午夜剧场

The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon is located 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; consequently, it was registered as a UNESCO World Mixed Heritage site in 2012. While it has long been known as a mecca for divers worldwide, the number of visitors to Palau increased further upon registration, and currently, more than 120,000 people visit annually compared to the native population of approximately 18,000. Upon departure, each person is required to pay a $100 Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee, which is added to the airfare in advance.

Ten years prior to the World Heritage registration, I was staying in Palau for a long period as a graduate student to conduct field research. Because I lived a settled life in a rural village, I was never able to go to the Rock Islands. Fieldworkers who go 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 I never wavered and never went to the Rock Islands even though they were right under my nose. However, I now regret that I missed a precious opportunity to observe the social conditions prior to the World Heritage registration at the actual site of tourism.

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 viewing points representing 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 indicated by the title of the collection of essays to which I recently contributed, 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, battle sites of the Pacific War 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 the warring nations, Japan and the United States. Moving forward, I want to continue focusing on the dynamics of local memories of war in relation to leisure tourism, but I also want to remember the time when I could not go to the Rock Islands.