The Japanese Encounter with the South: Japanese Tourists in Palau

This paper examines some sociocultural implications of Palauan tourism through the lens of Japanese tourists. In 1997, Palau had some seventy thousand international visitors, of whom more than twenty thousand were Japanese, second only to the Taiwanese, whose visits have been increasing rapidly in recent years. After discussing the general characteristics of tourism in Palau, I investigate the Japanese way of encountering Palau, not only through contemporary tourism, but also in its historical context. Tracing the history of Japanese colonial expansion to the South, the paper pays special attention to the Japanese type of orientalism, in which Japan needed to orientalize the South as a backward and undeveloped place in order to de-orientalize Japan as an advanced and modernized country. The paper also argues that this Japanese orientalism is at work in contemporary postcolonial Pacific tourism. Analyzing the interregional interaction of Japan and Palau in this way, I explore how the Pacific is situated in the larger modern world system

Hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios of thermal waters of Okayama Prefecture, Japan

Hydrogen and oxygen isotope rations of thermal waters from 46 spas in Okayama Prefecture range from -62.6 to -29.2% in δD and from -10.0 to -4.4% in δ18O, respectively. The isotope rations indicate that all but one of the thermal water in Okayama prefecture are meteoric in origin. The Ofuku thermal water is the only exception, which is probably a mixture of seawater and meteoric water with the ratio of about 1. Sulfur isotope rations of dissolvel sulfate in the thermal waters range from -6.2 ti 59.3% in δ34S. The high δ34S values observed in some thermal waters may be due to bacterial reduction of sulfate