“It’s like Hawai’i”: Making a tourist utopia in Jeju Island, 1963-1985

Abstract

This paper examines the trajectory, ambitions, and practices involved in the official national and provincial planning for Jeju Island from 1963 to 1985 as it became reimagined as the so-called ‘Hawai'i of East Asia’. Jeju Island has been constantly built, left unfinished, demolished, and rebuilt at each wave and ebb in regional tourism trends. Jeju has thus become a complicated geography of heavy contradictions as South Korea’s prime tourism experiment. Before the 2002 ‘Free International City’ project, the larger region of Jeju Island was identified as a ‘specified region’ from 1963 for experimentation in tourism. By virtue of its historic marginality, Jeju has been portrayed as a pristine internal frontier ripe for tourism and utopian transformation ‘like Hawai’i’. Surprisingly, however, ‘Hawai’i’ does not actually appear in official planning documentation, even while it is a frequent talking point in public discourse. In this paper, I discuss the specter of ‘Hawai’i’ in Jeju tourism development and address the discrepancy between official development planning strategies and colloquial references to Hawai’i, observing that reference to ‘Hawai’i’ was not from initial design but followed the late 1950s to 1960s zeitgeist in which tourism itself became a mark of distinction for modernity.