Bridging between “here/now” and “there/then”: guiding Japanese mainland school “peace education” tours in Okinawa

Abstract

Anthropologists and geographers have pointed out an inherent dilemma in educational tours, such as fieldtrips and educational “dark” tours, which bring tourists to the places where a tragic event befell. While these tours emphasize a difference between the learner-tourists’ home and their travel destinations as a source of great pedagogical potential, the learner-tourists must also bridge the gap for their educational experience to be meaningful. The article examines “peace education” school tours from Japanese main islands to Okinawa, the site of the tragic Battle of Okinawa in 1945 and the host of massive U.S. military bases today, guided by local peace activists who view tour-guiding, or what they refer to as “peace guiding”, at the sites relevant to the past war and current militarization as a means of political activism. Through two ethnographic snapshots of tour-guiding for the school tours by these “peace guides”, the article demonstrates how the educational tours’ spatiotemporal dilemma can be mediated by engaging and thought-provoking narrative performances by tour guides.

Keywords:

• Japan
• Okinawa
• tourism
• education
• war
• militarism

Notes

1. Currently, approximately 75% of the total land area exclusively used by U.S. forces in Japan is located in Okinawa Prefecture although the prefecture comprises only 0.6% of Japan's total land area (Okinawa-ken Chiji Kōshitsu Kichi-Taisaku-ka 2014).

2. The motivations of dark tourists have long been a subject of debate, ranging from the views that they are searching for “aura” that is deemed absent in their everyday lives (Diller and Scofidio 1994, p. 25), expressing “anxiety and doubt about the project of modernity” (Lennon and Foley 2000, p. 11; see also Sharpley and Stone 2009), delightfully consuming the “unusual” and “horrific” sites as spectacles (Ashworth and Hartmann 2005; Dann 2005), pursuing the reconciliation with a painful past and catharsis (Kugelmass 1996), being motivated by “feelings of moral obligation” to learn about the history and educate others (Thurnell-Read 2009, pp. 47–48), to trying to “(re)construct the moral geographies which bring events of the past into proximity” of their present lives at “home” (Hughes 2008, p. 328).

3. The teachers were also threatened by the worldwide escalation of nuclear armament in the 1970s and 1980s (Takahashi 2006, p. 35). Okinawa shūgaku ryokō was boosted in the late 1980s when the school boards in Naichi Prefectures began to permit school air travel, and the national government began to offer financial aid for school trips in 1988 (Okinawa-ken Kankō Konbenshon Byūrō 2009, p. 2).

4. Despite this preparation, many students confessed that their prevailing images of Okinawa before shūgaku ryokō were its hot weather, blue sky and ocean, and white-sand beaches (Den'en Chōfu Kōtō Gakkō 1996), a primary signifier of Okinawa's geographical distinction from Naichi. The peace guides I interviewed also told me that the students' eagerness to learn from the peace study program during shūgaku ryokō varies greatly, often reflecting their teachers' enthusiasm, or lack thereof, for peace education and Okinawa.

5. Even though the melodramatic description of Okinawans' deaths at the Battle of Okinawa as “noble and patriotic sacrifice” have become uncommon in recent years, bus guides for commercial tours continue to highlight the tragic nature of their deaths (Ōshiro 2004; Ōta 2004). For a comparative analysis of guiding narratives at the Battle of Okinawa-related sites by commercial tour guides and peace guides, see Suzuki (2013).

6. Okinawan academics and activists wrote numerous guidebooks specifically for shūgaku ryokō students to introduce them to the “backstreet” destinations and encourage them to learn not only about the Ryūkyū Kingdom's history and culture but also about the Japanese annexation/colonization, Okinawans casualties during the war, and the continuing oppression of Okinawans after the war under U.S. occupation and the U.S. military presence after 1972 (Aniya et al. 1985; Okinawa-ken Kōkyōso Nanbu Shibu and Heiwa Kyōiku Kenkyū Iinkai 1986; Arasaki et al. 1992; Ōshiro and Mezaki 2006; Okinawa-ken Kōkyōso Kyōiku Shiryō Sentā ‘Gama’ Henshū Iinkai 2009).

7. The narratives quoted in this article are some of the same peace guide's guiding narratives quoted in my other examinations of peace guiding (Suzuki 2012, 2013).

8. Prior to conducting the participant-observation of school educational tours in Okinawa guided by OPN peace guides, I became an OPN member in 2008 by paying annual membership dues (10,000 yen, or about US$120) because I became sympathetic to the aforementioned OPN's goals. My OPN membership is significant for this article not only because it implicates my bias in my interpretation of peace guiding by OPN members but also because it shaped my positionality in my participant-observations of the peace study tours. I joined and observed seven peace study tours guided by the members of OPN and the University of the Ryukyus Peace Guiding Club.

9. The guides' names are pseudonyms.

10. All guiding narratives presented in this article were originally spoken in Japanese, and were translated into English by the author.

11. Some peace guides are increasingly critical of what they see as the overemphasis on “gama shock”. They claim that many of the Okinawans during the battle who were non-military personnel did not or could not remain in the caves to escape the relentless bombing; therefore, gama should not be presented as a space that symbolizes the Okinawan mass' experience of the Battle of Okinawa (personal communication with OPN and the University of the Ryukyus peace guides, 28 August, 2010).

12. Most, but not all, Okinawan primary and secondary schools include peace study in their curriculum, and many peace study programs, like Naichi schools' shūgaku ryokō, include visits to a gama, war memorials, and museums, as well as battle survivors' storytelling, typically during the month of June, which is designated as “Peace Month” (Heiwa Gekkan) by the prefectural government.

13. An examination of the peace study program's impact on students is out of this study's scope. Although the Okinawan peace guides and the Naichi school teachers I interviewed insisted that the students were often moved by the experience, and they seemed to engage the issues surrounding war and peace more seriously after shūgaku ryokō, it is difficult to gauge the tour's long-term effects because, as Feldman stated in his study on Israeli students' pilgrimages to the Holocaust-related sites in Europe, “[l]ong-term changes in behavior cannot be inferred from the students' reactions in the short term”, and the trips' impact is “difficult to isolate from a person's life history” (Feldman 2008, p. 233).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Denison University under the Denison University Research Foundation Research Grant; Pre-Tenure Fellowship; and Michele T. Myers Professional Development Grant.