Okinawa · a blue zone · October and November 2023

We planned a week. We stayed a month.

Two ends of Okinawa islandNanjo in the south, Ogimi in the north
On the beach near Ogimi, Okinawa, October 2023
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A blue zone in the East China Sea

Okinawa — the island that kept us

What Okinawa actually told us

Six answers from a month in the most famous blue zone on earth. Only one of them is about food. Tap any of them to go straight to it.

  1. 01Don’t dwell on things. The first thing a ninety-seven-year-old said
  2. 02Talk, endlessly. Okinawa has a word for it — yuntaku
  3. 03Pray outdoors. To a stone, or a spring. Nobody writes this part down
  4. 04Don’t eat alone. She left a house in America with a pool for this
  5. 05People. Then people again. Four questions, one answer
  6. 06Grow it by the door. Papaya, bitter melon, aloe, daikon, shiso

Nanjo, in the south

Where the month began

Japan was meant to be a stop on the way — Kyoto, Tokyo, a look at the blue zone, and on. We stayed a month. The first days were in Nanjo, near the capital, where Mikiko Kumagai took us in as her guests and became the reason the whole Okinawan leg worked at all. She had left Tokyo twelve years earlier and never gone back.

Aleksander, Marek Piotrowski and their host Mikiko Kumagai in Nanjo, Okinawa
With Mikiko Kumagai in Nanjo.
Mikiko Kumagai at her guesthouse in Nanjo, Okinawa
Mikiko Kumagai. Nanjo, 24 October 2023.

Aleksander interviewed her the day before we went north, and asked the question the whole trip was built on: what is the secret of the blue zone? Her first answer was the one everybody who lives here gives.

“Communication is a secret.”

“Yuntaku is… chatting. And always yuntaku.”

Mikiko Kumagai

Then she gave a second answer, and it is the one that never appears in the articles.

Mikiko Kumagai

“And religion and faith. Okinawan people, their faith is based on animism. So they pray to God.”

Aleksander

“They are very religious.”

Mikiko Kumagai

“Outside. An object of praying is sometimes stone, and sometimes spring. So they pray in nature.”

Nobody writes this part down

Every account of Okinawa lists the sweet potato, the bitter melon, the walking and the friendships. The woman who lives there put faith second on her own list, before food was mentioned at all — and not faith inside a building. A stone. A spring. Something you stand in front of, outdoors, in the same landscape you grow your vegetables in.

She was less sure about the word the rest of the world took from here. Asked about ikigai — the purpose in life that made Okinawa famous — she laughed and said she was not sure. Ten minutes later, talking about the small field behind the house where she grows her own vegetables, she named it herself.

“I think that is one of ikigai.”

Mikiko Kumagai

Two smaller things stayed with us. The villages look empty in the afternoon not because nobody is home but because the sun is too strong and people wait it out. And there are no trains on Okinawa, so most grandmothers drive their grandchildren to school — which is why three generations here see each other several times a week without anyone planning it.

What has actually changed, in her words

Aleksander asked her about hara hachi bu, the rule everybody quotes — that Okinawans stop eating at eighty per cent full. She said no; the ranking had fallen; and she gave a reason.

“’Cause they eat too much.”

Then she explained where the eating came from. “Okinawa was occupied by the United States. So their culture have come. So hamburgers.” Young people, she said, love hamburgers and donuts and are not so healthy — but on communication, they still follow the older people’s way of life.

The food tradition broke. The talking tradition did not. That is the honest state of the most famous blue zone on earth, from the first person we asked. We went north anyway.

The jungle and the sea seen from above Nanjo, Okinawa
Nanjo, looking to the sea.
A yacht anchored in the bay at sunset, Nanjo, Okinawa
The bay at the end of the day.
A lifeguard tower on the sand at sunset on a beach in Okinawa
The sea, from the sand.
Aleksander Piotrowski with a bicycle beside the sea in Okinawa
Aleksander. Most of the month looked like this.
The river at Ogimi at sunset, Okinawa
The river at Ogimi.

On the sand, in Okinawa

A walk with Tina Woods

Tina Woods was in Japan for a conference on independent ageing, and she and Marek walked the beach talking about why anyone lives longer here. She works on the other end of the problem from a laboratory — on governments, pension funds, and the conditions that decide whether a whole population gets to be healthy or not.

Tina Woods walking on the beach with Marek Piotrowski in Okinawa
Okinawa, October 2023. Tina Woods and Marek, on the sand.
Marek and Aleksander Piotrowski with Tina Woods and the camera rig on the beach in Okinawa
The three of us, and the rig.

What she had noticed in Japan was not a supplement and not a clinic. It was that the country had never stopped doing the obvious things.

“It’s everything that your grandmother used to tell you, really. It’s common sense stuff, which is kind of the terrifying thing, because we’ve lost touch with all the things that our grandmother used to tell us.”

“They venerate their elders. Being older is actually considered valuable. Wisdom is a good thing. In the Westernized world, we have ageism.”

Tina Woods

The part that is nobody’s grandmother’s fault

Her argument is that knowing all this changes nothing on its own. What decides whether a population is healthy is the conditions it lives in — what food is nearby, what it costs, what the air is like, whether prevention is paid for at all.

“It’s about democratizing access to the benefits of the so-called longevity dividend — and not just those who can afford it.”

North, to the end of Okinawa

Ogimi

Ogimi is at the far northern end of Okinawa. Getting there from Naha took most of a day and three local buses. On the day we arrived we set a camera down and talked to each other about why we had come.

“We know more or less the secrets of people in the Blue Zones, their traditions, what they eat, how they keep their active bodies. But it is different to hear it from the others and pretty different to experience it by ourselves. So we’ve decided to come here together, father and son, and see how it looks like.”

Marek
Marek and Aleksander Piotrowski in front of the giant OKINAWA letters on the beach
Okinawa, spelled out.
Aleksander Piotrowski with a rucksack at a bus stop on the way to Ogimi, Okinawa
The last of three buses. On the road into Ogimi.
Marek and Aleksander Piotrowski at a table in an eating house on Okinawa
Father and son, at a table in Okinawa.

How we got in

Through a woman in the village store

There was no fixer and no introduction. We walked into the local shop, and the woman behind the counter mentioned that the old people of the village meet at the community centre. We went, and sat down with a woman of ninety-seven. Halfway through that first interview it turned out how the two were connected.

“Her daughter is here. You know the store you just talked to? That’s her daughter.”

Eiko, translating

The woman who sent us to the community centre was Okushima Kikue’s daughter. Her mother lived to a hundred and eight and never went to a doctor. Most of the family reached their nineties. Kikue was born in Ogimi and has never lived anywhere else, and she teaches the village to dance. Asked what keeps her going, the first thing she said was not about food.

“Above all, don’t dwell on things. Always have laughter, talk with your friends, really make your own three meals a day and eat them, and walking, exercise, sleep — with those as the foundation I just repeat that, every day.”

Okushima Kikue, ninety-seven · from the Japanese

Don’t let things sit on your mind

That is the first thing a ninety-seven-year-old said when she was asked the question everybody comes to Ogimi to ask. Not a food, not a supplement, not a number. A way of carrying yourself — and it came before the three meals, the walking and the sleep, not after them.

Okushima Kikue talking to Marek Piotrowski with Eiko translating, Ogimi, Okinawa
Okushima Kikue, ninety-seven. Eiko translating.
Elderly residents of Ogimi sitting together at a table in the village community centre
The community centre. The photographs on the wall are of them.
An elderly resident of Ogimi in the village community hall
The hall where the village meets.

The person who made it possible

Eiko

Eiko was not a translator, or a guide. She is from Ogimi, she left Okinawa for the United States, trained and worked there as a nurse, and came home after her husband died. She heard two foreigners struggling, offered to translate, and stayed with us for the rest of the week. Then she invited us to her house for breakfast. Her reason for coming home is one sentence long, and it is not about food.

“My brother and my sister-in-law, we eat three meals a day here. We eat together. So I don’t eat by myself.”

Eiko
Eiko with Marek and Aleksander Piotrowski at her home in Ogimi, Okinawa
Breakfast at Eiko’s. She left a house in America with a pool and five kinds of fruit tree, so as not to eat alone.
Marek and Aleksander Piotrowski with Eiko at the community centre in Ogimi, Okinawa
Eiko. At the community centre, with the village photographs behind.
Marek and Aleksander Piotrowski with Eiko and her sister in Ogimi, Okinawa
With Eiko and her sister.

Seventy-eight

Taira Tsugo

Born in Ogimi in 1946, the eldest of seven, and still serving on the village council in his seventh term. Marek asked him the question every blue-zone article asks — is it the diet, the exercise, or the connections between people? He answered people. Then he was asked what he loves most about life, and answered people. Then what he would say to a seventeen-year-old, and answered people.

“Think about the people is the best. People is the best. He has to have good friends and families. That’s it.”

Taira Tsugo, through Eiko

And one sentence that never reached us on the day

Talking about neighbours looking after each other, he said in Japanese that it has been lost — 「なくなってしまった」. It was the only critical thing anybody said in Ogimi, and it did not survive into the English at the time. We found it two years later, when the recording was transcribed in Japanese.

A blue zone is not a place where nothing changes. It is a place where people are still trying.

Twenty to six in the morning

Emi-san’s kitchen

Emi no Mise — “Emi’s shop” — is in Ogimi and you cannot walk in; it is by appointment. Emi-san runs it with her only son. The alarm went at 5:40 and we took the bus out to watch her cook. The garden came first: almost everything she cooks is grown a few steps from the kitchen door — papaya, bitter melon, aloe, daikon, shiso.

“My garden is a garden full of weeds. You can’t tell where the vegetables end and the weeds begin.”

Emi-san
Marek and Aleksander Piotrowski with Emi-san and her helper outside Emi no Mise, Ogimi, Okinawa
Emi-san, her helper, and the two of us outside the shop.
Emi-san welcoming Marek Piotrowski at the door of Emi no Mise, Ogimi, Okinawa
The welcome. Emi no Mise, Ogimi.
Emi-san picking vegetables in her garden at Ogimi, Okinawa
Picking what the meal will be made of.
Emi-san cooking in the kitchen of Emi no Mise, Ogimi, Okinawa
Little oil, soy sauce instead of salt.
Shredded green papaya cooking in a pan at Emi no Mise, Ogimi, Okinawa
Green papaya, shredded — shirishiri.
The dishes cooked at Emi no Mise, Ogimi, Okinawa
The meal, finished.
Emi-san laughing in her kitchen with Marek Piotrowski at Emi no Mise, Ogimi, Okinawa
In her kitchen. Ogimi, October 2023.

She could not eat with us. The shop opens at half past eleven and she had to work. She cooked the whole meal, packed it into containers, and sent it to Eiko’s house for us to eat there.

笑味の店

She had already written the book we came to make

Four months before we arrived, Emi-san published おばあたちの台所 — The Grandmothers’ Kitchen — a record of the everyday meals and the way of life of the old women of her own village, in their words, with twenty-four of the dishes.

We travelled around the world to ask how the people of Ogimi eat and live. She had spent years writing it down, and then cooked us breakfast.

See the book on Emi-san’s own site

金城笑子 · Graphic-sha · June 2023 · 152 pages · ISBN 978-4-7661-3774-3

A month in the Okinawa blue zone

The answers, side by side

Everybody arrives in a blue zone looking for the food. The food is real — and almost nobody there gave it as the answer.

Ninety-seven

Don’t dwell on things

Laughter, friends, three meals you cook yourself, walking, sleep. In that order, and the first one is a state of mind.

Seventy-eight

People, four times

Four different questions about longevity. One answer to all of them, and it was never a food.

Nanjo

Talking, and praying outdoors

Mikiko Kumagai gave two answers. Communication — yuntaku, endlessly. And faith, to a stone or a spring, in the open air.

The one who came home

Not eating alone

Eiko gave up a house with a pool in America for three meals a day at a table with somebody else at it.

On the beach

Your grandmother knew

Tina Woods: friends, greens, sleep, exercise, fresh air. The terrifying part is that we already knew it and stopped doing it.

Twice, honestly

And it is slipping

Mikiko says the ranking has fallen because people eat too much. Taira Tsugo says neighbourly care has been lost. A blue zone is not a museum.

Two people, eight thousand miles apart, said the same thing

On the beach, Tina Woods called the whole recipe “everything that your grandmother used to tell you”. A few days later, standing in Emi-san’s kitchen at six in the morning watching her cook, Marek said, without thinking about it:

“I feel like in my grandparents’ kitchen.”

A Pole in a village in the East China Sea, recognising his own grandmother’s cooking. That is the argument of the whole quest, and neither of them was trying to make it. The rest of the month belongs to Live Beyond, the film and the book.

See the whole quest → Marek’s page