34. THE OLDEST VILLAGE IN THE WORLD

The best place to find a centenarian on Okinawa, perhaps in the world, is the village of Ogimi, in the northwestern part of the island. Over a third of its 3,100 residents are aged over sixty-five, with a dozen or more centenarians among them—the highest proportion in Japan and most likely the world.

Lissen, Asger, Emil, and I drove there along a coast road of dazzling beauty, the East China Sea glittering in the sunshine. We arrived in time for Sunday lunch, having made a reservation at the village’s only restaurant, specializing in longevity food.

Just outside Ogimi, we passed a stone marker on which was written: “At seventy you are but a child, at eighty you are merely a youth, and at ninety if the ancestors invite you into heaven, ask them to wait until you are one hundred, and then you might consider it.”

The village itself was just a single, poorly made street with small, low-rise houses, most of them wood, all of them with immaculate, lush gardens. In some of them elderly men and women tended their flowers, fruits, and vegetables—surveys have shown that gardening is good for longevity, and elderly Okinawans are keen gardeners. Only a passing funeral procession put a damper on the idyllic atmosphere.

The restaurant was a simple, open-fronted place with a corrugated plastic roof and bare wood tables and chairs. Above the entrance there was a large cactus loaded with freakish pink dragon fruit. Before we ate, I asked the owner, Emiko Kinjyo, if she might afterward be able to introduce us to a centenarian.

A few minutes later, she returned and beckoned us to follow her down the high street. We came to a dark, wooden, traditional open-fronted Okinawan house, essentially a large living room–bedroom with a small, neat garden surrounding it.

An elderly lady walked slowly out to meet us, smiling at Asger and Emil. We all smiled back. The woman’s name was Matsu Taira. She moved with grace and ease, her face exuding a fragile radiance. She smiled again and beckoned us to sit beside her as she knelt on the wooden veranda of her house (without a single knee crack, I might add). She was extraordinarily thin with thick gray hair swept back Don King–style. Her face was weatherworn but serene. She lived alone in the house, she told us, but was visited by her family daily. She still tended her garden, where she grew goya and potatoes. She ate little food, but it was fresh and mostly from her garden or the gardens of her friends. Her only vice was the occasional piece of Okinawan black sugar. She offered some to Asger and Emil, who had been standing some distance away eyeing this extraordinary woman warily, but now approached shyly.

We talked for a while, and I asked her about the war. She said she had hidden in the hills with her mother and sister for many weeks during the fighting. Her father had not survived. It struck me that perhaps this generation of Okinawans, the generation that had survived the war, really was unique. I was reminded of something Willcox had said to me about how impressed he had been by the strong will, the sheer stubbornness of many of the centenarians he had met. Of course, to have survived when a third of their number had perished must have taken astonishing levels of resourcefulness. Surely that will to survive had played an intrinsic role in their longevity.

Emiko explained that the Okinawans don’t in fact consider one hundred to be the big milestone we do in the West. Instead they celebrate the ninety-seventh birthday with a public party called kajimayaa. She recalled hers with a smile. All her family came, and there were pinwheels, she said, toy windmills that are always used to decorate a kajimayaa to symbolize a return to the youthfulness that Okinawans believe comes with age. The government gives them a lump sum, too.

Taira-san looked calm, then, slowly, tiredness crept across her face, and Emiko quietly suggested we should think about going.

Back at the restaurant, we ate rice and tofu, bamboo shoots, seaweed, prawn tempura, pickles, small cubes of braised pork belly, and a little cake and ice cream for dessert. The seaweed was especially remarkable—Okinawans call it umi-budo, or sea grapes; others call it sea caviar on account of its tiny pods arranged around an edible stalk like a DNA helix. The pods pop in your mouth, just like caviar, releasing a flavor of the sea.

Emiko explained that Okinawans differentiate between kusui-mun, which are foods with medicinal benefit, and ujinimun, which are those with nutritional value. She tried to blend the two, she said, offering us a traditional Okinawan dish called tofuyo, or fermented tofu (similar to the Chinese chou doufu, or “stinky tofu,” which is most likely where the Okinawans got the idea). The tofuyo was an evil-tasting, dark red tofu served in small cubes with toothpicks. The idea is that you are supposed to nibble the tiny morsels, but no one explained this to me, so I stuck a toothpick in one and ate it whole. The effect was instant and involuntary. I gagged and spat it out onto my plate.

Emil made a See? face, remembering only too vividly his experience with the dried scallop. “Oh my god, ugh, ugh, pfttcht. That is disgusting!” I said, desperately gulping down water. My mouth was burning. It was like Roquefort mixed with Korean fermented chili sauce, but apparently it is good for you. The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan did some research into tofuyo and came to the following conclusions:

Spontaneously hypertensive male rats at eight weeks of age were fed a diet containing lyophilized tofuyo for six weeks. At thirteen weeks of age, the systolic blood pressure of rats in the tofuyo group was significantly lower than that in the control group. After feeding them the experimental diets, the ACE activity of the kidney was significantly lower in the tofuyo group than that in the control group. Total cholesterol in the serum in the tofuyo group was significantly lower while the ratio of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) to total cholesterol in the tofuyo group tended to be higher than that in the control group.

Given the choice, I think I will take my chances with high cholesterol.