AGE-OLD HIGHLIGHTS AROUND OKINAWA • If there’s a quintessential Okinawan art, it would have to be bingata, and the Shiroma Bingata workshop is a good place to see how it’s produced. Bingata is a technique for creating fabrics whose design is not woven into them but rather painted onto them. The results are beautiful, but they don’t come easily: sometimes three or four people are hunched over the same swath of fabric, slowly and carefully massaging the paints into the cloth with stiff brushes. • Want to try eating like a Ryūkyū king? A restaurant called Ryūkyū Ryōri Mie, occupying an atmospheric 60-year-old house in the heart of Naha, serves recreations of the recipes used by Ryūkyū royalty. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth a splurge. Call 098867-1356 for a reservation – but be ready with some Japanese translation help. • Though they haven’t been restored to their former glory, as Shuri Castle has, several other castles from the days of the Ryūkyū Kingdom are worth visiting. A total of seven of these gusuku have been inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list. whc.unesco.org/en/list/972/ • For an overview of Okinawa’s traditional artistry, visit Naha City Traditional Arts and Crafts Centre, downtown on Kokusai-dōri, where workshops allow you to try your hand at making bingata, lacquerware, and more. kogeikan.jp/international/english/
Top: In Kijōka, a village in the north of Okinawa, Mieko Taira inspects a grove of banana plants. Bottom: Weaving is one of the traditional crafts which is still being handed down to successive generations.
skinned version of a zucchini. Fried with some egg, tofu, and pork, it makes gōya champuru, a dish which is about as easy to come by here as burgers are in the west. Other local favourites include sōki soba – a slice of pork on a bowl of wheat noodles – and taco rice, a dish which dates back only to the American occupation of Okinawa in the post-Second World War era. Gōya champuru, sōki soba, and taco rice, as tasty as they are, probably don’t explain the Okinawans’ long lifespans, but the Longevity Lunch just might. At Emi no Mise, a restaurant in the north of the island, owner Emiko Kinjō prepares dietary staples from her garden in traditional ways. Varying from day to day, the Longevity Lunch might include deep-fried tapioca, vinegary sweet potato leaves, shrimp tempura with fennel, lime-flavored cold noodles, turmeric, multiple varieties of seaweed, and more – but all of it in small portions, for in addition to consuming a healthy diet loaded with vegetables and low in sugar, a guiding principle in the Okinawans’ eating habits is to eat only until their stomachs are 80 per cent full. Emi no Mise lies several hours’ drive north of
Naha, but it’s not the only reason to make an expedition up there, for the nearby hamlet of Kijōka is where bashōfu has been lovingly brought back to life. Bashōfu involves weaving fabric out of the fibres of banana plants. It’s a very labour-intensive skill, and in the island’s lean years after the Second World War, bashōfu almost died out as people focused on food production and simply wore whatever mass-produced clothes were available. A lady named Toshiko Taira was bashōfu’s saviour, single-handedly bringing it back from the brink of extinction and training a new generation of weavers, and in recognition of her decades of weaving and teaching, in 2000 Japan’s government conferred upon her the title “Living National Treasure.” Even today, Taira continues to make bashōfu and to work tirelessly for the organisation she founded, the Kijōka Bashōfu Preservation Society – at the sprightly age of 95. Despite all I’d seen, eaten, and photographed in Okinawa, I can’t say I was much closer to the secret of long life when I returned home. But I was ten days older than when I’d left, and that fact didn’t bother me in the least. l FEBRUARY 2017
Peter Weld is a Tokyo-based photographer and writer who has spent several decades exploring Japan. His last previous visit to Okinawa was in 1987, when he was a lot younger.
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