Memoirs of the Battle of Okinawa: From the Perspective of ‘Mabuigumi’

This article focuses on the story ‘Mabuigumi’ (‘Spirit Stuffing,’ 1998) by Medoruma Shun, a contemporary writer of Okinawan descent. The story explicitly depicts the history of the Battle of Okinawa and the people who were traumatized by the war. First, this article demonstrates that landscapes and living things evoke memories of the war and people, and they play a significant role in showing that people’s present lives remain threatened. Second, the article conjectures that an āman (a hermit crab) represents Okinawa, which was traumatized by the mainland, and shows that Uta (the protagonist) is burdened by the guilt of her own survival. In addition, it considers the love of a mother (Omito) and son (Kōtarō) for each other. Third, this article illustrates that the history of the mainland was decentralized through visual expressions of personal memories of war. The history of mainland Japan does not regard the fact that Japanese soldiers killed Okinawans during the Battle of Okinawa. History, as officially narrated by the Okinawans, changes its narrative content depending on the shifting relationship between Okinawa and the mainland. This work relativizes and decentralizes the official historical narratives of the mainland and Okinawa through repressed personal memories of the war.

“Riding a Stick of Dynamite”

This chapter details Harry Dean's military service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was one of several actors who served in the South Pacific, including Lee Van Cleef, Lee Marvin, and Harry Dean's future acting teacher Jeff Corey. Following a description of life in Navy boot camp, the chapter discusses service on an LST (landing ship, tank), which Harry Dean described as "riding a stick of dynamite." He was ship's cook on the hardware-carrying USS LST-970, which saw service in the Battle of Okinawa -- the last major battle of the war -- and faced the death-defying missions of Japan's kamikaze pilots. The Navy lost more ships in this battle than at any other time in its history. "I was damn lucky I didn't get blown up or killed," Harry Dean said about the experience.

Okinawan Dream Show

This chapter deals with the oeuvre of Okinawan filmmaker Takamine Gō and video artist Yamashiro Chikako, with an emphasis on the former’s feature Queer Fish Lane (Hengyoro, 2016). Taking as a point of departure Gilles Deleuze’s framework of time-image, which underpins his explication of modern political cinema, this chapter examines how Takamine has experimented with textual strategies and forms of expression in configuring the ‘stratigraphic image’ apropos of Okinawa, wherein the boundaries between the actual and the virtual and between the real and the imagined are blurred. Meanwhile, I also turn to Yamashiro Chikako’s recent narrative-oriented video works that have been intricately connected to the legacies of the Battle of Okinawa and the current waves of protests against the US military bases on the islands.

Depictions of the Battle of Okinawa and its Social and Cultural Complexity using a transmedia approach: The Case of Gima Hiroshi (1923-2017)

The battle of Okinawa of 1945 was one of the bloodiest battles of the Asia Pacific War, with nearly a quarter of the Okinawan population perishing. This paper examines paintings, woodblock prints and manga that depict this battle, and through analysis of these works I show how deeply they reflect significant issues relating to Okinawan history, culture, and society, notably the struggles of its citizens and Okinawa’s social and political complexities. This paper explores several artists’ visual descriptions of the brutal and catastrophic Battle of Okinawa, particularly in terms of how their works disseminated the artists’ views on the battle, as well as war in general, to an audience beyond Okinawa prefecture. Art that concentrates on the Battle of Okinawa, either as a focal point or a cultural influence, has been little studied so far, most probably because it has been treated as a sensitive and controversial issue, culturally and especially politically. Artists are grouped and discussed according to regional identities (Okinawa or non-Okinawa), generation (pre-war or post-war), and gender. I also analyse the complexities of the objectives and challenges of each artist who was trying to create works that exposed the social reality, though my main focus is on the woodblock print artist, Gima Hiroshi, who was an Okinawan diaspora artist with a more transmedia approach than 2 contemporary painters such as Maruki Toshi (1901-1995), Maruki Iri (1912- 2000), and war-theme (sensō) manga artist, Kyō Machiko (b. 1978).

Strategic narratives and US military bases in Japan: How ‘deterrence’ makes the Marine base on Okinawa ‘indispensable’

Governed directly by the US from the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 until its reversion to Japan in 1972, the island of Okinawa hosts the majority of US military bases in Japan despite comprising only a fraction of a percent of the total land area. The central government in Tokyo has refused to countenance revision of the status quo in the face of increasing local opposition, including mass protests and the election of anti-base politicians at the local, prefectural and national level. The relocation of the controversial Marine base at Futenma to Henoko in the north of the island, has become the locus of opposition in recent years. Activists, local media and local politicians call for it to be relocated outside Okinawa to reduce the burden on the prefecture, while the central government, conservative national media and the US maintain that the current relocation plan must be implemented – to do otherwise would undermine deterrence. This article analyses the projection of the deterrence strategic narrative in the conservative Japanese media. The first section locates the concept of strategic narratives in a discursive epistemology, and highlights the importance of discursively empowered actors, before placing the newspapers in the broader context of the Japanese media environment, which differs from that of other highly developed countries in the way it empowers traditional actors. The main section of the article then traces the development of the narrative from the late 1990s, analysing how it discursively links the Marines’ presence with the ‘China threat’, and how it renders those who question the narrative as naïve, or even dangerous, for potentially undermining the Japan–US alliance and thus the security of all Japan. The article concludes by assessing the effects of the narrative, including potential unintended consequences for deterrence in the long run.

Oppression and Suppression: The Lingering Controversy Surrounding the Meaning of the Battle of Okinawa in Japanese Memory

Historical facts are sealed, but the memory of a particular history changes from one generation to the next. The highly politicized nature of historical memory determined that only one interpretation can be right at a time. Yet when individual memories contradict what is taught publicly, such gap creates an identity conflict within generations of war survivors. Such is the conventionality of Okinawa’s unique history. Focusing on the relationship between “memory” and “identity,” Countering this conception is the suppressed memories of individuals whose recollection challenged the conventional portrayal of victimhood. Drawing on the second-generation war survivor Medoruma Shun’s fictional novella Droplets as primary document, this paper explores the conflict of identities of Okinawans from a perspective of “memory.” Emphasizing the consequence of prolonged war trauma created by the lapses in public and private memories, the paper points to the bridge of the two as a potential gateway to resolve not only identity conflicts within individual war survivors, but collective healing as a group in reconciliation with its own pastcrimes.