Shingo Iitaka: Leisure Tourism and Memories of War

2018/12/10

The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon in Koror State, Republic of Palau, in the Micronesian region of Oceania. This area, consisting of limestone islands and coral reefs, is a treasure trove of diverse organisms and contains traces of past human life such as caves and rock art, leading to its registration as a UNESCO World Mixed Heritage site in 2012. Long known as a mecca for divers worldwide, the number of visitors to Palau increased further upon registration, and now more than 120,000 people visit annually against a native population of approximately 18,000. Upon departure, payment of a $100 Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee is mandatory and is added to the airfare in advance.

Ten years prior to the World Heritage registration, I was staying in Palau for a long period for field research as a graduate student. Because I was settled in a rural village, I was never able to go to the Rock Islands. Fieldworkers going to surrounding regions often talk about the hardships of local life, but in my life in Palau, there were no protozoan infections or eating of bizarre foods. After returning to Japan, I used to boast about my local life, saying that even though they were right under my nose, I never wavered and never went to the Rock Islands. However, I now regret that I missed a valuable opportunity to observe the social conditions at the tourism sites before the World Heritage registration.

It was only after I started working at a university that I was finally blessed with the opportunity to visit the Rock Islands. In general sightseeing tours, along with activities such as snorkeling, sites such as decaying fighter planes and caves used for positions were included as traces of the Japanese-American combat at the end of the Pacific War. Perhaps because tour participants are drawn to the contrast between the two, they enthusiastically point their cameras. As shown in the title of the collection of essays I recently contributed to, Leisure and Death (Kaul and Skinner eds., University Press of Colorado, 2018), death is also consumed within leisure tourism.

In recent years in Palau, along with the increase in tourists, Pacific War battlefields have come to be developed as tourism resources. In this process, the people of Palau are also remembering the Pacific War from a perspective different from that of Japan and the United States, the parties to the war. I would like to continue to focus on the dynamics of local war memories in relation to leisure tourism, but I also want to remember the time when I could not go to the Rock Islands.