Visualizing (im)mobility in post-reversion Okinawa: a comparative study of NDU’s Asia Is One (1973) and Chinen Seishin’s The Human Pavilion (1976)

ABSTRACT

This article compares two influential visual media works produced in post-reversion Okinawa: the film Asia Is One (1973), produced by Nihon Documentarist Union (NDU), and Chinen Seishin’s experimental play The Human Pavilion (1976). The performative deconstruction of Okinawan regional identity in these works reflects the emergence of (im)mobility as a critical concept for approaching Japanese ethnonational discourse and its mediated enactments during this period. Asia Is One employs a complex spatio-temporal mapping of Okinawa’s diverse historical networks of labour and cultural exchange to challenge visions of ambivalent synchronicity between Okinawa and the mainland advanced within the event of reversion. The Human Pavilion challenges structures of spectatorship developed in the 1975 Ocean Expo to demonstrate the limitations of visualizing ethnocultural particularity, gesturing to a pervasive and self-perpetuating silence integral to the production of ‘Okinawa’ as an ethnographic object. Reading these works in the context of post-reversion media ecologies offers a sense of the complex negotiation of Okinawan identity that developed in the Ocean Expo and the reversion, events that exposed and reproduced transhistorical legacies of (im)mobility in Okinawa.

KEYWORDS:

• Okinawa
• film
• (im)mobility
• reversion
• NDU
• Chinen Seishin

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their kind guidance in helping me to improve and rework this article. I am particularly grateful to Kosuke Fujiki for his translation of Nakazato Isao’s article ‘Continuing as an “Open Incompleteness”: Motoshinkakarannū and Uncanny Okinawa’ featured in the Spring 2021 issue of JJKC and for sharing his translations of Nakazato during the writing of this article. I would also like to thank Alexander Zahlten for his assistance in reworking the initial draft of this article and for introducing me to NDU.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Media’ and ‘mediation’ are two central concepts of this paper. I use these terms to foreground both the networked/ecological relations among the works and events of interest and their non-representational capacity as sites of negotiation for clarifying and/or complicating discourses of cultural difference and geopolitical identity.

2 Deleuze (1992) does note that creativity can emerge from within the overdetermined conditions of hegemonic mediation, by using the tools this mediation itself to impute a radical openness/mobility, what Deleuze describes as an interstitial ‘silence’ (292). This corresponds to the position of the artists and filmmakers I examine in this article who utilize non-representational techniques of editing, splitting, and inversion to bring to the fore the limitations of representation itself and the ‘silences’/ ‘gaps’ that are produced between images.

3 I examine the 1978 version of the Japanese text, using footage recorded in Moriguchi Katsu’s documentary film, Act 1, Scene 1 Okinawa Human Pavilion (Ichimaku ichiba: Okinawa jinruikan, 1978), as well as photographs of various performances to demonstrate its visual production. All translations are my own unless otherwise specified.

4 Fragments of these initial performances and more extensive interviews with Kōki appear in Moriguchi’s Act 1, Scene 1 Okinawa Human Pavilion.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Patrick Chimenti

Patrick Chimenti is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His work examines the intersection of literature, film, and print media in post-war Japan. His current research project explores the transformation and imagination of ‘peripheralized regions’ in and around Japan following the period of high economic growth.