The Okinawan table

The kingdom traded with China for five centuries and cooked accordingly. Stir-frying, braising, and a use of pork that no other Japanese region approaches: Okinawa has a saying that everything of the pig is eaten but the squeal, and it is not a joke about thrift so much as a description of the menu.

What to actually order

Goya champuru. Bitter melon stir-fried with tofu, egg and pork. Champuru means mixed together, and it comes from the same root as the Malay campur — a word that arrived by ship. The bitterness is not softened for you. It should not be.

Okinawa soba. Thick wheat noodles in a clear pork-and-bonito broth, with braised pork belly and fish cake. It contains no buckwheat at all, which caused a formal dispute in the 1970s with the mainland noodle authorities. Okinawa won the right to keep the name in 1978, and the anniversary — 17 October — is Okinawa Soba Day.

Rafute. Pork belly simmered slowly in awamori, soy and brown sugar until it gives way. Court cooking, and the single best thing on most menus.

Umibudo. "Sea grapes" — a seaweed of tiny green spheres that burst with salt water between the teeth. Eat them cold, with a little ponzu, and never over rice that is warm.

Order Okinawa soba where the locals eat it — at a plain shop with a plastic sign, at eleven in the morning. It is a working lunch, not a delicacy.

The longevity question, answered honestly

Okinawa genuinely was one of the longest-lived places on earth. That reputation was built on a generation born before the war, whose diet was overwhelmingly sweet potato, vegetables, soy and modest amounts of pork and fish, eaten in small quantity.

It has not held. Post-war Okinawa adopted American fast food earlier and more thoroughly than anywhere else in Japan, and by the turn of the century Okinawan men had fallen sharply down the prefectural life-expectancy table — a shift discussed locally in blunt terms. Obesity rates here are among Japan's highest.

So the traditional Okinawan diet is a real and well-documented thing worth eating. It is simply not what most people on the island eat now. Anyone selling you the myth in its present tense is selling you something.