"That's the price you pay for our protection." - A high-ranking US official referring to the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by three American soldiers.
by Marius Gombrich
from The Japan Times
In our global information age, when all of us are exposed to more data than we can perhaps adequately manage, the appeal of cliches has never been stronger. By a process of reduction and crude characterization, that which is complex, ambiguous, and difficult-to- know becomes simple, and is summed up by a few stock images or ideas.
This has particularly affected the way we see countries and locales. Now a difficult and daring exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is attempting to reverse this process in the case of Okinawa, by inviting us to take a look at aspects of the archipelago that tend to get airbrushed out of the brochures that typically advertise it as a hibiscus-wreathed "paradise" of sun and sand, with a quaint archaic culture.
Looking like a typo, "Okinawa Prismed 1872-2008," the title of the exhibition, actually makes perfect sense as the intention of the curator, Katsuo Suzuki is to present a show where the image we have of Okinawa is "prismed," or split like a beam of light by a prism, in order to unravel it — "Rashomon"-like — into separate, complexly interwoven narratives, some of them at odds with the island's official place in Japanese history, its role in hosting important U.S. military bases, and most significantly its image as Japan's own domestic island paradise.
"The stereotype of Okinawa is made by the mass media and the interests of consumerism," Suzuki explains. "My point is to make the visitors question existing images of Okinawa in order to find its reality by themselves."
This intent seems obvious almost from the moment you enter, as the bulk of the exhibition, which also features paintings, installations and videos, is made up of monochrome photographs, of which there are more than 100. For somewhere as colorful as Okinawa, this reliance on black, white, and gray is a shock. So is this an intentional device to deconstruct preconceived notions?
"The 'colorful' image of Okinawa is a kind of stereotype constituted historically," Suzuki comments. "But I regard Okinawa as a special place of evocative power that has inspired many artists, poets and scholars. The aim of this show is to figure our meaning of this island as a creative source. I chose important artworks made in the islands for this exhibition, and I met not a few photographers who did such a wonderful job in monochrome."
While some of the photographers, like Genichiro Kakegawa and Taira Koshichi, deal in gritty reportage, detailing the often harsh everyday lives of Okinawans, other photographers evoke the elemental beauty of the islands. With their strong shadows and skittery clouds, Shomei Tomatsu's "Pencil of the Sun" works capture the sultry heat of the Okinawan summer, while Yasuo Higa's "Kuba no Ki" (1975-77) from "Rituals of Kudaka Island" evokes a sense of wind-borne mystery.
The exhibition's emphasis on photography also serves to fulfill another intention of the exhibition: to present Okinawa as a real place, existing in the modern world, with a distinct identity different from that of Japan. This is also why the exhibition avoids including traditional Okinawan craft arts, part of the stock representation of the islands that de-emphasizes their modernity. According to Suzuki, modernity in Okinawan culture has been suppressed because it evokes the islands' difficult history, including attempts to submerge the islands' distinct identity in the interests of national unity, as well as a lengthy period of U.S. military occupation, and the situation today where it bears the brunt of a continuing U.S. military presence in Japan.
"By stopping at early-modern times, the tense relationship between Japan and the United States gets abstracted, and the expressions made by earnestly confronting the reality in Okinawa lose the opportunity to be discussed properly," Suzuki writes in the exhibition catalog.
This is something the exhibition tries to make amends for. A video installation, "Wartime Experience Narrated with Okinawa Islanders' Language," (2003-2008) gives recognition to the impossible situation in which Okinawans were caught up during the struggle between two external powers — America and mainland Japan.
"In this exhibition, this oppression was represented in this video work, in which old Okinawa people are talking about their memories of the Battle of Okinawa in the Okinawan language," Suzuki explains. "Their spoken language is impossible to understand without subtitles in standard Japanese. And this language was suppressed and prohibited in schools and is on the verge of disappearing."
The islanders' ambivalence is more poetically summed up in a mesmerizing installation of eight illuminated photographs and a large wall-projection by Okinawan-born Chikako Yamashiro. Mistranslated as "Seaweed Woman" (2008), the Japanese title "Arthur Woman" better captures the artist's intent, which is clearly to invoke the Lady of the Lake from Arthurian legend. The installation shows a young woman emerging from or submerging beneath the waves. This figure from legend, with its connections to the trials and battles of the knights and the magical island of Avalon, resonates particularly well with the 20th century history of Okinawa.
"Okinawa Prismed 1872-2008" is showing till Dec. 21 at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; admission ¥850; open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. (closed Mon.; Fri. till 8 p.m.). For more information, call (03) 5777-8600 or visit www.momat.go.jp
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