Okinawa and the Islands Where Strangers Become Family

The old woman at the market in Naha has sold me nothing. I asked about a vegetable I did not recognise; she explained it, cut a piece for me to taste, asked where I was from, told me her grandson was studying in a city near there, and then, when I moved to leave, pressed a small bag of the vegetable into my hand and waved away the money. Ichariba chōdē, she said, and laughed at my face, and said it again slowly so I could repeat it.

It is a phrase in the Okinawan language — not a dialect of Japanese but a separate, endangered language of the Ryukyu islands — and it means: once we have met, we are brothers and sisters. It is the islands' motto, more or less, printed on tourist material and painted on walls and still, evidently, practised at market stalls. And it is en (縁) — the Japanese idea of the thread that connects people who meet — taken further than the mainland usually takes it, into something like a rule for living.

Not quite Japan

Okinawa Prefecture is a chain of islands stretching a thousand kilometres southwest from Kyushu toward Taiwan, and for most of its history it was not Japan at all. The Ryukyu Kingdom, centred on Okinawa island, was an independent state from the fifteenth century, trading with China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, paying tribute to the Chinese court, and developing its own language, religion, music, food, and architecture. Japan annexed it in 1879. The United States occupied it from 1945 to 1972 after a battle that killed a quarter of the civilian population. It remains the poorest prefecture, the one with the most American military bases, and the one whose relationship with the mainland is most fraught.

It is also, by the usual measures, the one where people are most connected to each other. Okinawa became famous in the 2000s as a "blue zone," a place of unusual longevity, and the researchers who studied it kept arriving at the same conclusion: the islanders' long lives had less to do with diet, though the diet was good, than with the fact that almost nobody was alone.

Moai

The institution at the centre of this is the moai. A moai is a group — five, six, a dozen people — who meet regularly, often monthly, often for life, pooling a small amount of money and, more importantly, pooling themselves. The word originally referred to a rotating savings club, a form of mutual finance that let farming families cover a wedding or a funeral. Over time the finance became secondary and the meeting became the point.

A moai formed in childhood can last eighty years. Its members see each other through marriage, children, illness, bereavement, and old age; they show up at each other's houses without calling ahead; they know, when one of them stops coming, that something is wrong, and they go and find out. The researchers noted that elderly Okinawans, unlike the elderly almost everywhere else in the developed world, very rarely reported loneliness, and moai was the reason.

It is en made into a structure. The thread between people, which on the mainland is something you notice and thank and let go, is here tied deliberately, early, and never cut.

Yuimāru

The other word is yuimāru — from yui, to bind or join, and māru, a turn or rotation. It originally meant the cooperative labour by which villages planted and harvested each other's fields in turn, each household working the next one's land. It now means, more generally, the spirit of mutual help: the reflex, when a neighbour needs something, of simply providing it, in the confidence that the turn will come round.

Yuimāru is why the market woman gave me the vegetable. Not generosity in the sense of a gift, exactly — more the assumption that things circulate, that what goes out comes back through some other door, and that the accounting is not worth keeping. The mainland has en, the thread; Okinawa has yuimāru, the loop.

The village elders

You see it most clearly in the villages of the north, in the yanbaru forests of Okinawa island, or on the smaller islands — Kume, Ishigaki, Taketomi, Iriomote — where the pace is slower and the traditions have held.

On Taketomi, a tiny coral island with a village of red-tiled roofs and coral-stone walls and sand streets, the residents have refused resort development for decades and maintain the village collectively; there is a charter, and every house follows it. On Ōgimi, on the mainland's northern coast, the village of centenarians that the longevity researchers made famous, the old women still garden and dance and gather, and the community centre is the busiest building in town.

And in the utaki, the sacred groves of the old Ryukyuan religion — clearings in the forest, marked by a stone or a hearth, tended by the women who serve as priestesses — the connection extends past the living. Ancestors are present. The household altar is the centre of the home, and the annual festival of the dead, Obon in the lunar calendar, is the biggest event of the year, when the whole island dances through the night to bring the ancestors home and then send them back.

The complication

I want to be careful not to make Okinawa into a paradise, because the islanders would not thank me for it.

The yuimāru culture is also a culture that can be closed. The moai that holds you can also hold you back; the village that watches out for you also watches you. Young Okinawans leave for Tokyo and Osaka in large numbers, for work and for room. The longevity that made the islands famous has, in the younger generations, collapsed under an American-influenced diet — Okinawa now has some of the highest rates of obesity in Japan. And the connection the islanders feel to each other exists alongside a deep, justified grievance about their relationship to the mainland and the bases, which a visitor who admires the warmth and ignores the anger has not really seen.

Ichariba chōdē is real. It is also what people say to each other on islands that have been, for a century and a half, on the receiving end of other people's decisions. The solidarity is a strength. It is also a response.

Going

Fly to Naha, and spend a day or two in the city: the market, the reconstructed Shuri castle (burned in 2019, being rebuilt), the pottery street of Tsuboya, a night in a small izakaya with awamori, the islands' rice spirit, and sanshin music. Then leave the main island. The Yaeyama group in the far south — Ishigaki, Taketomi, Iriomote — is a short flight and another world: coral, jungle, water the colour of nothing on the mainland, and villages where the loop still turns.

Eat what is put in front of you. The cuisine — pork in every form, bitter melon, sea grapes, purple sweet potato, tofu — is one of the most distinctive in Japan. Learn two words: mensōre, welcome, and nifēdēbiru, thank you. Use them.

And accept what you are given. The vegetable, the extra dish, the ride to the ferry, the invitation to a moai meeting you have no business attending. Refusing is not polite here. It breaks the loop.

The bag

I ate the vegetable that night — handama, it was, a purple-leaved thing, blanched with sesame — and thought about the woman and her grandson in a city I knew. I had not asked her name. I did not need it. Once we have met, we are brothers and sisters: the thread was tied, the loop had turned, and somewhere, by the accounting nobody keeps, I now owed the islands a vegetable.

I am still paying it back. That, I think, is what she intended.