goyablog

Like people, places put on makeup to attract and appeal to others, to provide an image of what the self thinks the other wants to see. I’m about twelve pages into chapter three of the manuscript, discussing mainland Japanese tourism experts who gave Okinawans advice on what to do in the early Sixties to develop a viable tourism industry. What goes unstated (taken for granted) is that this is particularly advice on how to make Okinawa appealing to mainland Japanese. The thrust of the advice is, in a word, to go native, but not the local native. Rather, the native here means native to the tropics. It starts by giving Okinawa a makeover that emphasizes a south sea island atmosphere. This means replacing a lot of greenery and then some. It’s the “then some” that interests me in this chapter now and has me raising John Urry’s idea of “the tourist gaze” ordering, regulating, and shaping the tourist landscape and the tourist’s relationship to it. The tourist has an image of a yet-to-be-visited place (a tourist destination) constructed through media and imagination, but that image may already be shaped by what would-be hosts think would-be guests expect. They expect, usually, an authentic experience of the Different, but nothing says that the Different has to correspond with anything real or native or “authentic” to the destination.

In Okinawa’s case, for better or for worse, it is perceived to be or have the potential to be a “south sea island-like” place, which is long way to say “tropical paradise” where “paradise” = Place Supremely Other to Place Supremely Quotidian and “tropical” = the opposite of or at least Very Different from the climate of northern latitudes. It also signifies fruity alcoholic drinks with umbrellas in them, and that in fact the more important point. The tourist g(r)azes for signs. Tourism at its core is simply one big sign system signifying the Not-Quotidian. so then, besides g(r)azing for some authentic Okinawan experience (there isn’t any to be had), the Tokyoite tourist to Okinawa wants to feed on and be fed a forest (jungle?) of signs that say “I Am Not In Tokyo.” This desire has implications for the locals, especially if they aspire to be (culturally, economically, technologically, etc.) like the metropole as proof of progress. under these conditions to submit to the tourist gaze is to let yourself to go native in your native land. And that–with or without palm trees and hibiscuses–is not always a pretty sight….

Riffing on the Magritte painting of his famous (non-)pipe in his series “The Treachery of Images,” I’m centering the book chapter I’m currently writing (reforestation/tropicalization of postwar Okinawa) on the idea of flora as symbol (representation of something other than what it is) in postwar Okinawa. Non-native palm trees planted there to evoke the tropics for tourists is my prime example. Of course Magritte was commenting on his painting as a representation of a pipe, not a pipe itself while I am talking about the palm tree in Okinawa as something even more radically not-what-it-seems-to-be: I argue it is not planted as a palm tree, but as a sign of the tropical, as a pure symbol. Demonstration of this symbolic nature (get it? — symbolic “nature”) of the palm in Okinawa lies in its absurdity. My argument (as I think about now after two glasses of very real — not symbolic — wine) hinges on the idea that the more labor intensive and dangerous and expensive and non-utilitarian palm trees are in Okinawa, the less they exist and are experienced as a material object (tree). They are sensed on the periphery of the consciousness of a tourist only as a vague index of the tropical. People don’t seek shade from them, they don’t eat their fruit (in the case of coconut palms), they don’t climb them. They are not experienced, used, as trees. The fact that tall palms are non-native to Okinawa is for a reason: they topple in typhoons. They don’t belong there. And yet, thousands have been transplanted into the potentially most dangerous areas — along main “tourist-exposed” thoroughfares. Okinawa prefecture spends a LOT of money buttressing these palms and netting the coconuts on coconut palms. It’s ridiculous. Absurd. But, it is calculated that what is expended in material costs and labor is recouped in tourist dollars drawn to the place for its tropical look. That, in a nutshell, is the heart of the chapter. Hibiscus are a part of this story too, although it works a bit differently. That’ll be tomorrow’s topic….