In an Okinawa Kitchen

 

A brief look at behavior modification in a time of manufactured truth.

There is a restaurant in Jacksonville, North Carolina, that is staffed by several women from (or descended from) the island of Okinawa in Japan. Jacksonville is home of Camp Lejeune, the largest Marine Corps base on the East Coast. The Marine Corps has a strong presence on Okinawa, so it is not surprising that some Okinawans and their descendants now call Jacksonville home.

The small restaurant has two seating areas: a few tables out front, and a counter in back that forms one side of the kitchen. I am an American of European descent who loves sitting at the counter so I can watch and listen to the women as they cook and transport Okinawan lunches. Accents are strong, especially among the older women, and sometimes I wonder whether they might be speaking Japanese or even the Ryukyuan language of older Okinawa. I assume that at least some of the younger women were born in the U.S., and their accent was learned at home. That is how band leader Lawrence Welk got his German-accented English. He was born and raised in a rural Germanic community in North Dakota.

I am writing this at the cusp of age 80. Though fraying at the edges, the center holds. Because I am now solitary and living the life of a suburban hermit, I am often slow to pick up on newer tenets and nuances in the Age of Behavior Modification, of political correctness and its inevitable plunge into censorship – oops! I mean cancel culture.

I grew up in an era that thrived on political incorrectness. It is imbedded in my unconscious, and is the home of many incorrect but instinctive responses in social situations. I recognize that these responses are not the fault of my conscious mind, but it is my fault to knowingly let them lie there uncorrected. With great effort over extended time, I have learned to intercept some of these incorrectnesses before they exit my pie hole and cause harm to me or others. Political correctness requires constant vigilance.

So back to the Okinawan kitchen, which prompted this examination. I know I’m not supposed to make much – or anything – of physical differences, but that’s not the human default. Noticing physical differences is. The Okinawan women on average seem darker than those on the islands to the north, which are in the temperate zone. Okinawa is subtropical. Hotter climates breed more melanin for protection against solar radiation.

My racist upbringing feasted on melanin. When I was growing up, even southern Europeans from Portugal to Italy were suspect because of their African proximities and ties, and their own higher natural levels of melanin. I remember the politically incorrect culture questioning the racial correctness of Lucile Ball’s husband, Desi Arnaz, who was from Cuba, where the races are more compatible.

Our capacity for demeaning others, whether by racial or cultural characteristics, is ancient and universal. When I lived in Montana, we told North Dakota jokes. It has occurred to me that the demeaning is the ultimate expression of our immune systems, keeping us alert to, and away from, strangers from strange lands. There of course is a biological basis for this. Consider the decimation by disease of Western Hemisphere indigenes during the European invasion and conquest.

In the COVID-19 pandemic we were quick to demonize the Chinese, to blame them for something that might actually have happened anywhere. According to recent research, the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 most likely originated in North America, with the earliest cases in Kansas or New York. All we know for sure about the origin of COVID-19 is that it was first documented in China. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where it originated. We Euro-Americans will continue to disparage other races and cultures – that is the default, the form; melanin and virus origin are just content.

In war, demeaning others isn’t enough. We must demonize them to justify killing them. To this day we call the conquest of the West the Indian Wars because it is less morally complicated to kill enemy combatants than it is to kill people defending what is left of their homeland. In war, racism and ethnicism become patriotic.

Given their deep human history and universality, racism and ethnicism will be impossible to eliminate by willful behavior modification alone, as so much of it remains invisible to so many people. It will be interesting to see how much applied political correctness – authoritarian behavior modification – we can accept.