I'm currently in Okinawa, where until recently lifespans were the longest on the planet.
If you made it to sixty here and had somehow survived the war,
you could expect to live passed eighty, up to ninety years old.
On average.
Since then, however, it's been dropping off a little bit.
Not enough to cause alarm among the locals, but for those who have been fetishizing
the longevity of these people, it has caused a little bit of a stir.
Thousands of news articles have been rewritten to have newer, hotter takes.
Because as it turns out and lucky for the plot of this video, there is more to longevity
than mixing the perfect amount of pork with the perfect amount of rice.
The Okinawan diet is good.
It was good.
And in all likelihood it's going to continue to be be good.
But if you want to live a really long time, the one thing you truly need is money.
So many people want to live longer.
I don’t mean longer than they’ve lived right now, I think that’s most of us,
but longer than the average.
They take weird vitamins and go on diets and cleanses and all sorts of other fads.
Not based on the premise that it will necessarily make their lives better today,
but that it might tack on a couple more years on the end.
Which to me, seems like a curse, not a gift.
The worst monkey’s paw is being given more life at the end by making life worse in the middle.
But there’s no denying it's popular.
Here in Okinawa, there’s an entire tourist subculture of fetishization around the idea
that they hold some sort of secret to our survival.
And in true Rare Earth fashion, as is the case any time I come across tourism in its most comical forms,
I’m going to spend this entire video making fun of them for it.
In researching this episode, I read about a hundred articles on Japan’s life expectancy.
Everything from the AARP to the Guardian, from tiny motherhood blogs to actual medical research.
I put in way too much time trying to determine what was true here.
And from what I found, it's actually quite simple.
Virtually all of these articles are lying to you.
Not lying in the direct sense of telling you a fact that isn’t true, but lying by means of omission.
And I’m sure that many conspiracy minded people will claim that this is due to their
corporate overlords handing down decrees about keeping wealth inequality on the hush-hush or whatever,
but I’m more of an Occam’s razor type myself.
I think they’re lying because they’re lazy, and dietary longevity in some foreign land
is an incredibly easy clickbait story that intellectually lazy people just love to hear.
Why do the Japanese live longer, these journalists ask.
Food!
They respond.
Something you could be doing but aren’t!
Which is in some ways true.
I don’t want to deny the facts here.
Scientific studies on the Japanese, and more specifically Okinawan aboriginal diet,
have shown that those that stick to the common core food groups have on average done better
than those that haven’t.
Japanese citizens eat more fish, less saturated fats and fewer calories than other nations.
It’s not that the news is wrong in saying that, it's just that they’ve extended the idea
well beyond its natural legs.
In Okinawa, they sell all varieties of local foods under the idea that they’ll extend your life.
Many of whom have ample scientific backing.
Goya, the bitter melon common to most Okinawan meals, is world-famous for its health benefits.
Sweet potato from the main island is a staple of nearly every desert
and sea grapes off the coast are presented on TV in the mainland as a rare and life-giving delicacy.
In perhaps the most direct statement for tourists, chomeiso leaves from Yonaguni
are specifically marketed as “life extending”.
And as I mentioned before, none of these statements are specifically a lie.
They’re just openly misrepresenting the truth.
If you read these articles, you’d imagine the Japanese to be superhuman,
well surpassing any country by leaps and bounds.
But in reality, they barely live a third of a year longer than the next highest nation.
For those already aged sixty, there is virtually no discernible difference between
any of the major Western nations.
Or, perhaps I should say, the major Western nations with quality access to healthcare.
The recent collapse of the Okinawan lifespan has likely little to do with their changing diet,
just as the drastic growth of the mainland post-war lifespan had little to do
with them returning to their ancestral ways.
In both cases, the changes seem far more in line with fluctuations to personal wealth
and access to medical care than they do with any shift in consumption.
The key to understanding the drop in life expectancy of Okinawans is to understand that
it's being undertaken in comparison to mainland Japan, not as an isolated area.
They aren’t dying off at a much faster rate so much as other parts of the country
are living slightly longer now.
The comparison is no longer a stark.
And while nobody truly understands exactly why that is, it’s almost always pitched as dietary,
and I feel like in turn like there are certain things being overlooked when this story is brought up by the media.
Much of the media claims that Americanization of the diet is to blame.
And certainly, after the war, the influx of foreigners with foreign meals and ideas about health
were bound to have an effect on the local population.
Unquestionably, people here are now eating more burgers and more salt
and more processed foods than ever before.
But so are the mainlanders.
It would be hard to visit Tokyo and Naha and think that Naha was somehow more Westernized in their diet.
So there must be more to it than that.
And the way I see it, and the way my research presented it to me is that it has to be healthcare.
Japan has one of the most effective and cheapest healthcare systems on the planet.
But that hasn’t extended equally to the Okinawans.
Not just because they’re a subjugated people treated as second-class citizens in Japanese society,
relegated to their own community’s most dangerous jobs with worse pay, treated with less concern,
and overall allowed less equality in society.
But also because they’re island folk, and not every island is prepared for
maintaining the health of its citizens like those on the mainland.
On the island of Yonaguni, for example, Kata and I caught a nasty strain of strep throat
and found ourselves visiting the only clinic available.
It was a tiny three room box separated by curtains, with barely enough capacity for
a dozen visitors.
If anything serious happened, it was incredibly clear us that we’d have to be flown somewhere else.
And there are few people in such an environment that are going to the hospital for anything
but the most important illnesses, simply because it’s a bigger pain to do so.
But that's not the case on mainland.
On mainland, as more people urbanize and the cities densify and become wealthier and more developed,
it just becomes easier to access a doctor.
Wealth and the ability to see a doctor promptly, within a reasonable budget, for the max number of citizens,
is the key to statistical longevity.
Diet is secondary.
That’s what every news article I read seemed to miss.
If fish and a lack of meat was the ticket to longevity, Switzerland wouldn’t be in second.
If a lack of processed foods was the ticket, Australia wouldn’t be in fourth.
What all the leading nations share is access to quality, timely, socialized medicine.
Not just goya.
But with all of that said, I still don’t want to finish this video without spending at least a little bit more time
mocking the tourists who came here to eat the superfoods.
Because they’re almost never doing so in a way that could possibly be pitched as beneficial anyway.
Tourists come to Okinawa from the mainland to eat goya.
But then they find it tastes terrible.
So they turned into ice cream and shakes.
Where it still tastes terrible.
They just end up throwing it out after the third sip.
They eat the sweat potato but they do it as desert, as pie.
They eat the sea grapes with giant steaks and they drink the chomeiso leaf after a couple of shots of sake.
Nobody actually wants this stuff.
Even if the diet was the key to longevity, all this fetishizing does is symbolically sends
a few pack a day smokers on a single beach run during their vacation.
None of the tourists who are visiting here are going home to change their diet
to that of the indigenous Okinawans.
It’s all novelty.
They’re just coming here for a quick hit of theoretical health, and then leaving back to how they were before.
Only for the Japanese, I guess they’re now doing it a bit more ironically, because statistically
they’re actually living longer just staying home.
If you want to believe that fad diets are what keep you healthy, then by all means
come here to Kokusaidori and have a bit of goya ice cream.
It tastes terrible, so you can pretend it’s working.
But if you want to go somewhere on vacation wherever the culture might actually extend your life,
just choose somewhere that has got socialized healthcare.
This is Rare Earth.
And those are some old ladies.