I’m a fan of my second hometown, Jeju City, which has a sister-state relationship with Hawaii.

Lieutenant Sylvia Luke visited Jeju Island – South Korea’s largest island – in August this year with a delegation which included Jimmy Tokioka, director of the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, and executives from the Hawaii Tourism Authority and the travel industry.

The primary goal of the tourism mission, according to Luke’s office, was to strengthen relations and create opportunities for cooperation between Hawaii and the Republic of Korea, including Jeju, promote cooperation in tourism and promote mutual goodwill under the theme “Island Connections: Reimagining Tourism.”

I am interested in the future of the island, how it plans and copes with carrying capacity, and want to share my experiences with Jeju. I believe in the importance of international cross-cultural knowledge and strongly support Hawaii’s sister state program.

The Sister State Program was created to advise the governor and the legislature on matters relating to sister state or provincial relations and relations generally between the state and the states or provinces of foreign countries.

Hawaii lists 20 sister state or provincial relationships. There are many activities associated with sister states that go on, but are not necessarily well known or often reported in the media. We are much more international than many would suspect.

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Jeju in the 1970s, and this year I visited again. The island is so massively changed and developed with hotels and high-rise apartments and new business districts that it is almost unrecognizable from that time.

There is a fairly new high-tech research and education hub with a hotel and four independent international elite high schools as part of the complex. Environmentalists are not too happy with the extensive land use development. Others see it as a new education and technology niche for Jeju’s future.

A tourist-oriented tea farm gets rave reviews. Windmills dot the coast. Well-developed hiking trails and beaches connect visitors with Jeju’s natural beauty, along with exclusive hotels and other amenities say: Jeju has arrived.

A bit of Jeju history

About the size of Maui, Jeju Island is off the southern coast of the Korean mainland, and with its mild climate and beaches, is sometimes called the Hawaii of the East.

(Note: Earlier romanization systems spelled the island Cheju. This was later changed by Korean linguists to Jeju.)

For many hundreds of years, Jeju was the independent kingdom of Tamna. Over the centuries, traditional Korean kingdoms took control, including during the time when the Mongols briefly colonized Korea and used the island to raise horses.

At one point, Dutch sailors ran aground, and their maps called the island Quelpart. During the Joseon or Yi dynasty (1392-1910), losers in Seoul’s rival power faction conflicts were often exiled to Jeju. Japan occupied all of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Sixty-eight years ago, Jeju was granted independent provincial status by the Korean National Government.

My host family during my Peace Corps days in the early 70’s (1970-mid 1973) were exiled to Jeju around 1500, so had been on the island for 500 years. Thus, there was a constant mix of indigenous residents, stranded navigators, northern Chinese, pirates from Japan and later left overs from when Japan colonized Korea for 35 years (1910-1945), and families from various parts of the Korean mainland including North Korea.

After World War II, violent conflicts erupted with the local population against Seoul’s armies resulting in over 30,000 deaths and the destruction of many rural villages. A prominent Buddhist temple was the site of major battles.

Demographic changes

Like all of Korea and much of Asia, birth rates are declining. The Korean government has just created a special task force to investigate so-called “depopulation.”

In 2021, the population of Jeju aged zero to 9,58,901. Within a year, this had shrunk to 55,536, or a decrease of 3,365. This decrease probably reflected fewer births. We see a similar decrease in the 20-29 age group from 86,681 to 84,016.

While other age groups increased, especially seniors, Jeju’s population is aging. The number of young families having children and the birth rate are decreasing. Japan is also very concerned about this imbalance in the age groups of the population.

Before the pandemic, the years 2016 and 2017 had the most tourists (15,852,980 in 2016) as well as foreign tourists (3,603,021). Of particular note were the over 3 million from China (85% of all foreign visitors) who also invested heavily in casinos (there are eight on the island) and hotels.

As you drive around the island, many of the road and street signs are not only in Korean but include the Chinese characters, or hanja. This reflects the importance of the economic impact of visitors from China at the time. But by 2022, this influx had shrunk to less than 10,000 per year, representing only 11.4%.

Thus, Jeju has experienced dramatic fluctuations in both numbers and sources of visitors and external investment. These large swings must have had parallel effects on foreign investment and spending on the island’s economy.

Immediately after the signing of a sister state pact with Jeju in the 1980s, Jeju Korean and Hawaiian leaders facilitated a series of important meetings in Hawaii and Jeju with conferences focused on promoting Jeju as an island of peace, general globalization, energy, urban and island planning, maritime affairs, education and tourism. Below is a photo of panelists and honored guests in a globalization conference in 1995. Three were former Peace Corps volunteers.

Why Hawaii Should Care

There are obvious common circumstances and questions we can ask about why we should care about sister-state relations beyond exchanges of teachers and government leaders.

The earliest common threads for many of our sister states include our shared challenges and government strategies to address the effects of climate change.

Jeju found that its coastal roads were too close to the coastline. Additional wave barriers are installed along the coast. An iconic lava rock formation known as Dragon Head Rock, a favorite among tourists, was decapitated after a strong storm. This year, Korean temperatures were higher than normal, and this negatively affected the growth of some vegetables, whose prices rose.

All share a heavy economic dependence on tourism and an initial sort of one-sided Big Brother source of support from the US for those who were much poorer and welcomed economic development advice.

Clearly, the enjoyment and value of learning about the homelands and cultures of Hawaii’s immigrant roots stimulated interest. Hawaii’s political establishment after World War II was fueled by generations of immigrants from Japan.

Many were created before the power of the internet and the expansion of jet travel to learn more about the world, especially Asian and Pacific nations.

In Hawaii, we could see a broader educational benefit of getting to know the world beyond our shores. Today, the University of Hawaii no longer requires any history courses for graduation.

Important Issues for Hawaii

Given the tremendous expansion of tourism, economic development and internet information, is tourism development still a relevant or necessary topic of interest? Do we or others like Jeju really want more than 10 or 15 million visitors? Or is it about contributing to a deeper, more sustainable and climate-responsible future?

Is Hawaii still striving for some kind of technological or economic leadership among the island nations of Asia and the Pacific? Perhaps this is as much a role for the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center as the tourism bureau.

Rather than being a source of support for others, are there innovations and programs from our sister states that we could learn and benefit from? Large investments in Jeju from the private sector may be of interest.

Do the historical developments and megatrends in our sister states provide objective indicators of where Hawaii may be headed, and should we be mindful of these trends when crafting our own policies and programs?

An informal snapshot of Jeju today

Increasingly proud of its pre-modern history, Jeju has renovated a number of old traditional structures in the central part of Jeju City, where there are regular performances of Yi Dynasty military rites and local oral dramas aimed at tourists.

Compared to the 1980s, Jeju has developed a wide range of tourist-related attractions, well-maintained, clean and highly geared towards those who want to experience nature. Beaches rent surfboards, there are hiking trails and so on. Public facilities are generally better maintained and cleaner than those on Oahu.

I have been in contact with local officials about what Hawaii can learn from Jeju.

“Going forward, we hope that Jeju and Hawaii will continue to cooperate in both tourism and environmental fields and identify effective policies and outcomes for our shared prosperity,” Kim Hee Chan, director of the Tourism Exchange Bureau for Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, wrote in a letter to me this month.

As a senator from Hawaii recently noted: “We have a lot of catching up to do in terms of cleanliness and maintenance of public facilities. Your comments echo those of many who have pointed out that Japanese train stations and other Asian economies seem to be taking better care of their facilities and transportation infrastructure than we do in Hawaii…”

Those points are well taken! We have a lot to learn from our Asian neighbors.