral organism’s “responsiveness with an environment are

the conditions of its emergence.” This ontological model applies to coral

transplanters as well. Volunteer divers emerge as ecological stakeholders as

they carry corals and ferry reef data between wet and dry worlds. This kind

of liquid mobility also becomes a “strategy for claiming territory” (Ogden

2011: 90)—a strategy for both humans and nonhumans to stake claims in

reef territory.

Coral Gardening

The essential Trobriander … is ﬁrst and foremost a gardener … He experiences

a mysterious joy in delving into the earth, in turning it up, planting the seed,

watching the plant grow, mature, and yield the desired harvest. If you want to

know him, you must meet him in his yam garden, among his palm groves or

on his taro ﬁelds. You must see him digging his black or brown soil among the

white outcrops of dead coral and building the fence, which surrounds his garden

with a “magical wall,” which at ﬁrst gleams like gold among the green of the new

growth and then shows bronzed or grey under the rich garlands of yam foliage.

(Malinowski 1935: xix)

Coral Gardens and Their Magic, Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1935 account of

agricultural economy in the Trobriand Islands, can stimulate in the reader a

deep “yearning for the physical sensuousness of a wet and blue-green Earth”

(Haraway 1999: 50 ). The descriptive contrast of blacks and browns, greens

and golds against the dead white of dead coral makes me want to delve deep,

to plant and grow new life.

However, Malinowski’s ethnography is concerned foremost with the ma-

teriality of coral primarily as a lens on Trobriander life. Like the islands of

Okinawa Prefecture, the Trobriand Islands (currently known as the Kiri-

wina Islands, a chain of atolls located oﬀ the eastern coast of New Guinea)

are comprised of coral. Malinowski’s Trobriander informants scraped small

chunks of coral from the outer ridge of their atoll and used them as an ingre-

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dient in what could be likened to magical fertilizer for yams and other crops.

This practice provides an ethnographic basis for his discussion of magic and

rationality in Trobriander daily life. In short, Malinowski followed the coral

to get near the people.

I never found an “essential” Okinawan of the sort Malinowski character-

ized in his ethnographic present, but I was intrigued by the “mysterious joy”

(1935: xix) of the coral transplanter, whose work, I can now say with conﬁ-

dence, can prove inﬁnitely frustrating and unrewarding. An early detractor

from so-called “armchair anthropology,” Malinowski asserted that a particu-

lar form of interactive nearness (conventionally known today as participation-

observation-interaction) is key to understanding Trobriander ways of life.

Malinowski’s famous trumpeting call for the ethnographer to “put aside

camera, notebook and pencil, and join in himself in what is going on” (Ma-

linowski 1922: 21-22, quoted in Geertz 1988: 76-77) is by now canonical

advice for anthropologists and standard ﬁeldwork practice. To even attempt

underwater participant observation amongst Okinawan coral transplanters

and reef surveyors, however, these were precisely the participatory tools I had

to take up.

Monitoring and Maintenance

In late February 2011, I joined the NPO Coral Okinawa for an orientation

and training course that would enable me, at long last, to join them on one

of their monthly monitoring trips. We met on a crisp Wednesday morning

at the Ginowan Marine Support Center and were soon joined by six grad-

uating students from the Okinawa Well Sports Technical College. Most of

these 18–22-year-olds expressed an interest in pursuing some sort of sports

ﬁtness career, and all of them were experienced divers. I perused blue plastic

tanks full of baby coral transplants warming under heat lamps in their watery

nursery. Mr. Gibu called us to gather around him, and began a sort of review

session by quizzing the students on what exactly we were protecting the

corals from with the green metal cages he had amassed. He held one up, and

I recognized it as a half-moon shaped upside-down hanging ﬂower basket,

also from the hundred-yen shop. He asked the group: “Who eats the coral?”

“Onihitode (crown-of-thorns),” one student replied. Gibu continued: “What

else does?” “Reishigai (dog winkles),”14 the group chorused.

Most students were returning to do maintenance (mentenansu) and mon-

itoring (monitooringu) on corals they had transplanted the previous month.

Both of these key words were borrowed from English, and when Gibu asked

them what monitoring meant in Japanese the giddy bunch went silent. Even-

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Footprints in Paradise

tually he conceded and told them: “Keikakansatsu” (literally “progress ob-

servation”). His translation was met with a vigorous nodding of heads. He

later explained that he preferred to use the English loanword version of these

basic words in his explanation of international standard transplanting proce-

dures because many of the training manuals and literature he drew on were

published in English. Gibu selected one of the more experienced students to

explain the basic transplanting procedure to me. The tools laid out before us

included the familiar white gardening gloves, a coarse wire brush, a mallet,

thick silver nails, clear zip ties, two varieties of mud-like dark grey glue, and

the inverted ﬂower basket cages. The student gave a quiet, very tentative over-

view of how each of these tools was used to secure the adolescent corals atop

the reef. After another brief moment of silence, Gibu jumped in to elaborate

on the protocol we were to follow once submerged:

1) Select an appropriate reef on which to build (we relied on Gibu’s ma-

rine biologist assistant to do the choosing).

2) Use the wire brush to scrape the surface of the reef vigorously and

clean oﬀ algae and other accumulated particles.

3) Mix the two glues together into golf ball-sized lumps, taking care

never to touch the glue out of water.

4) Remove the planting corals from their plastic container and press the

square base ﬁrmly into the glue mixture, taking care to secure all four

corners.

5) Press the coral transplants into the reef such that each ﬁts snugly un-

derneath the canopy of the wire cage.

6) Secure the cage on top of the corals, ensuring that none of the polyp

branches protrude to invite ﬁshy nibblers. (Note: author’s translation)

7) Use the zip ties to anchor the basket atop the corals.

8) Secure zip ties to the reef by carefully hammering four nails around

the perimeter of the cage without shattering the underlying reef.

9) Adjust until zip ties are taut.

After rehearsing the process twice, we were sent to prepare the materials. I

scooped globs of the dark and light grey glues from a large tub using house-

hold rice scoopers. The glue resembled black sesame ice cream, a popular

Japanese dessert, but the sticky stuﬀ made it diﬃcult to transfer into our

smaller containers. I removed the hanging cords from the wire basket plant-

ers, completing their transformation from aboveground garden accessory

into underwater coral safe haven.

Mr. Gibu then led us outside to the adolescent coral nursery (these larger

specimens had been incubating for about six months). Each table coral,

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Ecologies of Nearness

one of the most proliferous and commonly transplanted species, was rub-

ber-banded to a roughly 1.5-inch square base comprised of ground up and

recycled coral fragments. He asked us to carefully choose six corals that we

estimated would all ﬁt inside a protective cage. We tenderly lifted them out

of their shallow, ﬁltered seawater nurseries and placed them side by side

into clear plastic tubs and fastened lids on top. After a short bus ride to the

shoreline we all unloaded and began donning our gear. I quickly fell behind

and was still adjusting my ﬁns while everyone else waded into the water for

a shore launch. A teasing student voice rang out: “Andy, you’re pretty slow!”

Shallow Encounters

Not all transplanters are divers. One need not even get wet. I attended a

number of family-friendly shoreline maintenance and monitoring events

where participants could wade just a few meters out toward a shallow reef

to check on the growth of their coral, or to plant a new polyp. The ﬁrst

time Gibu invited me to participate in a transplanting session, he just told

me to meet him at nine in the morning at the Ginowan Marine Support

Center, giving no further details. I turned up in late January 2010 with my

wetsuit and all of my diving gear in tow and was immediately handed a

“Staﬀ” badge and given an oﬃcial NPO Coral Okinawa sweatshirt to wear.

My job was unclear, so I stood guard next to the nursery and tried to look

conﬁdent.

Soon a large tour bus arrived and unloaded about ninety volunteers. I

was surprised to see that a “typical” tourist guide, outﬁtted with heels and a

ﬂag, was leading the group. I noticed that a few of the volunteers were wear-

ing t-shirts that read “We ♥ Okinawa,” a tourism promotion campaign I

had noticed across the island. The group gathered around Gibu, who brieﬂy

explained the philosophies and procedures he had taught me the ﬁrst time

I attended one of his lectures. The We ♥ Okinawa representative gave him

precisely twenty minutes to explain his NPO’s activities. Gibu later told me

that he was very frustrated because he needed at least forty minutes to ex-

plain what they do and why they do it. His speech began:

Why should anyone care about coral? First of all, because they’re alive. They are

small animals. Coral are like underwater trees—they are inhabited by ﬁsh like

birds inhabit the forest. Coral is their habitat. But 90 percent of Okinawa’s reefs

have died in the last ﬁfteen years. Looking from above or outside nothing has

changed, Okinawa’s sea is still unusually beautiful. But inside it’s changing. The

coral could be gone in ﬁfty years.

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Footprints in Paradise

He touched on the devastation of El Niño in 1998,15 concluding that trans-

plantation would help at least “a little bit.” He closed with a call to “re-

turn Okinawa’s reefs to their pre-’98 condition.” When Gibu was ﬁnished

speaking, the tour guide summarized his comments as follows: “Without

beautiful, clean water we can’t make good beer!” Only then did I realize that

this coral tour was actually an Orion Beer–sponsored event, and that our

volunteers were just stopping in on their way to a brewery in Nago.

In just one hour on this sunny Sunday morning, ninety people migrated

toward the coral nursery, listened to Mr. Gibu’s brief explanation of his

work, secured a broken branch of coral onto a square base with a rubber

band, then wiped their hands with the corporate towels generously provided

by Orion (see Figure 4.3a). Then they jumped back on the bus and oﬀ they

went, completely dry. After incubating for about 2–3 months (see Figures

4.3b and 4.3c), the corals would attach to their square bases and would be

ready for transfer by an experienced diver (see Figure 4.3d).

FIGURE 4.3a • Volunteer Coral Gardeners on Land, Ginowan

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Ecologies of Nearness

FIGURE 4.3b • Coral Polyp Transplants (3 months)

FIGURE 4.3c • Coral Polyp Transplants (6 months)

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Footprints in Paradise

FIGURE 4.3d • Volunteer Coral Gardeners at Sea, Ginowan

Diving Deeper

In March 2011, I accompanied Mr. Gibu and ﬁve professional dive instruc-

tors on a coral transplanting mission to Kamiyama Island, about a half-hour

boat ride due west from Miegusuku Port in Naha. By now I had transplanted

coral about six times. The pressure to get it right mounted when Gibu, only

half joking, pulled me aside and said, “Andy, today we’re not taking care of

you. Everyone here is a pro. You’re on your own.” Aware that I tended to

move slowly, he asked me to start setting up my gear at least twenty min-

utes before everyone else. I tried to act cool and conﬁdent, stealing sidelong

glances at the other divers to make sure none of my gear was assembled

backwards or upside down. I struggled to pull up my wetsuit, hopping on

one foot and bouncing up and down as if on a pogo stick. Trying to appear at

ease, I casually asked him about the origins of today’s batch of corals. He told

me that after permission was obtained from the prefectural government,16

baby table corals were harvested from donor corals collected speciﬁcally for

this transplanting. He added that every May the sea turns brieﬂy but in-

tensely red when corals release their eggs for fertilization, a phenomenon I

had watched on the news but never managed to see live. Eggs and sperm are

then harvested and combined to make new corals. On this occasion we were

planting only ﬁve corals each because, Gibu informed us, “The point is to do

it cleanly and properly.”

When we arrived on Kamiyama, we did a quick review of materials and

objectives, lined up and leapt into the chilly water one at a time (left hand on

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Ecologies of Nearness

mask, right foot pointed straight out in military marching fashion). Despite

the foreboding, nauseating waves and grey storm clouds we had encountered

on the way out, we all entered the water with relative ease. We deﬂated our

BCD vests, gave each other the thumbs down sign,17 sank down to about

ﬁfteen meters, and began swimming due east. I followed behind the others,

mimicking their relaxed and leisurely graceful frog kicks with my black rub-

ber ﬁns, and practiced reading my compass. Then my mask began to fog over

and I realized I had forgotten to spit on the hard plastic lens.18 I lifted the

mask, allowing the cool seawater to rush in and wash the inside of the lens.

I cocked my head back, angled the mask away from my face, and purged the

water with an equine nasal snort.

Perhaps for the ﬁrst time since I had begun diving, I actually recognized

where I was. The reef was small, and on our previous mission I had taken

for granted that I would be able to recall where my corals were located. Such

was not the case, and I was grateful for the individualized nametags zip-tied

to each cage. Without names, they all looked the same. I began surveying

the reef for a smooth, bare spot ripe for transplanting. One of the other

divers swam up behind me and handed me two baseball-sized balls of the

grey glue; another followed with my ﬁve transplants. I had found a reason-

ably ﬂat spot nestled in a crevice of the reef and surrounded by rusting and

algae-covered cages from past plantings. I began to scrub away with the wire

brush, recounting the planting protocol steps in my head. My buoyancy

shifted as I gradually depleted the air in my tank, and soon I had to jam my

neoprene-padded knee into the crevice to stabilize my position. I hesitated

to hammer the nails into the compromised reef, which cracked with each

strike.

After about twenty minutes I had completed my task and began looking

around for something else to do. The divers were scrubbing algae oﬀ the

cages of older coral (maintenance), so I joined in until they began signaling

that it was time to go. Gibu hovered behind us to do the monitoring, which

included photographing the corals and recording their few centimeters of

growth over the past few months. Soon I heard the faint, tinny clanking of

pointer-on-tank, which signaled that it was time to head back. By the time

I arrived back below the boat the other divers were all doing their safety

stops,19 ﬂoating in lotus position, perfectly suspended in the water, looking

peaceful.

On the ride back to Naha, I asked Gibu what the day’s activities had actu-

ally cost Coral Okinawa. He puﬀed carefully on a cigarette, taking care to tap

the ashes into a glass jar to prevent them from ﬂoating oﬀ into the water. He

told me that a local dive shop had donated the boat, and, save for the glue,

virtually all of the materials used were from the 100 yen store. Most expenses

were incurred in the growing and harvesting of corals prior to transplant. To

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the eight thousand corals he was actively monitoring we had added fewer

than thirty—but at least this small action was cost-free.

After docking, we unloaded all of our gear and gathered in a circle to re-

view the day’s events. He asked each diver to give a three-minute impression

of their experience, asking: What went right? What could have gone better?

What did you learn? What does this mean to you? Most of the responses were

on the mild side, displaying commonplace Japanese public modesty: “I think

I might have helped a little bit,” or “I’d really like to do this more often.” I

asked Gibu a more speciﬁc question about the consequences of hammering

into one dying coral to plant a new one on top. In between thoughtful drags,

he replied that the damage done to corals by typhoons far outweighs the dam-

age we do with our hammers,20 and insisted reassured me that our methods

followed the international guidelines they had adopted in 2004.

His comments left me wondering whether our contributions were merely

a drop in the salty sea bucket. If our eﬀorts could be thwarted any time the

sea temperature surpassed thirty degrees Celsius, or whenever a tsunami blew

through, and if every seventy years the reefs are taken over by the crown-of-

thorns anyway, then why bother? He countered my cynicism: “For policy, we

need this [protocol] as a policy. More than new technology, we need good

policies.” This is how Gibu and his volunteer transplanters take stakes in coral.

Conclusion

When we think of getting near to nature, we might imagine childhood proj-

ects such as butterﬂy and rock collections, or perhaps even seashells and coral

fragments once collected to decorate our bathrooms and gardens. But not all

nature collections involve removing the object of interest from its ecosystem:

diving stakeholders collect coral colonies by adding to the marine popu-

lation and naming individual transplants. This form of collecting involves

monitoring and maintaining corals, and recording the names of ﬁsh and

other species that inhabit them. Instead of acquiring natural trinkets such as

sand dollars, the take-home from this kind of coral counting and collecting

is data, accumulated and recorded on waterproof notepads and later elabo-

rated in personal dive logs. In addition to chronicling basic details such as

the temperature of the water, depth and length of each dive, logbooks (a

form of “recreational book-keeping” [Lorimer and Lund 2008: 197]) always

include a section for the diver to sketch any remarkable sightings. In Chap-

ter 3, village walkers and community chatters gathered local cultural and

ecological knowledge by collecting objects such as rocks, ﬂowers, memories,

and photographs. In the context of coral transplanting, the experience of

monitoring and maintenance is collected rather than the coral itself.

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Ecologies of Nearness

Hayden Lorimer and Katrin Lund (2008: 185) problematize a common

trope in outdoor travel and exploration through the ﬁgure of novelist John

Fowles. Fowles ﬁrmly believed in the possibility of a “pristine encounter”

with nature: “[Fowles’] message was clear: for as long as the conceptual urge

to classify, document, list and tick prevailed, our common response to nature

would be much the poorer.” In Fowles’s view, expressed most eloquently in

his essay “The Blinded Eye” (1984), amongst collectors an “elevated appreci-

ation” of nature is too commonly subordinate to “a much diminished, lesser

form of knowing”—a knowing based on drawing, measuring, and counting

(Fowles 1984: 77, quoted in Lorimer and Lund 2008: 186). The capacity

to see, and, in the case of coral transplanting, to touch one’s collection, is

central to the act of coral gardening. Lorimer and Lund (2008: 186) artic-

ulate shared qualities in the experience of collecting nature, where “tasks

of judgment, organization, inspection, preservation, re-inspection and com-

parison happen as a series of correspondences between nimble hands and

discriminating eyes.” Diving stakeholders’ “epistemic ambitions” are grati-

ﬁed through haptic (involving the sense of touch) and optic intervention in

local coral reefs, as well as through the simultaneous proprioceptive (bodily)

experience of underwater movement through diving.

Our need to feel nature may derive from an overall trend identiﬁed by

Bryan Turner (1996: 1) as the turn to a “somatic society,” wherein the body

becomes part of a “self-project” wherein individuals express their emotional

needs through speciﬁc acts of bodily construction. Through this process

of embodiment, the individual body “is connected into larger networks of

meaning at a variety of scales” (Cresswell 1999: 176). The range of spatial

scales can be imagined through interactions with whales, dolphins, and coral.

The ecologies of nearness explored in this chapter consider aﬀective, ther-

apeutic, moral, and scientiﬁc forms of intimacy between and among human

and nonhuman animal species. In Okinawa, ecological stakeholders emerge

through the use of natural tools—ﬁngers, eyes, brains, and kisses—and also

through technological extensions of these tools: nomenclatures, notepads,

cages, harpoons, cameras, tanks, masks, and hammers. These tools bring us

close to nonhumans through a nearness that also constitutes us as human.

Chapter 5 considers what else is lost when we lose our sense of place in nature.

Notes

1. For further discussion of touristic labor as the entry point to “authentic” nature, see Chap-

ter 5.

2. When I asked my informant whether he would prefer the use of a pseudonym, he chose

this one.

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Footprints in Paradise

3. While they do endorse much of the research showing depressed patients’ positive responses

to animals, mental health specialists Aaron Katcher and Gregory Wilkins (1993: 178–79)

dispute many of the exceptional claims regarding dolphins and autism. They write: “Press

reports of autistic children miraculously responding to the presence of captive dolphins …

are the result of uncontrolled clinical studies and the suggestive inﬂuence of the cult that

has evolved around dolphins and other cetaceans. Equally spectacular results have been

noted with cats, dogs, birds, and even a small turtle.”

4. In a remarkable 2013 announcement, India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests Cen-

tral Zoo Authority rejected various tourism development groups’ proposals to build a

commercial dolphinarium because “cetaceans in general are highly intelligent and sen-

sitive … [and] dolphin should be seen as ‘non-human persons’ and as such should have

their own speciﬁc rights and [it] is morally unacceptable to keep them captive for enter-

tainment purpose” (Ministry of Environment and Forests 2013).

5. The Japanese title of this novel is ໰ḺƒભƊťƮ, and uses honoriﬁc language to elevate

the cat’s position relative to the owner.

6. ǪǞƻƋ଀Ὂದ, pronounced in Okinawan: “Pitu to Nagunchu.”

7. In Japanese: Gondo kujira. The short-ﬁnned pilot whale is a small cetacean comparable

in size to the bottlenose dolphin. Okinawans refer to this particular species as “ikura”

(dolphin).

8. A body of literature already addresses the politics of cetacean hunting and consumption

(for a small sample see Blok 2008; Catalinac and Chan 2005; Watanabe 2006).

9. Oura Bay is famous in Okinawa as a site where the relatively rare species blue coral was

ﬁrst discovered, but is perhaps better known as the home of the endangered dugong—a

charismatic animal resembling a manatee. Anti-U.S. military base protestors rally around

these and other symbolically valuable species to prevent the expansion of heliports into the

northern village of Henoko (see Figure 1.1).

10. In Japan, “NGO” refers to international non-governmental organizations, while “NPO”

refers to domestic non-proﬁt organizations. Similar coral transplanting volunteer groups

have also been created on more than thirty islands outside Japan.

11. Coral Okinawa is one of four coral-transplanting NPOs on the main island. The or-

ganization annually receives ¥20,000,000 ($235,000) from the prefectural and national

governments, and also has about twenty private sponsor companies (including the Japan

Travel Bureau, which donates ¥5,000,000 [$60,000] every year).

12. The popular Okinawan dish mozuku (Nemacystic decipiens) is an algae-like seaweed served

in a vinegary sauce.

13. This is my term, appropriated from Malinowski’s ethnography. While I never heard any

Okinawans refer to coral transplanting (sango no ishoku) as “gardening,” NPO Sea Seed

Okinawa’s oﬃcial website (www.seaseed.com) does refer to the practice as “coral farming.”

14. Dog winkles or rock shells are thumb-sized, purplish, predatory sea snails.

15. Coral bleaching is a well-documented consequence of rising sea temperatures that has

plagued Okinawa’s reefs since the major El Niño bleaching of 1998. The summer of 1998

marked the strongest El Niño on record, during which the complete absence of typhoons

in Okinawa Prefecture rendered the temperatures of the East China Sea warmer than at

any time in the previous ten years. Hurricanes and typhoons are actually critical to the sur-

vival of Okinawa’s reefs because the intense winds churn up and cool down the shallower

ocean waters in which many heat-sensitive coral species reside. Experts from the Ministry

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Ecologies of Nearness

of Environment have also been tracking a severe bleaching from 2007; these events are

predicted to occur annually by 2050 (Harvey 2017). A 2016 reef survey conducted in

Okinawa’s Sekisei Lagoon ﬁnds that 90 percent of coral has bleached, and that 70 percent

of Japan’s largest reef has died. It is worth noting that bleaching coral reefs can recover

with time and favorable conditions.

16. Many broken coral branches wash ashore following typhoons, but it is illegal to remove

them from the shore as some may survive being beached and return to a coral colony with

low tide.

17. In dive-speak, thumbs down and thumbs up indicate one’s intention to descend or ascend.

18. Spitting in one’s mask is a low-tech anti-fog technique employed by divers worldwide, as

is urinating in one’s wetsuit to generate warmth.

19. “Safety stop” means pausing for a few minutes at a shallower depth before surfacing, giv-

ing the body a chance to equalize and avoid a potentially fatal air embolism also known as

“the bends.”

20. The meaning of environmentally friendly (kankyō ni yasashī) transplanting practices is

contested. Sea Seed Okinawa advocates transplanting by drilling holes into dead corals

and securing baby polyps with the Okinawan sponge gourd Naabeera (Hechima in Jap-

anese) rather than using chemical glues. A New York Times article on the world’s largest

government-led “coral transplant surgery” project on Sekisei Lagoon Reef (Okinawa) de-

scribes a range of other methods being tested by reef scientists that could be used else-

where to rescue reefs endangered by overﬁshing, pollution, and global warming (Fackler

2009).

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Chapter 5

HEALING AND NATURE

FIGURE 5.1 • Okinawans Do Forest Therapy, Yonabaru Forest

Nuchigusui: This is the healing forest. This is the healing village of Kunigami.

—Kunigami Forest Therapy

English-language promotional brochure

No one in his right mind looks at a pile of dead leaves

in preference to the tree from which they fell.

—E.O. Wilson, Biophilia

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Healing and Nature

Introduction

Nuchigusui is an Okinawan term that means “to be healed from the heart”

(kokoro kara iyaseru) or “medicine for life” (inochi no kusuri). I became inter-

ested in health claims associated with the forest after hearing stories about a

local man who had left Okinawa but returned home when he fell sick. The

forest, with its “delicious water,” cured his cancer. This kind of testimonial

was often invoked by residents and nature guides living in Yambaru as evi-

dence of the intrinsic value of their forests.

What makes an environment “healing”? In this chapter, I discuss the rela-

tionship between healing and nature in the context of ecotourism by intro-

ducing the practice (and practitioners) of forest therapy and other forms of

“intraspecies” (Haraway 2008) encounters in northern Okinawa. Participants

in these activities are taught to cherish nature through their engagement in

guided outdoor activities designed to evoke a speciﬁc kind of transformative

sensory experience. The nature of these experiences, however, is not easily

deﬁned. I begin by analyzing the external structure of the tours. Expanding

upon the themes of localization, movement, and perspective introduced in

Chapter 3, the ﬁrst part of this chapter explains how nature-based tourism

is promoted to northern Okinawans as a promising new economic sphere

at community meetings and through samplings of state-supported, entre-

preneur-driven ecotours. I examine the labor of organizing and implement-

ing ecotourism used by the Kunigami Tourism Association (KUTA) and the

Ministry of Environment to encourage residents of Yambaru to see their sur-

rounding biophysical environment as a tourist does—as unique, precious,

and ultimately worth exploring and protecting. These tours are simulated,

in the sense that they are conducted to give locals a sense of how ecotourism

catered to outside visitors provides one strategy for unlocking the economic

and community healing potential of the forest.

The middle section of the chapter focuses on guides, whose work is to

bring the forest to life through a prescribed set of outdoor, nature-based ac-

tivities meant to shift the balance of participants’ everyday perceptual tools

from primarily visual to tactile and aural. The nature interpreters (neichaa

intaapuritaa) and forest therapy guides I encountered often claimed to oﬀer

privileged access to “real” nature, and many of them derived their sense of

authority, expertise, and belonging from their ability to bring ecotourists

closer to it. Questions of authenticity in nature frequently emerged when

guides discussed their own personal biographies. As I discussed in Chapter 3,

for some guides, being native to Okinawa is much more a matter of mindset

than place of birth.

We learned in Chapter 1 that nature interpreters are ecotour guides who

distinguish themselves from other kinds of tour guides by claiming to have

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Footprints in Paradise

an especially deep familiarity with nature that enables them to interpret the

natural environment for others. In Japanese, the term “guide” (gaido) typi-

cally connotes a young woman, dressed in hose and high heels and carrying

a small ﬂag, leading a group of agreeably passive late middle–aged sightseers

on a rigidly scheduled bus tour generally allowing only short stops to photo-

graph scenic spots. A good Okinawan friend of mine who had worked as a

tour bus guide in her early twenties joked about having visited the Churaumi

Aquarium at least two hundred times; but for her this had been a temporary

job, and little more. She did not link her sense of being Okinawan with her

scripted narration of popular tourist sights. Nature interpreters, on the other

hand, self-consciously claim authenticity and sincerity in their work—an

authenticity and a nearness to nature not pursued by more conventional tour

guides. Nearness is what qualiﬁes them to interpret nature: They can bring

Ishikawa’s frog and the deigo tree new meaning for the ecotourist or student

of environmental education by locating these species in the forest, and by

explaining their roles in supporting the ecosystem. This authenticity claim is

generally linked to the interpreter’s multilingual breadth of local knowledge

about indigenous, endemic, and invasive species.

In distinguishing themselves from typical guides, the nature interpreters I

interviewed emphasized the hundreds of hours they had spent studying the

Yambaru Forest and its denizens. Most, though born and raised in northern

Okinawa, did not naturalize themselves as inherently nearer to nature by

virtue of their geographic origin. The distinction between native and non-

native interpreter becomes clear in the explanation of a self-described “in-

vasive species” interpreter: rather than relying on a passive birthplace-based

claim to authenticity, a native interpreter approaches intraspecies nearness by

reclaiming or reconstituting lost or fading knowledge about the area. Inter-

preters often expressed a desire to (re)connect with the forests of Yambaru.

As one of my twenty-year-old informants put it when describing his aﬃnity

for the Forest School and surrounding area: “I don’t want to be separated

from this place.” The nature interpreters I met pinpointed the location and

deﬁned the limits of their nature externally, by scrutinizing the origins of

certain plants and animals, as well as their own geographical and cultural

roots. Whether local or visitor, participants’ nearness to nature was mediated

by their interpreters: through plants and animals introduced, senses height-

ened, and stories told.

Nature interpreters can also be seen as “human technologies” or as “di-

verse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for direct-

ing and multiplying relational action” (Haraway 2008: 31). Similarly, Noel

Salazar’s ethnography of the politics of international tourism refers to ex-

pert tour guides as “mechanics of glocalization” (2010: 173) to emphasize

the labor-intensive work of highly skilled guides responsible for localizing

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Healing and Nature

global concepts circulated by tourists, and for globalizing local stories and

attractions through their tours.1 Through their embodied actions (walking,

talking, diving), the Aruki village walkers and community chatters discussed

in Chapter 3, and the coral-transplanting stakeholders from Chapter 4, en-

gage in the parallel endeavor of documenting intraspecies encounters.

In this chapter, I draw on E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis and Marc

Augé’s concept of the supermodern “non-place” to ask a fundamental ques-

tion: Why do we endeavor to get close—sometimes dangerously close—to

nature? The people I joined on the ecotours discussed next were expecting to

have fun, but some discovered medicine for life.

Cherishing Nature

I ﬁrst met Mr. Oku, head of the Naha division of the of the Ministry of

Environment Nature Conservation Oﬃce when I was seated behind him

in a two-person kayak on the Gesashi River. We paddled downstream, sur-

rounded by a gaggle of ebullient ecotourists. Undaunted by the unusual set-

ting for our interview, I attempted to make conversation with the back of

his head. Taking care not to splash me with his wooden paddle, Oku turned

around and explained to me that Okinawa Prefecture’s ecotourism charter

was created to cultivate in visitors and locals a sense of nature as “cherish-

able.” Itsukushimu,2 a verb he translated as “to cherish,” suggests a reverence

for nature that comes from direct experience or contact (fureai).

In fourteen years of Japanese language study I had never come across

this verb, and one of my Japanese colleagues explained that it is an unusual,

old-fashioned sounding word that encompasses a variety of emotions: to

itsukushimu is to love, have aﬀection for, and pity something all at the same

time. This, Oku suggested, was a sentiment long cultivated in mainland Ja-

pan owing to its long history of overcrowding and natural resource deﬁcien-

cies.3 Meanwhile the vast majority of Okinawans, he claimed, had lived in

predominantly rural settings until quite recently and thus did not appreciate

nature in the same way mainland Japanese did.4 Coming from a Yamatonchu

(Okinawan term for “mainland Japanese”), this assertion immediately trig-

gered my skepticism—but I had also heard it from an Okinawan. Though

he did not use the word itsukushimu, Mr. Kuba (of KUTA) reiterated Oku’s

notion of cherishing when he explained that the objectives of his NPO were

to “cultivate hearts that value nature”5 in people of all ages throughout Oki-

nawa—especially Yambaru youth who underappreciate their surrounding

environment as common or mundane, to them. Both men sought to revi-

talize Yambaru by rendering everyday nature cherishable through carefully

crafted native ecotours.

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Footprints in Paradise

Ecotours for Locals

KUTA was created in 2000 to coordinate and promote sustainable tourism

development in the Yambaru region. The organization comprises about ﬁf-

teen members, including Professor Junko Ōshima, a self-described “nature-

lover” (neichaa rabaa) originally from the Tokyo area who has lived in Oki-

nawa since 1998. Other members of KUTA were born and raised in north-

ern Okinawa. At least one of the energetic Chinen brothers (introduced in

Chapter 3) was present at nearly every ecotourism event I attended between

August 2009 and May 2011. In addition to working for the village oﬃce,

both brothers also facilitate the maintenance of the Forest School, an envi-

ronmental education facility in Kunigami built in the mid-2000s on land

previously controlled by the U.S. military for use as a jungle warfare training

area (discussed in Chapter 2).

Mr. Shimabukuro, a KUTA associate, is a professional photographer

whose stunning images of endangered and endemic species, including the

Yambaru kuina, the Ishikawa Frog, the Ryukyu Mountain Turtle, and the

Pryor’s Woodpecker (Noguchigera), are sold as postcards and posters, and are

printed on promotional materials that circulate all over Japan. In collabo-

ration with KUTA, Shimabukuro’s son works as a nature interpreter at the

Forest School, and his daughter-in-law is a forest therapy guide.

Between November 2009 and January 2010, these KUTA members

organized a series of ecotourism promotional events called the Yambaru

3-Village Treasure Box.6 The events were scheduled to take place in Higashi,

Ōgimi, and Kunigami. The organizers staged three monthly themed expe-

ditions—“Mountain,” “River,” and “Ocean”—to teach local participants

about the interrelatedness of three distinct ecosystems while introducing

them to the ecotourism concept more generally. The museum-sponsored

village walks and organized community chats described in Chapter 3 en-

couraged locals to see their everyday surroundings as a tourist would. These

Treasure Box tours, oﬀered to locals at no charge, were designed expressly to

gain support and enthusiasm for the expansion of ecotourism in the area.

The advertisement in Figure 5.2, circulated by KUTA, promotes a man-

grove kayak trip in Higashi, a waterfall hike in Ōgimi, and nature games in

Kunigami:

Re-discover the region’s beauty! Participate for free!

Given that these tourism promotional events were limited to local residents,

I felt quite fortunate when a colleague invited me to attend. I was unsure

where they would place me in the lineup and was surprised when, just as

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Healing and Nature

FIGURE 5.2 • Ecotourism Promotional Flier for Okinawans: “Treasure Box”

Nature Games

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Footprints in Paradise

Mr. Gibu had done during the Orion Beer event, Ms. Kakazu from the Min-

istry of Environment quietly slipped me a “Staﬀ” badge. With no training

whatsoever to qualify me for such a distinction, I quickly improvised a role

and introduced myself to the participants as their “English language refer-

ence guide.” This proved to be a mistake once the nature interpreters began

introducing plant and animal species, as I could not yet name most of them

in English, let alone in Japanese or Okinawan. Fortunately, the novelty of

my presence seemed to override the fact that I was neither expert nor local.

The priorities established during the KUTA planning meetings I attended

were that participants would:

1) Be safe!

2) Have fun!

3) Ponder their discoveries and their sense of natural beauty.

4) Consider how to protect each place visited.

The kayaking trip up the Gesashi River proved exciting for the roughly thirty

participants (ages 4–80, though the target demographic was mainly mothers

and children), many of whom had lived in Okinawa their whole lives with-

out ever being in a non-motorized boat. Unfortunately, the Ōgimi waterfall

walk was interrupted by inclement weather, leaving participants little oppor-

tunity for reﬂection.

Healing “Nature Games”

On a cool Sunday in mid-January 2010, I accompanied the KUTA staﬀ to

a protected forest in Kunigami for the ﬁnal stage of the Treasure Box Tour,

which was advertised as a series of “Nature Games.” Participants gathered in

the parking lot of a small nature center at the base of the trail and broke into

ﬁve groups of roughly ten people each. Before we departed on our journey,

one of the nature interpreters handed me a stethoscope. The guide laughed

at my puzzled expression and said we would be using it to take the pulse of

the trees.

As we trekked uphill along the beaten path, our volunteer nature inter-

preter Mr. Inafuku, a retired man in his late sixties, stopped to point out

diﬀerent trees and plants that are famous in Okinawa. The Itajii 7 tree, he

revealed, was actually not indigenous but had been imported in the late

nineteenth century. He informed us in a distinctly critical tone that very

few of the plants symbolically associated with Okinawa today (e.g., hibiscus,

pineapple, dragon fruit) are actually endemic to the area.

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Healing and Nature

Halfway up the hill, our group stopped and dispersed for a quiet moment

communing with nature. We were told to plop down in a comfortable spot

and listen for the sounds of the forest: the rustle of the wind in the trees,

the crunching of fallen leaves by camouﬂaged ground critters, the trickling

ﬂow of a small stream nearby. I chose a large, smooth gray rock just oﬀ the

path and sat down, feeling sleepy and ﬂat. I wondered how long this next

bit was going to take. After about ten minutes our guide roused us from our

thoughts and gathered us around him for a moment of group reﬂection.

Participants marveled politely over the various sounds and sensations they

had discovered as I tried to recall where my sluggish mind had wandered.

We continued on our trek, and our interpreter stopped every few minutes

to point out a rare plant such as a land orchid, or to listen for a Pryor’s wood-

pecker busy chiseling a new tree dwelling. One shrub had leaves that tasted

like lemongrass. We approached a giant Itajii and Inafuku paused to take the

stethoscopes out of his backpack. I watched a mother tenderly teaching her

ten-year-old son how to listen for the tree’s pulse. After many failed attempts

I ﬁnally found the tree’s muted “heartbeat,” which resembled the sound of

rushing water or the inside of a conch shell. (I later learned that what we

were actually hearing was the crackling, gurgling sound of sap ﬂowing up to

the branches.) This tree appeared healthy and robust, but the application of

the cold metal device made me feel like we were treating it for something,

reverently. At the very least, we were treating it like it like us.

About two hours passed before we descended the hill and sat clustered in

circles on the asphalt parking lot of the nature center to reﬂect on our ex-

perience. My group consisted of the mother-son duo, three retired couples,

two younger couples, and a single young woman. Participants reported back

that it was nice to get outdoors; most had not known they could hike in this

particular forest. They also recounted the names of some of the plants they

had learned to recognize with the help of our interpreter.

The young woman stood up and volunteered to present our group’s feed-

back to the other tour participants. She listened attentively to their compli-

mentary but predictable comments: “It felt so nice to be outside”; “I learned

a lot”; and “I realized how much we need to protect this forest.” As the

woman began to speak, she trembled and was suddenly overcome with a rush

of emotion. She described having problems at work; having “many many”

social and family conﬂicts, and alluded to suﬀering from a long-standing ill-

ness, which, one of the coordinators later quietly suggested to me, was most

likely depression. The woman sobbed as she spoke about the sheer relief she

felt from noticing the wind on her face, breathing the clean fresh air, and

immersing herself in such an unfamiliar and pristine natural environment.

She spoke of coming back to life, thanks to the forest.

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Footprints in Paradise

Promoting Forest Therapy

In late March 2011, I attended a daylong conference at Kunigami’s Forest

School designed to promote the longstay tourism8 model to Yambaru resi-

dents. Our featured speaker was an energetic executive in her ﬁfties in charge

of Mahaina Wellness Resorts Okinawa, a hotel chain leader in the longstay

tourism trend since 2000. She opened by reﬂecting on how amazing it was

to hear the call of the Yambaru kuina in the morning when she arrived, how

quickly its cries had transported her out of her city life and working state of

mind. She raved about the “pawaa chaaji” (power charge) she had received

from the forest.

Forest therapy (also called forest bathing [೦ਟფ]) might be described

most simply as going to a forested area and wandering around. And yet

the facilitation of this simple practice provides a small but crucial economic

“power charge” for young residents who might otherwise be compelled to

leave Yambaru to seek work in Naha or Tokyo. There are forty-two certiﬁed

forest therapy centers in Japan, but only one in Okinawa Prefecture.9 The

Kunigami Village oﬃce spent seven years planning its forest therapy pro-

gram, building four distinct therapy roads; it has trained nature guides since

2007. Guides are typically recruited out of the local high school, though I

met a few non-certiﬁed guides who had arrived via a diﬀerent path: after

studying for approximately one month, they ﬂew to Kyushu (the nearest

major island to the north), sat for a ¥7,000 ($80) test in Fukuoka Prefecture,

and became certiﬁed by the national organization that runs all of Japan’s

forest therapy programs.

Mr. Tamaki, a youthful looking thirty-something man who coordinates

the forest therapy program in Kunigami, presented the key concepts of his

program to an audience of about ﬁfty middle-aged men and women from

Yambaru: Kenkō (health), Kankyō (environment), Kankō (tourism).10 Tamaki

promoted forest therapy as a thirty-year-old technique supported by scientiﬁc

research (see Nakamura 2008; Ulrich 1993). The healing modality has been

proven to boost the immune system, lower blood pressure, slow the pulse,

and even reduce stress hormones (Nakamura 2008). In addition to “power

charging” tourists, he described Kunigami’s program as “health-making for

residents,” in part because venturing into the forest reminds older folks of their

childhoods and makes them “genki” (spirited or cheerful) (see Figure 5.1).

Interpreting Forest Therapy

Nature interpreters in Okinawa deﬁne forest therapy and ecotourism more

generally. Local ecotourism promoters with whom I met complained occa-

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Healing and Nature

sionally that foreign tourists (primarily American, frequently U.S. military

personnel) would come to their kayak shops and request a discounted rental

for a guide-free experience. Mr. Miyagi, director of Higashi’s Tourism Pro-

motion Association, explained the relative scarcity of non-Japanese visitors

to the area: “Their sense is diﬀerent.” The ecotour guides would never allow

this kind of self-directed adventuring because they strongly believed that

their natural surroundings could not be properly understood through an

outside perspective. In addition to the need to protect their livelihood, these

interpreters believed that the legitimacy of their enterprise hinged on their

ability to provide an interpretation of Yambaru’s nature unavailable through

any other medium.

Each of the interpreters introduced in the next section has negotiated his

or her professional identity in relation to the guide-interpreter spectrum.

Like the locals and researchers introduced in Chapter 3, the “knowing” and

“noticing” ecotour guides are diverse in gender, geographic origin, level of

ecological knowledge, and degree of social mobility. I include some of my

personal reactions to each tour and each guide to illustrate the physical, spir-

itual, and intellectual discomfort that comes from healing in nature.

The Native Novice

The morning after the Kunigami community chat session, I passed a giant,

colorful tourism map on display in front of the town oﬃce. I stopped to

study it for a while, making sure I knew most of the highlighted destinations.

The Forest Therapy Road (೦ਟǑǿǪ✣ȃ✣ǟ®) caught my attention,

and I entered the oﬃce to ask how I could access what I imagined as a rug-

ged, winding trail through the woods. A helpful city worker in a pastel green

jumpsuit strongly encouraged the use of a guide. He quickly made some

phone calls, and a few minutes later another young man in another green

jumpsuit was escorting me to the entrance of the therapy road.

The road wound up the hillside for about two kilometers. As we ascended

into the “Broccoli Forest,” the dark green Itajii trees grew dense. A wooden

sign posted at the entrance to the park read “Mori to mizu to yasuragi no sato,

kunigami” and was translated into English as “Kunigami oﬀers you ‘Peace of

Mind’ from Okinawa’s best Forest and Rivers.” In my impromptu quest for

tranquility, I was about to get a lesson in patience.

I was escorted to Ms. Taira, a northern Okinawan woman in her mid-

twenties who kindly oﬀered to take me on an abbreviated (but free) walk

on the therapy road. She had just returned from a training session at one

of the larger forest therapy facilities in Nagano Prefecture and seemed eager

to practice. As we walked, I asked her a few questions about the program:

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Footprints in Paradise

“Who comes? Retirees? Mothers and children? Patients?” She replied that,

while it would be ideal if “genki ga nai” (unwell, literally “no spirit”) people

came, in fact most of the participants were already in good health. “People

who aren’t well can’t be bothered going outside, can they?” Her deadpan

response came in startling contrast to the dramatic healing potential Tamaki

had touted at the longstay tourism conference.

The forest therapy road was constructed of smooth concrete with white,

rubbery zebra stripes painted across it, which made it much more accessi-

ble than I had expected. Where was my rugged outdoors? I found the road

aesthetically intrusive and began to wonder about its therapeutic value. As

if reading my mind, Taira said: “The purpose of this route is not so much

trekking as it is being. We don’t want people to slip along the way. The aim

is to simply be, in the forest.”

Feeling an equal and opposite need to document the situation, I fumbled

for my camera. “First, we want people to touch the trees,” Taira explained as

she tenderly petted the soft green moss growing on the side of a tree. I copied

her skeptically. We continued walking and she bent down to uproot a small

plant. “This one’s great,” she said, holding it up to my nose. “The leaves don’t

really smell but the roots are amazing.” I sniﬀed the white roots and guessed:

“Spearmint?” “Actually it’s more like A&W,”11 she noted. I got the reference

and concurred, “Like root beer, sarsaparilla, yes!” Before we had progressed

another two hundred meters, she stopped and pointed to the ground. “Look!

The Iju [needlewood]12 seeds look like laughing faces!” The rugged ever-

green’s large brown dry seeds lay cracked open on the trail, smiling up at us

indeed. I picked one up and put it in my pocket.

Ignoring her suggestion to “just be,” I attempted to continue my inter-

view by asking about the documented eﬀects of forest therapy, who sponsors

the program, and so on. She replied that she had only been working there for

a year and that there were much more experienced guides I should consult.

She paused, stooped down again, and produced a handful of bitter acorns

for me to sample.

Next Taira led me to a bench overlooking a large pond where a lone duck

swam in circles. “Try shutting your eyes for a few minutes. We are always

looking at the world, but you feel things entirely diﬀerently when you can-

not see. Notice the blowing breeze, hear the rustle and the sounds of the

insects chirping. This is where we work on breathing. People usually breathe

with their chests, but we invite them to breathe with their bellies.” I puﬀed

out my stomach, hoping to feel something.

We nibbled on the lemony leaves of shikwaasa, a lime-like Okinawan

citrus fruit that grows on sprawling green trees and, when mixed in, makes

awamori inﬁnitely more palatable. We chewed the cinnamon-like essence

out of shiny green gettō (shell ginger)13 leaves as she described how much she

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Healing and Nature

had learned from her tourist customers. She demonstrated how one man had

encouraged her to get down on all fours and sniﬀ out the edible plants on the

path “just like an animal.”

When Taira mentioned some of the psychological consequences of liv-

ing “in concrete,” I immediately thought about my tiny grey shoebox of an

apartment in Nago. When I had ﬁrst moved to Okinawa, despite living in

the centrally located city of Ginowan, I had actually been tucked away in a

very earthy and alive house replete with shikwaasa (green papaya trees) and

even a mori no aisu plant (“ice cream of the forest,” also called atemoya),

so nicknamed for its white, creamy sweet meat. Yamori geckos and giant

spiders scaled the walls of my three-bedroom house, inside and out, and a

pair of lovebirds ﬂirted the day away on my wooden deck. The walls of my

house shook daily from U.S. military planes ﬂying overhead, a source of

chronic, blaring noise pollution. There was a Starbucks in walking distance

from my place, and the controversial Futenma Marine Corps Air Station,14

surrounded by barbed-wire fences, was just a few blocks away. And yet, I had

unwittingly inherited my landlord’s gorgeous green garden full of wild vines

and hibiscus.

Taira asked me what had brought me to Yambaru, and I explained that for

the second half of my ﬁeldwork I was determined to get closer to the nature

that ecotourists sought. So I moved an hour north to Nago, only to ﬁnd my-

self living in a square eﬃciency apartment mass produced by LeoPalace21, a

nationwide chain of cookie-cutter apartments. I was closer to Yambaru’s for-

ests from Nago, but my immediate living environment felt tight and sterile.

Friends’ warnings about outdoor toilets and frequent reminders that “Living

in the countryside is a pain!” had convinced me to go for clean and new

instead of old and charming.

As we completed the therapy loop, we passed by a row of A-frame camp-

ing bungalows designed for short-term visitors. These large birdhouse–like

huts grew more attractive the more I reﬂected on my own housing. I won-

dered how it would be to live as a true nature lover, like Taira, immersed in

this kind of living environment day in and day out. I asked her when I could

return for a full therapy session with other customers. She explained apolo-

getically that she was moving to the mainland the next month to become a

housewife and probably would not have time to meet again.

Therapist Close to Fun

The morning after the longstay tourism symposium I reconnected with Mr.

Tamaki and six forest healing participants ranging in age from 25 to 65.

All were from Yambaru save for a youthful middle-aged reporter for the

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Footprints in Paradise

Okinawa Times who had driven up from Naha. Tamaki’s ﬁrst question to

the group was “How are you doing today?” He was not asking in the polite,

empty sort of way we all do but actually wanted us to record any speciﬁc

physical and psychological (mood) complaints on a before-and-after form he

distributed. We sat in a circle on the grass, and he came to interview us one

by one with no real pretense of privacy. He approached me last and asked

the following questions:

– How many hours did you sleep last night?

– How many hours do you usually sleep?

– How are you feeling today? Is your mood good/average/bad?

I felt quite meek next to the sporty journalist, who reported excitedly that

she works every day, never takes vacations, and requires only four hours of

sleep. After overhearing the rest of the group’s polite answers, I lied judi-

ciously in answer to the ﬁrst two questions. Then I remembered that this

was supposed to be therapy. I told Tamaki that I was in a bad mood (a for-

tunate coincidence in this case), at which the energetic journalist exclaimed:

“Why?!” Tamaki ﬁlled out the front and back of my intake form, circling

areas of physical discomfort that I indicated on a generic human ﬁgure much

like those used at a chiropractor’s oﬃce.

Then we prepared for our walk. Tamaki led us in a cheek and neck

“shape-up” stretch, a simple twisting of the head up and down, left to right,

which he suggested would be good for us because we were women. This

comment did not help my mood, but I took it as an opportunity to ask him

why no men had signed up for the tour. This forest therapy course was one

of a few half-day outings, each approximately ¥3,000 ($35), coordinated

for attendees at the symposium. We had chosen it over snorkeling, tea mak-

ing, and a village tour exploring the connections between water and moun-

tains. “Well, I think that women are naturally more interested in healing,”

he replied.

After a few more rounds of cosmetic calisthenics, we sauntered down the

hill and entered the well-marked therapy road. He encouraged us to chat

as we walked slowly. He asked us to stop and smell a delicate pink ﬂower

reminiscent of a hibiscus. Tamaki described the phenomenon of phyton-

cide (literally “exterminated by the plant”),15 wherein the very same aromatic

smells that attract humans to certain ﬂowers serve to protect the plants from

hungry pests. He pointed out the Itajii, the preferred home of the Yambaru

kuina and the favorite tree of nearly every nature guide I met. As we contin-

ued along the striped path, he reminded us to pause for a moment to check

our breathing: “Is it deep and slow?”

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Healing and Nature

Next it was time for tea and (more) chatting in the forest. (Tamaki told

us this was “the Yambaru way” of relaxing.) A freshly painted gazebo ap-

peared just oﬀ the zebra-striped trail, and we sat down at a table with tree

stump–shaped concrete stools. Tamaki produced two thermoses ﬁlled with

steaming hibiscus tea and a boxful of homemade Chinsukoo (Okinawan salty

shortbread). Perhaps inhibited by thoughts of drooping chins and stretching

necks, each woman took just one cookie then gave the rest to me as an omi-

yage (souvenir).

After resting for a while we resumed our walk, traversing a narrow bridge

that crossed over a large pond with two ducks paddling around. I passed the

pond unthinking, when out of the corner of my eye, a wave of glittery wind

washed over the water. For a brief and stunning moment, I was ﬂooded with

a sense of the numinous. I checked with my neighbor to make sure I was not

imagining things; she had seen it, too.

The rest of the group had not seen it, so we kept on walking until we

arrived at a wooden sign that explained something about music, fukisoku

(irregularity), and yuragi (shaking). I had no idea what was being discussed

until one of my companions explained: “Hikaru Utada’s voice does it.”

Something vibrating in the world-famous pop diva’s voice was also in this

forest. Apparently, if one stood in that spot long enough, there was some

beneﬁt to the parasympathetic nervous system.16 Tamaki said it was diﬃcult

to explain but summarized the healing eﬀect of this station as “relaxation.”

Next we engaged in a hammock experience, which was as straightforward

as one might imagine. None of my companions had ever sat in a hammock

before, and some of them looked quite nervous at the prospect of swinging

supine. One woman lay still and stiﬀ like a corpse in distrust of the contrap-

tion before ﬁnally exclaiming, “This is pretty good!” After approximately

three minutes Tamaki asked the group, “Could you relax?”

We soon came to the end of the course, which was only about six hun-

dred meters long, and waited for lunch by some picnic benches near the

Welcome Center. Tamaki brought us handmade recycled newspaper bentō

boxes chock-full of Yambaru delights. Using hand-carved reusable bamboo

chopsticks, we feasted on juushi fried rice balls packaged in another waxy

green shell ginger leaf (gettō in Japanese) in lieu of plastic wrap, Okinawan

fatty pork, and a lightly sweetened, purplish taro yam dessert.

As we sat down one of the older women remarked: “So that’s therapy!”

Two participants began discussing the meaning of the loanword for “ther-

apy” (serapii in Japanese). Much like the coral monitoring loanword conun-

drum from Chapter 4, nobody seemed to know quite what it meant. They

asked Tamaki, who admitted that he was not entirely sure, either. He men-

tioned that iryō (medical treatment or care) and ryōhō (a method of medical

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Footprints in Paradise

treatment or a cure) were two possible translations, but quickly added that

what we were doing was more like “therapy close to fun” (Fuan ni chikai

serapī). Eventually he settled on describing what we had done as “enjoying

the forest” (mori wo tanoshimu koto).

As we continued munching, one of the other women asked me, “So …

what does therapy mean in English? Is it medical? Is it personal?” I was

stumped as the many uses of the term in English ﬂashed in my mind. I

thought of colloquial examples such as “retail therapy,” but there was also

physical therapy, psychotherapy, occupational therapy, even hydrotherapy.

I replied that it was a very broad term with many meanings, both physical

and psychological. “Yes, but what are its nuances?” They were not satisﬁed. “I

think it connotes getting help with, or for … something,” I mustered. They

nodded politely.

Using our conversation as conﬁrmation of his earlier claim, Tamaki sum-

marized our discussion: “Yup, women respond to healing. Men prefer trek-

king.” He began asking us individually about our impressions of the tour and

took diligent notes on the before-and-after forms. The bouncy reporter was

following him around and asking follow-up questions of the participants, so

I followed her. I wanted to keep my health report card for a closer reading,

but he said he needed it for their national database.

We were invited to say what was good about the tour and what could use

improvement, but nobody oﬀered any complaints or criticism. The ample

positive feedback included:

My stress from work just ﬂew away …

Naha City is so dirty [compared to this forest].

My headache is gone!

I never look at the sky [when at home in the city].

The wind!

I should visit nature more often.

I could sense the real smells and real colors.

What a great opportunity to learn about local ingredients!

… and to ask about our ﬁve, six senses!

Tamaki invited us to feel our shoulders and to notice whether any tension

had been released. “But what can we do at home? What is the take-away?”

someone asked. “Breath” was his answer. We were to focus on our breath. He

concluded the session by encouraging us to “think about the health of the

forest, not only the health of people.” By experiencing the natural world on

a smaller, slower scale, this tour encouraged us to see the trees for the forest.

Then we walked back to our cars and drove home.

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Healing and Nature

Invasive Species Expert

My next visit to the Forest Park in Kunigami was prompted by an advertis-

ing ﬂyer for the “Yambaru Wonderland” that read, “Live well with a relaxed

stance!! Become one with the pleasant winds of Yambaru.” Mr. Satō met me

at the Welcome Center and informed me that I was the only participant that

day. He was a handsome, muscular, weathered man in his late ﬁfties with go-

mashio (black sesame and salt) hair and a stately goatee. I studied his business

card and saw that he had named his one-man company Yambaru Great Na-

ture Experience: Let’s Play! I pointed to the ﬂier and admitted that I did not

quite understand the description of a listed activity: Forest Pole Exhaustion

(Shinrinbō Datsuryoku). “Oh, that’s just the name I made up for the form of

outdoor martial arts I teach,” he smiled. Satō’s approach to guiding (and just

about everything else, I quickly learned) matched the “relaxed stance” advo-

cated in his ﬂier. He decided it was too diﬃcult to run a class with only one

student, so we went for a nature walk instead. He changed out of his karate

garb and into jeans and hiking boots.

We sat on the gleaming wooden ﬂoor of the Welcome Center for my

orientation. The receptionist brought us hot tea. Satō showed me two short

ﬁlms on his laptop. The name of the ﬁrst, released by the Japan Broadcasting

Corporation (NHK 2006), was “The Japan that Japanese Don’t Know” (Ni-

honjin no shiranai nihon), but was translated into English as Treasures of Ja-

pan. The ﬁlms in this series showcase places and people considered to occupy

Japan’s geographical and cultural periphery, such as the Ryukyu Archipelago

(Okinawa), the Ainu (Hokkaido’s northern indigenous people), whales in

the Ogasawara Islands south of Tokyo and Kumanokodo, and a series of an-

cient pilgrimage routes and World Heritage Sites in Wakayama Prefecture.17

The second ﬁlm, Wrapped in the Yambaru Wind: An Okinawa Photo Poem,

was a lengthy slideshow of beautiful images taken by a local photographer.

Mesmerizing scenes of the ocean, beaches, and broccoli forests of Yambaru

scrolled past. I felt strange sitting indoors, drinking tea out of a ceramic tea-

cup and listening to the lilting soundtrack of nature from computer speakers

while also feeling an actual breeze from a nearby open window.

After watching the orientation ﬁlms, we entered the forest and began to

walk along the wooded trail. Almost immediately I noticed a number of

red wire mongoose traps placed at the side of the path. Satō told me he had

begun tracking mongooses that had traveled north of the Shioya-Taira line

(explained in Chapter 2) and entered the Forest Park long before the gov-

ernment ﬁrst became involved in mongoose population control and exter-

mination in 2003. We came upon what Laura Ogden calls “state-sponsored

apparatuses of capture” (Ogden 2011: 34). The traps were quite small, and

I asked how they baited the animals. “Dried squid jerky,” he replied, joking

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Footprints in Paradise

that the trackers ate more of it than the mongooses did. I did not under-

stand why the traps were located so close to the trail. He explained that,

whereas they would normally be placed deeper in the woods, these traps

were “resting”—temporarily out of use—due to a lack of volunteer trackers.

Satō identiﬁed himself as part of the “world of humans,” but claimed some

aﬃnity with the mongoose: “we are both invasive species in Okinawa.” He

also identiﬁed himself as a second-generation atomic bomb victim who had

“invaded” Okinawa from Hiroshima twenty-ﬁve years ago and never left.

Many of the nature guides I encountered were particular about their titles,

so I asked him what it meant to him to be an “annainin” (this non-loanword

Japanese term for “guide” was printed on his business card). Satō distin-

guished himself from typical guides and from the nearby Forest School’s

nature interpreters—his local competition. Instead he fancied himself a

“messenger of the forest.” He elaborated further: “The trees are talking, and

I’m their feces” (Ki ga katatteiru, sono daiben). I gave him a funny look,

puzzled by his choice of metaphor. He smiled and reminded me that daiben

has two meanings; hence, “the trees are talking, and I’m their spokesperson.”

As we walked along the trail he snapped a few photos, explaining the

many diﬀerent ways of capturing a plant using ﬁlmic techniques such as

backlighting. He invited me to crouch down and look up at the sunlit leaves

of a tree from below. Next came the quiz: “Why are the new leaves of the

Itajii red instead of green?” “To keep bugs away?” (My feeble guess was based

on my recent lesson in phytoncide.) He began describing what I knew must

be the process of photosynthesis despite not grasping some of the more sci-

entiﬁc language he employed. “They’re the tree’s babies. The red color means

they don’t need to work yet.”18

Just as Ms. Taira had done, Satō asked me to get down on the ground to

see the plants from the perspective of an insect or a small animal. “See how

the image changes,” he told me. I lay on my belly in the dried leaves and took

a few photographs.

His next comment echoed coral activist Karen Magik’s claim that “your

experience is diﬀerent from my experience” (see Chapter 3), less the judg-

ment. “The way we see the world is diﬀerent. You’re standing here and I’m

standing here but what we’re seeing, the reality we are experiencing, is diﬀer-

ent. My reality is diﬀerent from your reality. For people who ﬁnd the habu

scary, that’s their reality. But I say we are all the same—the habu, mongoose,

Yambaru kuina, and noguchigera [Pryor’s woodpecker].” He paused. “But I

respect the earthworm the most because it is eaten by so many diﬀerent ani-

mals. People are ‘ojamamushi’ [pests, in the way] in the forest.”

I asked him what he thought about “forest power,” to which he replied,

“I believe it is very strong.” He shared the story of a woman healing her own

cancer by spending time in the forest, and relayed how a friend had cured

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Healing and Nature

her dangerously high fever just by walking through the forest. He told me

that the year before he could barely walk because of a pinched nerve in his

spine. His doctors instructed him to check into the hospital, but he went

into the forest instead and was healed. “I understand people’s pain. You don’t

understand when you’re healthy, do you?”

Satō told me he would do anything to avoid becoming a “sick person,”

noting, “Western medicine looks at the body as a thing and doesn’t see the

spirit, the heart.”19 He described his group tour participants standing in a cir-

cle. Without holding hands or touching, he explained, he asks them to cup

their hands over one another’s to feel their collective ki (spirit). “The power

of the spirit, the power of the trees—just as the characters read, it’s ‘Forest

Power’ (Shinrinryoku)”:

೦ਟ৯.20

In addition to explaining the healing potential of forest power/bathing, Satō

told me that we should conduct ourselves with omoi toward the forest. There

are many ways to translate the Japanese word omoi: thought, feeling, wish,

desire, or love. He compared human relationships with nature as that of a

couple who cherish one another, adding mournfully, “Cutting trees leads to

crying trees.” Suddenly he changed the subject to Doomsday and his belief

in the Ascension and the dour Mayan forecast for the coming year. I was

shocked when he referred to the recent earthquake and tsunami in north-

eastern Japan (which had struck not two weeks before) as a “message from

god saying, ‘You must change your life!—Kamoshirenai [maybe].’” He also

claimed to have seen UFOs in the forest.

Eventually the path led up to some gravel-covered steps. The walk had not

been particularly rigorous, but we sat down to rest and he whipped out his

harmonica. I was treated to “What a Wonderful World,” “When You Wish

Upon a Star,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and a Hawaiian love ballad.

I commented that the songs seemed rather romantic, and he told me that he

usually saves the ballads for his night tours. I was tempted to applaud after

each rendition but there was something startlingly tranquil about the mo-

ment. We sat in silence a while longer and soon we were back on the main

road winding down toward the Welcome Center.

When we reached my car, I grabbed my wallet and handed him the

¥2,000 ($23) fee listed on the ﬂyer. “I’m not doing this for the money,” he

said, refusing to accept anything but my gratitude for the afternoon we’d

spent walking in the woods. He insisted that he does not charge customers

if the “oﬃcial” class is canceled, so I opted to reciprocate with small souve-

nirs from the United States. Later another guide criticized me for accepting

his generosity: “It causes problems for us when customers don’t pay,” she

informed me in a scolding tone that I was unused to as a foreigner. On each

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Footprints in Paradise

trip, independent ecotour guides like Satō had to navigate the forest trails

and the slippery line between informal ecotour and friendly walk.

“This is my Yambaru.”

Satō insisted that I return the following week so he could take me on one

of his favorite hikes. We met at the Welcome Center and I hopped into the

passenger seat of his dirty, beat-up silver van. I immediately noticed the rum-

pled bed in the back, where he told me he often camped. He had decorated

the dashboard with bits of bleached coral, leaves, a few acorns, and other

dried seeds I did not recognize. A pair of plastic mom and baby habu swayed

back and forth like hula dancers as we bumped along the road toward the

trail. The ﬁrst thing Satō said to me was “Mattari,” Japanese slang for “take

it easy.” To this end he popped his copy of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”

into his vintage tape deck. It played on loop until we arrived at the base of

Mt. Yonadake.21 We listened to the song quietly, as if setting the mood for

our next adventure.

We parked on the side of a narrow, winding road and entered the trail,

which was marked oﬀ by a sign on a long swinging gate. “You won’t learn

much about ecotours from me,” he said. “I do erotours. Eroticism.” I fol-

lowed him into the forest, only slightly unnerved. The canopied air felt damp

and cool against my skin. As we meandered along the trail he began to re-

ﬂect on some of the diﬀerences between mainland Japanese and Okinawan

approaches to hiking: “Many older Japanese are ‘peak hunters.’” I was re-

minded of the time I had climbed Mt. Fuji in the middle of the night, strug-

gling alongside hundreds of others trying to reach the top in time for the

sunrise in perpetuation of the famous Japanese saying: “You’d be a fool not

to climb Fuji once, and a fool to climb it twice.” Satō continued: “But in

Okinawa there are no high peaks so the purpose is diﬀerent. Rather, people

look for the nice ﬂat stretches in the middle of the forest.” This comment

reﬂected the yukkuri (leisurely) approach to being in the forest, common

to every ecotour I joined, but also aligned with the broader life philosophy

espoused by many of my informants, both urban and rural.

A bird called, and Satō pointed to an Akahige (Ryukyu robin) perched in

a tree overhead. “We call it the Forest Guide (Mori no Annainin) because it

doesn’t mind the presence of people and will often hop around in front of

them, appearing to lead the way when in fact it’s just looking for food,” he

told me. I cracked a smile, and relaxed a bit as I recalled the many “foraging”

human forest guides I had met in these woods.

I noticed a conspicuous bald spot in the trail where the bank had been

worn down and no plants grew. Some ten years earlier a bunch of roving

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Healing and Nature

pleasure-seekers in jeeps had caused massive premature erosion on the sides

of the trail, uprooting trees with their chomping tires. “We need rangers, real

rangers like they have in Tanzania, not just the skinny, glasses-wearing kind

they have here,” he lamented. “Those guys are really just town oﬃce workers

with a patch on their arm that says ‘Ranger.’… We need rules!”

We continued on, but soon he stopped me again, pointing to a patch of

bright green bamboo stalks and asking, “Where are the bamboo’s roots?” At

ﬁrst I thought he was going to surprise me by revealing that the roots were

actually at the tips—this seemed impossible, but I had seen the sprawling

Higashi mangroves that grew this way. “China?” I guessed. “That’s right!”

Satō aﬃrmed: “Even bamboo, or hōrai-chiku in Chinese, is an invasive spe-

cies. Just like me. You see, the pine tree (matsu) is like Americans. It’s a ‘pio-

neer plant’ that grows in a place where there is nothing else. It goes there ﬁrst

and creates shade so that other plants can move in afterward. Whereas the

Itajii tree is Japanese—it grows in shy places.”

A large puddle appeared in the middle of the trail. I tiptoed delicately

around it, but Satō bent down and began ﬁshing through the dark brown

muck with his hands. Soon he pulled up a Chapstick-sized brick-red newt

with black speckles and told me to smell it. Nothing. Then he began rub-

bing its back vigorously, and soon the creature was covered in a foamy white

paste. He held it up to my nose—it smelled like rotting vegetables—and

then returned it to the puddle. The newt just hovered in the water, making

no attempt to escape. “That’s its poison, how it protects itself from predators.

It doesn’t have to be fast.”

The most remarkable animal we encountered was dead. Just as I was

about to stumble over it, Satō shouted out for me to freeze: “It’s a Ryukyu

long-tailed giant rat!” This “rat” is a national protected species,22 one that I

had heard much about but had never seen. It lay on its side in the center of

the trail, its long tufts of brown back hair and lengthy black-and-white tail

on full display.

Satō poked at it with his ﬁnger. “Maybe it was done in by a mongoose

…” He ﬂipped it over with a stick, but we could ﬁnd no visible injuries. “Or

maybe a habu bit it but couldn’t eat it because it’s too large.” He removed his

cap and placed it next to the deceased. Interpreting this as a sign of funerary

respect, I did the same. Then he grabbed his camera and began snapping

pictures of it from all angles, using the hat as a size reference. The mood was

slightly less reverent now, so I followed suit.

“It’s still soft,” he marveled. The animal could not have been dead more

than a few hours. We admired the creature in silence for a few more minutes,

and then he asked me: “Are you ready? Let’s send it to heaven.” He picked

it up by its long striped tail, carefully swung it back and forth a few times

to gain momentum, and gently lobbed it into a nearby verdant ravine. He

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Footprints in Paradise

then placed his hands together in prayer position and bowed to the departed.

When I later told Mr. Yamamoto from the Nago Museum about our discov-

ery, he frowned at me and said, “I wanted that.” Unfortunately, the eternal

life aﬀorded by taxidermy had escaped us in the moment.

We hiked on. Misty gray clouds rolled in as we trudged uphill, and Satō

had to announce that we had reached the “peak” of Yonahadake because I

could not see out. We sat down, and he produced two grilled-cheese sand-

wiches and oﬀered me a cup of coﬀee poured from his silver thermos. Once

again he broke out his harmonica, this time entertaining me with “Moon

River” and “La Vie en Rose.” He talked about his dream of passing on knowl-

edge about the environment, calling the practice a “baton touch”: “If I can

teach this much to someone even just ten years younger, then that person

can teach it again, and on down to the children. This is why I do these kinds

of activities with people of all ages, but especially children. ‘Somewhere Over

the Rainbow,’ ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ … This is my Yambaru.”

Interpreting Interpreters

My portrayal of these three guides reﬂects the range of biographies and per-

sonalities I encountered in Yambaru ecotourism. I focused the ﬁrst part of

this chapter on the role of nature interpreters because these actors ﬁlter local

visitors’ and outside tourists’ experiences of nature. Foremost, interpreters

impart speciﬁc kinds of ecological knowledge by facilitating multisensory

experiences. Taira was native to Yambaru but was new to forest therapy—

she claimed no particular authority over nature, and spoke more frequently

about what she had learned from her customers than what she was able to

teach them. Taira was already bound for mainland Japan, and although for-

est therapy provided her with a temporary job, it did not inspire in her any

particular spiritual or health-related vocation. (“People who aren’t well can’t

be bothered going outside, can they?”). Most of the young ecotour guides

I met related to Yambaru in a more emphatic, “nature-loving” manner, ex-

pressed most keenly by Cha-chan when he declared, “I never want to be sep-

arated from this place!” Taira’s relatively detached perspective complicated

my emerging expectations about who is drawn to forest therapy and why;

she reminded me that interpreting nature is also a job.

Mr. Tamaki, also a native of Yambaru, was a forest therapy spokesperson

who approached his tours in a rigorous but somewhat perfunctory fashion.

He followed the national forest therapy program’s guidelines closely and was

more interested in accumulating new data and citing convincing statistics

than facilitating a particularly emotive experience of nature. For Tamaki, for-

est therapy oﬀered healing but also provided a much-needed local business

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Healing and Nature

opportunity. Despite his concern with completing paperwork and conduct-

ing forest exit interviews, his depiction of forest therapy as “therapy close

to fun,” and his resistance to any overt medicalization of the experience,

privileged the touristic aspect of the enterprise. Tamaki’s perspective on his

work was consistent with Dr. Nakasone’s characterization of dolphin therapy

in Chapter 4: “That was fun and my heart has grown lighter.”

Mr. Satō, on the other hand, presented forest power as a transcendent ca-

tharsis for the human spirit. He was not a certiﬁed forest therapy guide, but

an independent competitor who organized trips and tours according to his

own intuition and self-taught ecological knowledge. He prided himself on

his ability to learn Yambaru’s forests despite being an “invasive species” from

the mainland. His passion for the healing power of the forest appeared to

feed him more than the frequently canceled tours and workshops he oﬀered

did. He carved out a superior position for himself by marketing his “mes-

senger of the forest” persona as a leader even more closely connected to the

forest than mere nature interpreters. Other guides I spoke with regarded him

as something of a nuisance, in part for poaching their custom but mostly for

his renegade approach: “I do erotours.” He naturalized his claim to an inti-

mate relationship with the forest by downplaying the remunerative aspect

of his tours—“I’m not doing this for the money”—and by trying to inspire

others with his own dramatic healing narrative.

Whether guide, or interpreter, or messenger, every ecotourism profes-

sional I met constructed the forest as a therapeutic space whose healing

potential could be realized only through some form of direct encounter (lis-

tening to trees, smelling ﬂowers, or even simply increasing physical points of

contact with the earth by getting close to the forest ﬂoor). The healing power

of the forest, I learned, involves a spiritual and emotional awakening realized

through participants’ sensorial reconnection with nature. How else is this

kind of healing transformation achieved?

The next section considers the relationship between direct experience and

healing events by problematizing the location and limits of Nature I en-

countered in Okinawa. I include details from one indoor healing modality

I explored to illustrate some of the unexpected overlaps I noticed between

wellness centers, forest therapy, and more conventional (i.e., non-touristic)

therapeutic modalities available on the island.

Simulated Nature, Real Healing

Following my “live” nature encounters with the forest, a giant ﬂat-screen

television projecting images of generic paradisiacal beaches and swaying

palm trees seemed particularly odd. A pleasant, elevator music-like Hawaiian

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Footprints in Paradise

luau melody wafted in from the overhead speakers in the waiting room at the

doctor’s oﬃce. I turned to face the other side of the room and noticed yet

another, smaller television with scrolling photographs of idyllic lakeside cot-

tages and placid forest scenery reminiscent of the slideshow Satō had shown

me at the Forest Park Welcome Center.

The clinic’s head nurse, Ms. Higa, smiled through her white mask (a stan-

dard accessory in any Japanese doctor’s oﬃce) as she took my temperature

and blood pressure. Higa handed me a “Proﬁle of Mood States” intake sur-

vey, and I answered sixty-ﬁve questions about whether, on a scale of 0 (not

at all), 1 (a little), 2 (moderately), 3 (quite a bit), or 4 (extremely), the way I

was feeling corresponded to any of the more than seventy listed descriptors,

including: (1) Friendly, (12) Peeved, (37) Muddled, (47) Rebellious, (50)

Bewildered, (63) Vigorous, or—my personal favorite—(65) Bushed. The va-

riety of English-language terms available for this survey made me wish I had

known how to tell Mr. Tamaki about my “bad” mood in a more interesting

way.

When I was called in to see the doctor, he told me that my mood resem-

bled an inverted iceberg. I almost laughed out loud at this choice of meta-

phor. He then produced a graphical representation of my responses to the

survey questions, which indeed formed a crude upside-down “V” complete

with jagged edges and a spiky point. He gestured with his hands, softening

the shape in the direction of a more ideal “U”-shaped mood state as he

oﬀered me some tips on how I could begin to melt away my emotional

extremes.

Next I entered the “Relaxation Room” and was surprised to ﬁnd that

the clinic had invested in an Alpha-21DX Body-Mind Health Environment

Capsule identical to a relaxation capsule I had sampled at the Motobu Well-

ness Village following my ethically disorienting Dolphin Adventure. I had

another chance to re-enter this encapsulated “environment” when the JICA

training group I had accompanied on the whale watch (see Chapter 4) spent

a day exploring the many facets of health tourism in Okinawa.

The Alpha-21DX was a smooth, cream-colored vessel reminiscent of a

space-age coﬃn or an enormous capsule of Prozac. First, I selected a scent.

From orange, lemon, lavender, and ylang ylang (each of which promised a

diﬀerent health beneﬁt), I chose the latter because it reminded me of a beach

in Thailand (a popular place of “not work” [Graburn 1983] for interna-

tional Japanese travelers) and slid eagerly into the soft capsule. Following a

long morning of hiking, I relished the blissful complement of a twenty-ﬁve-

minute heated, vibrating, aromatherapeutic escape.

Nurse Higa tenderly tucked a bib-like towel around my neck, placed

a noise-canceling headset over my ears, and slowly pushed the curved lid

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Healing and Nature

down over me. I was all sealed in and ready for takeoﬀ. She dimmed the

lights and pulled the privacy curtain around me. An eerie, New Age–meets-

melancholy-Disney melody ﬁlled my ears and swirled in my mind as the

bed began to vibrate. I sank gratefully into a meditative state, made safe

and comfortable by a completely climate-controlled environment. I relished

every second spent cocooned in the capsule, which quickly had me ﬂoating

through space.

When the vibration ceased I opened my eyes to ﬁnd a message on a ﬂuo-

rescent green digital display:

ǀǚǁȂǋǴǝǍǕ

At ﬁrst I did not recognize one of the most commonly uttered phrases in

the Japanese language, Otsukaresamadeshita (frequently translated as “good

job” or “you look tired” and meaning something in between the two), be-

cause it is typically written using the hiragana syllabary. The unusual use of

katakana23 to write such a quintessentially Japanese term compounded my

sense of having been temporarily transported into another world with very

little eﬀort.

Forest of Avatar

While explaining how all life forms in the forest are connected on one of

our walks, Mr. Satō referenced a 2009 blockbuster James Cameron ﬁlm that

had just hit movie theaters in Japan. His choice of phrasing—“The forest

is the world of Avatar”—stuck with me because it suggests that the forest

imitates the ﬁlm rather than the reverse. Avatar tells the futuristic story of a

mid-twenty-second–century world in which human beings, having depleted

the earth’s natural resources, are forced to colonize another planet. The ﬁlm

tells a moralized tale of resource abuse and respect for life by connecting

humans with nonhuman, extraterrestrial species through the use of hybrid

avatars. Characters use the consciousness-transferring “Tree of Souls” to

communicate with a vast biological network. The most striking aspect of the

ﬁlm is its ability to cause real, lasting aﬀective shifts in viewers through the

virtual simulation of an always already non-reality.

Among the highest grossing ﬁlms of all time, Avatar struck a chord with

viewers worldwide not only for its epic tale of right and wrong, but also

because ﬁlmmakers utilized three-dimensional and stereoscopic technologies

to make a simulated wilderness full of giant blue alien creatures feel familiar,

and real. A January 2010 report on audiences’ “post-Avatar blues” notes:

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Footprints in Paradise

“James Cameron’s completely immersive spectacle ‘Avatar’ may have been a

little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and

suicidal thoughts after seeing the ﬁlm because they long to enjoy the beauty

of the alien world Pandora” (Piazza 2010). On the online fan forum Avatar

Forums, a topic thread entitled “Ways to cope with the depression of the

dream of Pandora being intangible” received more than a thousand posts

from aﬀected viewers.

After seeing the ﬁlm twice in 3-D glasses, I could understand why Satō

alluded to it in support of his grievance that “Cutting trees leads to crying

trees.” This ﬁlm was compelling enough to provoke a wave of depression

among fans following the temporary escape made possible through the “im-

mersive spectacle” (Piazza 2010) of a fantastical, Technicolor nature. Avatar

is made real by its sophisticated simulation of an otherwise surreal experience

of outer space and other forms of life.

Natural Healing?

Our assumptions about the locus of the natural and the simulated inform

our experiences and shape our responses to healing moments. N. Kather-

ine Hayles questions the moral valence that often comes with discussions

of the natural and the unnatural, and that undergirds much of ecotourism

discourse: “bad simulation, good nature” (1995: 410), or what Donna Har-

away calls “the authenticity-destroying powers of the artiﬁcial” (2008: 251).

Hayles oﬀers the example of Yosemite National Park; where “natural preser-

vation” emerges through the creation of artiﬁcial borders (1995: 410). From

another perspective, as I discuss in Chapter 2, the habu-mongoose ﬁght, real

as it is for the combatants, is primarily imagined and experienced by humans

as a an entertaining performance.

For Hayles, “when ‘nature’ becomes an object for visual consumption, to

be appreciated by the connoisseur’s eye sweeping over an expanse of land-

scape,” it has “already left the realm of ﬁrsthand experience and entered the

category of constructed experiences that we can appropriately call simu-

lation” (1995: 411). Hayles also points out the problem of assuming that

“nature is natural because it is unmediated, whereas simulation is artiﬁcial

because it is constructed” (418). Avatar begins as a visual simulation that be-

comes real by creating the feeling of direct experience through sophisticated

media technologies. Likewise, the carefully groomed “zebra” trails that led us

safely into a space for the visual consumption of the forest; the hot tea in a

thermos that kept us comfortably, “unnaturally” warm throughout the walk;

and of course the reservations made and fees paid for guided paths through

the forest all simulate nature.

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Healing and Nature

Locating the Self

Hayles returns the intellectual and perceptual problem of natural versus

simulation back to the bodies-doing-the-viewing by ﬁrst problematizing the

location of the self. Hayles (1995: 412) writes, “the self is contracted to

some position inside the body and rendered remote from it. The body then

becomes equipment that the self has to learn to manipulate. When self is

constituted as a raft of awareness awash in an ocean of constructed experi-

ence, simulation is at a maximum.” This pelagic metaphor lends itself well

to a comparison with the phenomenology24 of scuba diving (elaborated in

Chapter 4), an experience that relies heavily on the manipulation of external

body-enhancing equipment (“virtual reality gear”) for a “maximum” simula-

tion of sea life. Informants who who spoke of scuba diving in otherworldly

terms, where one becomes hyperaware through a sensory disorientation

that ultimately dissolves the self like salt in water. When awash in the non-

metaphorical ocean, the self feels less like a raft and more like a porous sea

sponge.

To formulate our self-gear, however, we must examine our eyes as com-

pound, “technological eyes” (Haraway 2008: 250), in some senses an original

“prosthesis”—a mediating apparatus that we learn to use just like arms and

legs. Hayles locates the “marker” of the self neither internally, nor “unprob-

lematically projected outside [the body]”; and, in “drawing the distinction

between simulation and nature, where one places the marker that deﬁnes

selfhood is crucial” (1995: 412). In Chapter 4, Eva Hayward’s (2010: 581)

notion of beholding the world through “ﬁngeryeyes” pokes at the very same

spot to articulate “the in-between of encounter” as a space of movement and

potential.

Vassos Argyrou scales up theoretical questions of self/other, real/simulated,

and authentic/inauthentic by using James Carrier’s virtualism (see Chapter 1)

to analyze the logic of contemporary environmentalism. Argyrou (2013: 24)

writes that environmentalism, like modernity, “constructs a vision of the

world, which it takes to be reality itself, and attempts to make the world con-

form to it.” The nature-based and simulated healing modalities developed in

dolphin therapy, forest therapy, and in a more conventional clinical context

each construct idealized, naturalized environments and attempt to capture

and reproduce these ideals across diverse biophysical spaces.

The Ambiguous Life of Trees

The nature-based healing described in this chapter comes from trees. Laura

Rival uses Carl Jung’s (1968) “philosophical tree,” an archetype of the hu-

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Footprints in Paradise

man personality that accounts for the “natural growth and gradual transfor-

mation of the self ” (1998: 11), as a jumping-oﬀ point for more grounded

and historicized analyses of tree symbolism throughout the world. The act of

taking a tree’s pulse by applying a cold metal stethoscope to its bark points

to the intellectual diﬃculties humans face in conceptualizing forms of life

that do not bleed red.

The anthropomorphization of trees can come in the form of character

attribution. Just as Satō described certain trees as “shy Japanese” or “pio-

neering American” based on their natural temperament, anthropologist John

Knight (Knight 1998: 197) writes that on mainland Japan’s Kii Peninsula

(Wakayama Prefecture), trees become a “symbolic medium of human lives.”

In Japan’s “tree culture” people and places are frequently named after trees,

and wood remains a ubiquitous material in Japanese daily life (chopsticks,

shrines, houses, etc.) (199). The foresters Knight met often compared tree

growing to child rearing, and imbued their trees with “typically Japanese”

moral qualities such as “rectitude, endurance, and sturdiness” (Rival 1998:

11). Rival and Knight build on the widespread observation that “trees are

used symbolically to make concrete and material the abstract notion of life,”

and are “ideal supports for such symbolic purpose[s] precisely because their

status as living organisms is ambiguous” (Rival 1998: 3).

Maurice Bloch (1998: 51) interprets this ambiguity on a continuum

explained anecdotally, through the observation that most Westerners are

comfortable with the “unscientiﬁc” statement “plants are less alive than but-

terﬂies,” despite being taught otherwise in biology class. Put another way:

Are we more incensed by plant or by animal testing? Bloch suggests that

trees are “good substitutes” for human beings because they are diﬀerent, yet

“continuous with humans, in that they both share ‘life’” (40). Bloch’s es-

say, “Trees, Too, Are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the

Meaning of Life,” contends that, like animals, trees provide intellectual tools

that we use to think about and organize human society, a theory ﬁrst pro-

posed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1972).25 Bloch is primarily concerned with

the use of plants and trees in religious rituals. He generalizes the purpose of

rituals as an ongoing negotiation of continuity, and discontinuity, between

diﬀerent forms of life (in the context of religious rituals, such as sacriﬁces,

these life forms can be imagined as “principal” and “symbolic” entities). Rit-

uals are thus achieved “by connecting related entities, which therefore must

have an apparently ‘real’ and convincing unity between them, e.g. animals

and people, and then disconnecting them, because of their ‘real’ and con-

vincing diﬀerence” (1998: 52).

Forest therapy can be viewed as loosely ritualistic through its set of guided

practices, which do not depend on strict adherence to a particular method

to achieve speciﬁc outcomes. According to Bloch (1998: 53), the success of

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Healing and Nature

a ritual depends on the achievement of a particular kind of nearness between

entities—on “the complex demonstrable ‘real’ and convincing proximity, and

on the ‘real’ and convincing distance of the symbols and the subjects of the

ritual. They must be neither too close, nor too distant and, in fact, the more

ambiguous, yet convincing, the relationship, the more it can be evoked.”

More than the attribution of human physiological characteristics (blood),

or personality traits (shyness), Bloch ﬁnds that the presence or absence of

attributed intentionality is what makes another organism “fully” alive or not

(53). Intentionality assumes the kind of consciousness or self-awareness cited

by dolphin activist Rick O’Barry as the main reason these cetaceans should

not be killed. This kind of consciousness is much more diﬃcult to ascertain

in trees.

Following Victor Turner, Bloch (1998: 53) ﬁnds that symbolic objects

matter most for their “transformative potential during the process of ritual”

(my emphasis). With “transformation,” the symbolic object/entity becomes

something else (water into wine, tree into human, etc.). The successful ritual

also transforms the “principal” (human) entity, from sick to healed, sinful to

cleansed, and so on. Bloch’s discussion of trees in ritual and cognitive process

lands us once again at the very spot that Hayward (2010: 581) highlights in

her discussion of coral interactions (“the in-between of encounter”), which

Hayles (1995: 412), discussing the location of the self, describes as the “cusp

between the beholder and the world.” Whether writing about trees, corals,

or national parks, each of these scholars asks how humans occupy the inter-

stitial spaces of life—how we locate our/selves on conceptual continua such

as seeing/unseeing, alive/inanimate, self/non-self, inside/outside.

Trees and Cognition

In Okinawa, the metaphor of the fast-spreading mangrove tree may prove

more apt than the image of the “sturdy” (Rival 1998: 11) and “stable” ex-

istence generally associated with tree metaphors (Ogden 2011: 90). Rather

than “thinking with trees,” Laura Ogden argues that “thinking-as-mangroves”

maps the movements of people, animals, and other mobile life forms (90).

Scott Atran (1990) contends that our cognition of other life forms is innate.

Atran locates this cognitive domain in the nervous system, the product of

a shared human genetic heritage (cited in Bloch 1998: 44–45). For Atran,

our species possesses “an inborn learning mechanism for biological things,

and the details of this framework are gradually ﬁlled in and reﬁned through

experience” (Atran cited in Joye and De Block 2011: 194). The human ca-

pacity to learn things biological is of increasing interest to both social and

natural scientists.

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Footprints in Paradise

Biophilia

Renowned biologist E. O. Wilson deﬁnes “biophilia”26 as human beings’

‘“innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes”’ (Kellert 1993: 20).

The biophilia hypothesis, while not a formal scientiﬁc theory, posits that hu-

man dependence on nature goes beyond essential matters of survival (food,

shelter, etc.) to encompass our aesthetic, cognitive, even spiritual needs.27

Wilson’s hypothesis resists the dominant neoclassical philosophy that values

“natural space” as proﬁt-generating capital (Serageldin 1997) and instead ad-

vances the notion that the intrinsic value of nature, its essential importance

in our lives, is not only a discussion for poets, backpackers, and natural phi-

losophers. Rather, Wilson argues, the human tendency to “aﬃliate with life”

(Wilson 1993: 21) is inherent, hereditary, and biologically based.

Biophilia is also “innately emotional” (Wilson 1993: 31). In Chapter 4, I

identiﬁed some of the awe-inspiring, cherishable animals sought by ecotour-

ists. With the help of scholars such as Eva Hayward and a host of Okinawan

diving coral transplanters, I have tried to put a “ﬁngeryeye” on the ontolog-

ical source of this positive aﬃliation. Perhaps these aﬃliations are adaptive

“because an organism had clear evolutionary beneﬁts when it was hardwired

to focus on and to respond emotionally to certain survival-relevant living

elements” (Joye and De Block 2011: 190).

However, biophilia does not necessarily hold a positive (aﬃliative) va-

lence, and in fact spans the spectrum of human emotions: “from attraction

to aversion, from awe to indiﬀerence, from peacefulness to fear-driven anx-

iety” (Wilson 1993: 31). The negative (aversive) side of biophilia (perhaps

more accurately described as “biophobia”; see Ulrich 1993: 76) includes

common human fears of sharks, spiders, and snakes. Environmental psy-

chologist Roger Ulrich (1993: 74) suggests that arguments for a genetic

component to biophilia “gain plausibility if a genetic predisposition in hu-

mans for biophobic responsiveness to certain dangerous nature phenomena is

likewise postulated.” Biophilia is not purely a matter of survival instinct: it is

also a “complex of learning rules” (Wilson 1993: 31) that keeps us alive. We

are not born with a fear of snakes, but children do have an “innate propen-

sity” to learn such fear quickly and easily after the age of ﬁve (Wilson 1984:

84). As we grow and mature, the snake becomes The Serpent, cementing our

awe of an animal Wilson regards as the “most bizarre” (1984: 84) example of

our biophilic tendencies.

Chapter 2 asks why snakebites became such a big problem in late nine-

teenth-century Okinawa, or perhaps more accurately, why snakebites were

suddenly prioritized by the Japanese government and later the U.S. military.

For Wilson, who grew up in the back country of the Florida Panhandle, the

snake problem goes hand in hand with the “colonizer’s ethic” of “push the

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Healing and Nature

forest back and ﬁll the land” (1984: 88). (As discussed earlier, in Okinawa

this dangerous task was left to the colonized.) Despite 150 years of “settling”

the Gulf wilderness, Wilson writes, there remains an “oddly appropriate”

abundance of snakes (89). Ogden’s work on human-animal relations in the

Florida Everglades features entanglements with mangroves and “fantastic

snakes” (2011: 30) that possess the same human-repellant power that helped

to reserve the dense forests of Yambaru for other species.

Fear of snakes is an evolutionary adaptive trait that also manifests in

culturally speciﬁc ways. In Okinawa, the common sight of snakes “essing”

across the landscape has become “embroidered into the lore of serpents,” and

leading to some unusual local treatment methods comparable to those de-

scribed in Chapter 2. (In the Florida Panhandle, “if a snake bites you, open

the puncture wounds with a knife and wash them with kerosene to neu-

tralize the poison” [Wilson 1984: 89].) Wilson (1984: 97), also concerned

with the structure of the human mind inﬂuenced by space and time, writes:

“For hundreds of thousands of years, time enough for the appropriate ge-

netic changes to occur in the brain, poisonous snakes have been a signiﬁcant

source of injury and death to human beings.” Over time, the theory goes,

the genetic material of those who respond most carefully and eﬀectively to

a snake-ridden environment will be passed on more frequently, thus perpet-

uating the tendency to fear snakes. These “combined biases” thus become

what we commonly refer to as “human nature” (101).

For the biophilia theorist, our biophobic aversion to snakes locates deep

in our bodies as a feature of our basic genetic makeup. It is easier for us

to recognize the evolutionary origins of our aversion to deadly organisms

than it is to feel our biophilic attraction to whales, dolphins, and (at least

for some) coral reefs. However, our relationships with these charismatic life

forms may be equally vital to our well-being and survival.

Locating and Loving Nature

The biophilia hypothesis also claims that, “when human beings remove them-

selves from the natural environment, the biophilic learning rules are not re-

placed by modern versions equally well adapted to artifacts” (Wilson 1993:

31–32). Instead, humans “persist from generation to generation, atrophied

and ﬁtfully manifested in the artiﬁcial new environments into which tech-

nology has catapulted humanity” (32). Two key assumptions are in operation

here: (1) that it is, in fact, possible for us to remove ourselves from the natural

environment, and (2) that our “new” environments are artiﬁcial by default.

Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis is founded on what I call the natural his-

torian’s ethic of reason: a set of logics that embraces positivist assumptions,

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Footprints in Paradise

allowing for “a system of universal truth that reveals the natural traits, and

the relations between the elements of nature, that allow us to apprehend an

actually existing world ‘out there’” (Lowe 2006: 20–21). Yannick Joye and

Andreas De Block critique the biophilia hypothesis for its “anthropocentric

environmental ethics” (2011: 190), and for its “vagueness” in deﬁning the

objects of human biophilic response: “There is a wide gap between a life-like

process and life itself, and … something that is life-like is not necessarily

natural either” (191). What does “life-like” mean? The authors are troubled

by Wilson’s neglect of the commonalities and points of diversion between

terms such as, “life,” “life-like,” and “natural.” Following Kay Milton (2002),

they write: “‘life-like process’ is only a technical term in research on artiﬁcial

life, and Wilson doesn’t seem to think of life-like processes in that particular

technical sense” (Joye and De Block 2011: 191). Further, they remark that

“the conservation ethic envisioned by biophilists would work better if bio-

philia should imply an aﬀective orientation to actual life-like elements (i.e.,

we want to preserve real forests)” (207), and propose instead that humans

might be more plausibly endowed with “biomorphilia.” In this scenario, “our

biophilic tendencies [could] be equally gratiﬁed by, say, watching National

Geographic documentaries that bring wildlife and picturesque views and

landscapes into our homes, and are usually much more enthralling and beau-

tiful than the real wilderness” (2011: 207).

What might simulations to feed our “biomorphilia” look like? Haraway

(2008: 259–60) explores the phenomenon of the human-animal-technol-

ogy triad in her discussion of National Geographic’s mid-2000s Crittercam

television series, a show that attached video cameras to humpback whales to

simulate the experience of swimming with whales for viewers in the comfort

of their living room: “The Crittercam people oﬀered a means to go with

the animals into places humans otherwise could not go to see things that

changed what we know and how we must act as a consequence, if we have

learned to care about the well-being of the entangled animals and people in

those ecologies.” Ultimately, Nature may not have to stoke our innate con-

servation ethic—perhaps a natural environment need not be “real” to heal.

Conclusion

To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement

of the untrammeled world will be regained. I oﬀer this as a formula of

re-enchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little

known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit.

Splendor awaits in minute proportions.

—E. O. Wilson, Biophilia

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Healing and Nature

Forest therapy oﬀers a “formula of re-enchantment” (Wilson 1984: 139) to

reinvigorate the weary body and mind. Forest therapy promises to heal pa-

tients internally, “from the heart,” through speciﬁc guided encounters with

nature, but it is also a social experience. Participants are invited to have in-

termittent “independent” experiences of the forest (e.g., when we were sent

to ﬁnd a quiet space for reﬂection). However, these therapy tours are always

conducted in groups and share many characteristics with the Aruki nostalgic

village walks described in Chapter 3.

Lorimer and Lund interpret the mountain walking experience as a “so-

cially acceptable alternative to placing an ad in the personal columns,” liken-

ing mountains to the “substrate beneath people’s longing for love, aﬀection,

friendship or a soul mate. Passage on foot presents precious time and the

social space for getting to know others, for feeling accepted and for ﬁtting

in” (2008: 195). Mountain walkers walk and collect to “feel (a little more)

whole again” (195).

Forest therapy provides an intensely visual encounter with nature, but

participants’ reﬂections tended to emphasize the novelty of other heightened

senses (feeling the wind, smelling “real” smells, etc.). This healing modality

centers on walking, an “art” that Lorimer and Lund describe idealistically

as “taking people on a journey that leads at least part-way towards greater

personal security, reviving lapsed aspirations and life ambitions” (195). In

forest therapy, mountain landscapes become therapeutic places where people

go to “put their self more in tune with what are commonly perceived as the

timeless rhythms, elements, volumes and surfaces of wild, romantic nature.

In such visits, however infrequent or weekend-based, there is the promise of

a higher life” (195).

The creation of a sense of place through walking, a “counter-intuitive”

sense of belonging and security found in “places that are elsewhere” (Lorimer

and Lund 2008: 195) is critical to the philosophies of nature loving and

interpreting I encountered during ﬁeldwork. In forest therapy, losing one’s

sense of place (i.e., losing the over-determined comfort and predictability of

familiar surroundings) produces a new, placeological sensibility in partici-

pants. The forest therapy walks recounted in this chapter were not destina-

tion-oriented, but do have a punctuated beginning and end. Perhaps most

importantly, the emotional release that can accompany these walks “is not

simply a matter of losing your sense of place, nor is there a need for ‘non-

place’ to bring it about. Elsewhere can simply mean landscapes that are not

workaday” (Lorimer and Lund 2008: 195).

The production of a healing elsewhere mandates a break from the every-

day, and in the minds of participants it is crucial that the place visited and

the activities performed are “not work” (Graburn 1989: 22). Rather, Nelson

Graburn writes, “we imagine our wilderness vacation as re-creation, an ex-

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Footprints in Paradise

perience or set of experiences that are supposed to “renew us for the work-

aday world” (22). Graburn applies Edmund Leach’s (1961) schematic of

“sacred-profane alternations” (Graburn 1989: 25) to touristic phenomena,

suggesting that work and travel, home and away can be understood as con-

trasting dimensions of two lives: “the sacred/nonordinary/touristic and the

profane/workaday/stay-at-home” (26). Urbanization is key to understanding

these categories. When city dwellers seek non-ordinary things and uplifting,

elevating experiences, “nature tourism becomes, perhaps especially for the

Japanese, a sacred journey” (Moeran 1983: 93). Rapid postwar urbanization

and the consequent loss of “contact” with nature may partially explain the

popularity of domestic nature-based tourism in Japan (Moon 1997: 226).

In fact, MacCannell (1999) and Graburn (1989) ﬁnd that nature is believed

to have purifying and regenerating eﬀects for city dwellers in every indus-

trialized society. Okpyo Moon (1997: 233) argues that village-revitalizing

nature-based tourism actually serves to reify a human/nature relationship in

which the two are separated and “man no longer exists as part of nature but

outside and above it.” In this conﬁguration, nature becomes a “limited good”

to be sold and protected, and summons a new kind of “urbanist” environ-

mental consciousness couched in an ethos of reverence for Nature.

When theorizing sense of place, it is also good to think with the con-

ceptual opposite of “place”: “non-place.” Postmodern theorist Marc Augé

imagines place and non-place as “opposed polarities,” arguing that “the ﬁrst

is never completely erased, the second never totally completed” (2000: 79).

Augé defines the “non-place” as a space that is not “relational, or historical, or

concerned with identity” (77–78). These non-places might include parking

lots, rest stops, and highways—spaces generally overlooked (“un-placed”) for

their lack of memorability. Augé’s dynamic theory of place complicates the

spatial aspect of the sacred-profane binary espoused by Leach and Graburn.

Augé also draws on the metaphor of the palimpsest (see Chapter 1) as an

always already politicized surface “on which the scrambled game of identity

and relations is ceaselessly rewritten” (79). By imposing a kinetic relationship

with the landscape, walkers softly resist the proliferation of “supermodern”28

non-places in their communities.

Keith Egan’s essay “Walking Back to Happiness?” describes the contem-

porary tourist pilgrimage as a palliative for conditions of modernity such

as the disorientation and despair expressed by the depressed walker in this

chapter. Contemplative walking also serves as a “corrective for the mala-

dies of modernity,” such as the privatization of public spaces, by allowing

for a “more authentic pedestrianism to counteract the existential inertia of

contemporary civilization” (Solnit [2002] quoted in Egan 2012: 101). Egan

ﬁnds that pilgrims on Spain’s Camino de Santiago are, like Okinawan walk-

ers, determined to “[cast] oﬀ certain aspects of their identity and obligations

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Healing and Nature

in order to rediscover a sense of purpose, direction, and momentum” (Egan

2012: 100; cf. Rapport 2003). Aruki village walkers and forest therapy walk-

ers alike reproduce local knowledge, reclaim public places, and reinscribe

their history and identity with their footprints.

The biophilia hypothesis suggests that human place-making is best un-

derstood when we “look to the very roots of motivation and understand

why, in what circumstances and on which occasions, we cherish and protect

life” (Wilson 1984: 138–39, my emphasis). In his analysis of the roots of

the “Conservation Ethic,” Wilson (1984: 138) argues that “a healthful envi-

ronment, the warmth of kinship, right-sounding moral strictures, sure-bet

economic gain, and a stirring of nostalgia and sentiment are the chief com-

ponents of the surface ethic,” but that these factors alone do not amount to

suﬃcient cause to compel us toward the preservation of biological diversity.

One purpose of forest therapy is to teach participants how to cherish life

anew. If the technology of new and “artiﬁcial” environments leads to atro-

phy of our biophilic tendencies, could we reawaken them via “naturalized”

methods such as guided forest tours? I engage biophilia in this chapter not

to prove or disprove its validity, but rather to suggest that current trends in

“natural healing” possess an import that runs much deeper than the “surface

ethic” of a healthful environment and “sure-bet” economic gain (Wilson

1984: 138). Understanding the potential for economic gain is, of course,

also essential to understanding Okinawans’ interest in new forms of for-

est development. Krishna Sivaramakrishnan’s (1998) study of collaborative

forest protection eﬀorts by villagers and the Indian state of Bengal ﬁnds

that, much like mainland Japanese advocates for village revitalization (mura

okoshi) in Okinawa (see Chapters 1 and 3), proponents of “joint forest man-

agement” use the language of ‘“community resurgence”’ and “‘rural awak-

ening’” (1998: 284) to characterize their conservation projects. And like the

Japanese and Okinawan forest therapy promoters described in this chapter,

activists and government development specialists in Bengal regard joint for-

est management as an opportunity for a “recharging of energies through

self-renewal” (285). Sivaramakrishnan critiques the rhetoric of reawakening

an “innate conservation community” (292) in villages as a colonialist dis-

course that locates indigenous groups inherently closer to Nature than other

populations (cf. Moore 2010; Walley 2002).

While Othering discourses are prevalent in Okinawa’s history of coloniza-

tion by Japan and the United States, it is important to recognize the agency

claimed by Okinawans who embrace the notion that “something is lost” in

their connection with the natural environment. Along with Gerald Figal

(2012), I adopt Erve Chambers’s argument that authenticity should be eval-

uated by “the degree of agency that a community has in deciding to change

(or not change) its social settings” (Figal 2012: 89; cf. Chambers 2000). The

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Footprints in Paradise

quest for a renewed sense of place—that is, the desire to be recharged by

forest power—is made authentic by the participants’ enthusiasm.

This chapter has explored the interpreter-inspired practice of negotiating

and (re)locating sense of self vis-à-vis nature by shifting the walker’s focus

inward. My account for the non-economic motivations that propel the pop-

ularity of nature-based and touristic therapies in Okinawa today. Dr. Naka-

sone, the dolphin therapy expert introduced in Chapter 4, described this

practice to me most simply as “relocating to recuperate” or, more simply:

“changing place therapy.” In Yambaru, “therapy close to fun” is made possible

by therapy close to tourism. In Okinawa, the simple act of walking through

the forest has the potential to become therapeutic; an enchanting experience

of nature worth cherishing.

Notes

1. For further discussion of the poetics and performance of interpretative guiding for inter-

national tourists, see Salazar (2010).

2. In Japanese, Ջźƣ.

3. This problematic discourse pervades a body of Japanese literature known as Nihonjinron,

which propagates myths of Japanese uniqueness.

4. For discussion of Japanese exceptionalist ideologies of harmony with nature, see Moon

(1997) and Berque (1988).

5. “ሱಖƵն్ƎżƮྏƵტƉƮ.”

6. ƧƶƓƮĘըზ൭ད. This Japanese folkloric reference to a “Pandora’s Box” was in-

cluded to make the trips sound mysterious and exciting (cf. Love 2013).

7. Castanopsis sieboldii or evergreen chinkapin.

8. “Longstay tourism” is hotel terminology for any visit lasting more than four nights. Most

visitors to Okinawa never make it further north than the Churaumi Aquarium in Mo-

tobu, and those who do reach Kunigami stay an average of only one to two nights.

9. Akazawa Natural Recreation Forest in Nagano Prefecture is considered the 1982 birth-

place of forest bathing, but forest therapy in Japan did not gain oﬃcial recognition and

sponsorship by the government-aﬃliated National Land Aﬀorestation Promotion Orga-

nization until 2006. Forest therapy centers are certiﬁed only if researchers ﬁnd scientiﬁc

evidence of their relaxing eﬀect (Nakamura 2008).

10. This conceptualization is reminiscent of the frequently cited “3-k” economic structure of

Okinawa Prefecture: kichi, kankō, kōkyō jigyō (bases, tourism, and public works).

11. There are A&W restaurants all across the island, sometimes referred to as “Anata to

Watashi” (You & Me) by Okinawans in reference to the U.S. military presence that led to

the chain’s expansion across Okinawa (and elsewhere) during the postwar period.

12. Schima wallichii.

13. Alpinia zerumbet.

14. Futenma is controversial mainly for its location in the middle of a densely populated

urban area; in addition to noise pollution, accidents as well as fatal plane and helicopter

crashes that occur outside the boundaries of the base have stoked local protest against the

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Healing and Nature

air base. Despite decades of local political resistance, including vocal opposition from

Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga, as of early 2017 the Japanese government has re-

sumed construction that will ultimately relocate Futenma to the northern village of He-

noko (Kyodo 2017). This proposed solution to the danger Futenma currently poses does

not satisfy protestors, who demand that bases on the island should be reduced, rather than

relocated (see Figure 1.1).

15. Phytoncides are antimicrobial organic compounds generated by plants including pine,

oak, and tea tree, as well as certain spices, onions, and garlic. They are used in Japanese

holistic medicine and aromatherapy. Some forest therapy advocates believe phytoncides

possess healing qualities.

16. The parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is responsible for the stimulation of a num-

ber of bodily functions ranging from sexual arousal and salivation to tears (lacrimation)

and defecation.

17. Three Natural Heritage Sites (Sekai-san) have been designated in Japan since 2004: Shire-

toko Peninsula in Hokkaido, the Ogasawara Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa

Prefecture).

18. The direct translation of the Japanese word for baby (ԅƄƦƶ, akachan) is “little red

one.”

19. Okpyo Moon (1997) identiﬁes this kind of essentializing rhetoric—i.e., Japanese as exist-

ing in “harmony with nature” versus Westerners as separate from/controlling/dominating

nature—as central to ideologies of Nihonjinron (studies of Japaneseness) (228). Discourses

of Nihonjinron have been used to create distance between Japanese and Westerners, as

well as between Japanese and Okinawans (recall Mr. Oku’s explanation of nature as more

“cherished” by Japanese at the beginning of this chapter).

20. The radical component of the ideogram “forest” (೦ਟ) is (ଡ) (ki) “tree.” The ﬁrst two

characters, “forest” (೦) and “woods” (ਟ), commonly appear in Japanese surnames, sup-

porting John Knight’s theory of Japan as a “forest culture” (1998) (discussed later). The

third character, “power” (৯), is also a radical component of the ideogram “man” (ଳ).

“Shinrinryoku” is very similar to “Shinrinyoku” (೦ਟფ) or “forest bathing,” which in-

volves stress management through a combination of the techniques I learned from all of

my nature interpreters.

21. I use the term “base” loosely: The highest peak is 503m in elevation (Yamada and Sugimura

2004: 118).

22. In Japanese, ฿ಖὸ୑ọ໾. The nocturnal, roughly possum-sized Ryukyu long-haired

rat (Kenaganezumi, also known in English as the Ryukyu long-tailed rat) lives in the trees

like a squirrel. Its English name does not do this magniﬁcent animal justice.

23. As I touched on in Chapters 1 and 3, katakana is the Japanese syllabary traditionally

reserved for loanwords and formal scientiﬁc nomenclature.

24. Here I use Paul Ricoeur’s (1979: 27) deﬁnition of phenomenology as “an investigation

into the structures of experience which precede connected expression in language.”

25. See also Marvin Harris’s counter-argument that animals are “good to eat” (1985) and

Douglas (2003). For Haraway, these animals are agents and entities also “good to live

with” (Haraway 2015: 160) because their liminal characteristics can reinforce the interde-

pendence of the human and the non-human (cf. Kirksey and Helmreich 2010).

26. Wilson is credited with popularizing biophilia, but Joye and De Block (2011: 190) claim

German philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm as its originator.

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Footprints in Paradise

27. Yannick Joye and Andreas De Block (2011: 200) cite a vast literature linked to the bio-

philia hypothesis: that vegetative environments and elements such as trees, ﬂowers, and

plants are able to “elicit aesthetic responses in human beings” and can have a “stress-re-

ducing or ‘restorative’ eﬀect on them, as opposed to urban or [hu]man-made environ-

ments.” For empirical examples that support the biophilia hypothesis, see Kaplan (1995)

and Kahn (1999).

28. Augé’s term “supermodern” refers to a modernity focused on movement, transitoriness,

and impermanence. Beth Notar mobilizes Augé’s “non-place” to explain local forms of

resistance to the touristic rewriting of history in Dali, China. For an insightful analysis of

place-making as political resistance to hegemonic nostalgia and the tourism imperative in

the postcolonial Chinese context, see Notar (2006).

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Conclusion

YAMBARU FUNBARU!

Every day is a journey and the journey itself is home.

—Matsuo Bashō, Oku no Hosomichi, “Narrow Road to the Interior”

The International Journal of Okinawan Studies “Special Issue on the Envi-

ronment” (Murphy 2011: 15), published around the time I concluded my

ﬁeldwork, declares that “Okinawa’s current orientation for economic devel-

opment is doomed.” Okinawa’s two key economic ﬂows—the U.S. military

presence and tourism—are predicted to “slow if not screech to a halt en-

tirely” (15) as global oil production peaks and then descends into a future

of low energy consumption in which the costs of fueling aircraft and ships,

both military and commercial, may prove an impossible budgetary burden

that ultimately results in a much desired reduction in U.S. military bases on

Okinawa.

The tourism industry, though still the most rapidly developing nongov-

ernmental sector of Okinawa’s economy, may also be stunted by the rising

cost of the energy needed to supply tourists with electricity, potable wa-

ter, and fuel for the ubiquitous rental car. Murphy calls for the same kind

of fundamental economic transition that Noboru Jahana anticipated and

advocated during the late nineteenth century, in resistance to Japan’s po-

litical, linguistic, and environmental colonization of Okinawa. Through its

enmeshment in the global sugar trade, Okinawa was vulnerabilized to “exter-

nal energy and ﬁnancial inputs” (Murphy 2011: 17). In the early twenty-ﬁrst

century, the “tourism imperative” has shifted the prefecture’s dependencies

to external energy sources and the ﬁnancial inputs of tourists.

University of the Ryukyus eco-critic and environmental literature expert

Shin Yamashiro writes compellingly of the ﬂux between the “particularity” of

Okinawan environmental problems and the “universality” of the structures

that produce nature-based tourism dependence on small islands (Yamashiro

2005: 51). The Yambaru kuina cannot be found anywhere else in the world,

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Footprints in Paradise

but the threat of reduced habitat as a result of human expansion resonates

with the predicament of the kiwi, a similar ﬂightless bird endemic to New

Zealand. Laura Ogden (2011: 119) argues that “when places become eco-

logically famous, belonging solely to the world of things and facts” (facts

in the sense of particularized, collectable knowledge), “their social natures

are polished smooth, removing discordances.” Through the “polishing” of

Nature for ecotourism, Yambaru today has become what a “smooth object,”

a region whose ontology has lost its history of “inherent material and ideo-

logical conﬂicts, incongruities, and biosocial entanglements” (Ogden 2011:

101) (cf. Latour 2004). My attention to slow vulnerability (cf. Nixon 2011;

Parreñas 2012) in Okinawa is intended to roughen up and reinscribe some

of the major historical and political events that have brought the ecological

fame of biodiversity to the north.

Looking to the future, it is important to remember that Okinawan en-

vironmental consciousness ﬁrst emerged “in the reaction against the military

presence” (Yamashiro 2005: 55, my emphasis). Following decades of pres-

sure and protests by local residents, the U.S. military has announced its latest

plan to transfer 5,000 of the of the 27,000 troops currently stationed on

Okinawa to Guam by 2020 (Fuentes 2015). Whether U.S. military forces

ultimately depart Okinawa because of long-standing popular demand by

Okinawans, fossil fuel–related ﬁnancial constraints, or some combination

thereof, this proposed military exodus will free up close to 20 percent of

Okinawan land for new (and revived) sustainable economic practices. Inten-

sive agriculture, permaculture, and other farming techniques could rebuild

the prefecture’s economic backbone to support a strategic reduction of food

imports (Murphy 2011: 20). While these kinds of military agreements have

been long delayed owing to triangulated conﬂicts between the U.S., Japan,

and Okinawa, the prospect of environmental decolonization promises to

strengthen diversify economic opportunities in prefecture.

A tall white lighthouse towers over Nago Wharf, encircled by a massive,

elegantly carved blue and turquoise dolphin statue that faces the sea. On the

lighthouse is painted the Okinawan saying, “Niraikanai.” En route to join

forest treks, coral transplanting dive trips, and dolphin therapy sessions, I

drove past this sculpture hundreds of times without ever really noticing the

message, which translates roughly to “the other side of the sea.” Niraikanai

refers to the origin of all Yuimun—the good things that come near, that

come to us (yottekuru), such as protein-rich food from the sea. Mr. Satō,

the eccentric (if invasive) “messenger of the forest” who led me on multiple

ecotours, told me that whereas Niraikanai generally has a positive nuance,

bad things that come at us (yattekuru), such as illness, can also be Niraikanai.

For those who do not live on a small island, tourism may be regarded as

something that impacts life negatively “somewhere else” (Gössling and Hall

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Yambaru Funbaru!

2006: 13). When I ﬁrst arrived in Okinawa in the summer of 2009, a casual

stroll along the beach in Motobu revealed a stunning diversity of Niraikanai

litter from the other side of the sea: glass soda bottles that washed ashore

from Taiwan, milk cartons ﬂoated across from China, even an empty bag of

potato chips that appeared to originate in the Philippines lay shrouded in

Okinawan kelp. Okinawa, still imagined by many members of the military

and business communities as the “Keystone of the Paciﬁc,” shares a host of

environmental dilemmas with Guam, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and

American Samoa—many of which also support a large U.S. military pres-

ence and depend on international tourism.

Which kind of Niraikanai do ecotourists pose for Okinawa? Celia Lowe

writes that “the ‘ecotourist’ is the speciﬁc ﬁgure for whom nature will be saved.

Despite claims to the universal value of biodiverse nature, this is a nature

only some will be able to avail themselves of ” (2006: 161, my emphasis).

Whether future ecotourists come to Okinawa, as responsible travelers, or

come at Okinawa, as polluting consumers, will depend upon how exten-

sively the ideals of sustainable development are put into practice and policy,

and whether and how local economic autonomy is regained for Okinawans

(Uchinaanchu).

The catchy slogan “Yambaru Funbaru! ” (Stand Firm Yambaru!) was

printed on many of the postcards, t-shirts, posters, and brochures I collected

during ﬁeldwork. For all its doomsday predictions, Murphy’s article con-

cludes with the promise that Okinawa “has the freedom and opportunity

within the resource necessities that present themselves to pursue a path that will

circle back to many of the values and practices that have long deﬁned a

vibrant, resilient, ancient island culture capable of not simply enduring the

turmoil ahead but weathering it well” (2011: 20–21, my emphasis). Oki-

nawans may not experience full freedom to reduce their fossil-fuel depen-

dence and implement improved tourism standards as long as planes and

rental cars determine the ﬂow of tourist traﬃc on the island.

In this ethnography, I have assembled a pastiche of the innovative en-

trepreneurial and interpretive paths by which Okinawans are renegotiating

the terms of their tourism imperative. The terms of the tourism industry are

reclaimed through community chats that seek to revive lost language (Uchi-

naaguchi), and on nostalgic Aruki walks where residents search for lost places

and practices (such as subsistence dolphin hunting and communal sweet po-

tato farming). These journeys lead ecotourism guides and their visitors into

the promise of newly demilitarized forests and U.S.- and Japanese-controlled

farmlands. New pathways send volunteer scuba divers deep into the ocean,

where they can take stakes in coral reef health, and redeﬁne their sense of

self through transformative encounters with non-human marine life. Each

of these routes to economic and cultural revival present strategies for an exit

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Footprints in Paradise

from the maze of environmental vulnerability and tourism dependence that

shapes the conditions of possibility in Okinawa today.

Anthropological studies of tourism have propelled powerful discourses of

the “tourist gaze” (Urry 1990, 1992), privileging the visual realm of sensory

perception. The politics of visuality, sight, and seeing in a touristic context

are central to this book. I have emphasized the embodied aspect of seeing

and walking, two activities fundamental to the tourist experience, to move

away from the seductive but sometimes ﬂoating ideologies of the disembod-

ied gaze (cf. Veijola and Jokinen 1994). A grounded ethnographic analysis

of who is doing the participating and observing; through which technolo-

gies and interpretive media; and when, how, and for what purpose, is crit-

ical to studies of tourism concerned with human impacts on the natural

environment.

Chapters 1 and 2 consider which histories are made visible—or not—for

sightseeing tourists across Okinawa. In Chapter 3, I show how Okinawan

placeologists, village walkers, and community chatters “notice” new and

cherishable things by participating in community chats and attending to

proprioception as an underutilized way of knowing the natural world. Chap-

ter 4 scrambles anthropocentric notions of “observer” and “observed” by

noticing whales who watch us (observation); dolphins who heal us (inter-

action); and coral polyps who transform our sense of boundedness through

underwater gardening (intervention). In Chapter 5, forest therapy and other

experiential nature encounters draw participants out of their comfort zones

and away from overreliance on the visual apparatus as a means of apprehend-

ing the biophysical environment; at the same time, virtual simulations of

Nature suggest that technological appendages can be generative and healing

by providing innovative new platforms for multispecies “intra-actions.”

Many of the theoretical perspectives developed in this book center on

the fundamental human problem of control: control of natural resources

(sugar, water, lumber), control of knowledge and experience, climates, is-

lands, people—and the (attempted) control of nonhuman life forms such as

coral, birds, snakes, whales, dolphins, and adorable invasive mammals. This

story is also about the absence of control, what Donna Haraway and Thyrza

Goodeve (2000: 105) call the “rejection of simplistic dualisms derived from

Modernist assumptions that nature can be controlled,” my emphasis.

My political and ethical commitments as a fading Young Optimist were

clouded by a pernicious hopelessness following the 2011 earthquake, tsu-

nami, and nuclear catastrophe that devastated northeastern Japan. I could

not understand how people have the emotional capacity to continue caring

about life despite the terrible ruptures, (un)natural disasters, and other hu-

man tragedies they cannot control. Instead, I asked how visiting tourists,

tour guides, government bureaucrats, scuba divers, scientists, local residents,

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Yambaru Funbaru!

environmental activists, and volunteer trappers come to cherish animals and

ecologies not encountered in their everyday lives, and how they learn to resist

slow vulnerabilities they cannot readily feel. I wanted to do this because I still

believe that the key to education is experience.

Matsuo Bashō, renowned Japanese poet of the Edo Period (late seven-

teenth century), wrote about “home” as a daily journey undertaken by us

all. Bashō’s poetic diary “Narrow Road to the Interior,” alternately translated

as “Narrow Road to a Far Province,” details the journey of a pilgrim whose

travels are simultaneously spiritual and geographic. While these aspects of

the human journey may be timeless, it is the particularity of experience that

makes our stories worth telling. Through collecting stories of history, heal-

ing, and the revaluation of local knowledge, I oﬀer an interpretation of Oki-

nawan journeys home, to this cherishable place.

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INDEX

Atran, Scott, 141

Angst, Linda, 9, 20

Argyrou, Vassos, 13

Asato, Eiko, 19, 21, 55

Auge, Marc, 117, 146, 150n28