Abstract
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).
Highlights
It was not until almost thirty years after the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 that artists began to wrestle with the problem of how to convey, in images, the slaughter and the devastation of war
ART AND REMEMBERANCE These were not the only controversial issues that Gima sought to bring into the light. His third battle book, ‘The Battle of Okinawa: Korean Military labour and Comfort Women’ (Okinawa sen: Chōsen gunpu to jūgun ianfu) – the product of a series of posters he created for the documentary film Song of Arirang (1991) (Figure 5) – dealt with the highly sensitive subject of the use of Korean forced labour and comfort women, housed in buildings constructed in Japanese military bases on the island, by both Japan and the U.S The eponymous Arirang is the name of a Korean folk song
For many Okinawans, the Battle of Okinawa has become a token of communal identity, yet its representation remains a source of contention
Summary
ISSUE 1 – Between Texts and Images: Mutual Images of Japan and Europe ISSUE 2 – Japanese Pop Cultures in Europe Today: Economic Challenges, Mediated Notions, Future Opportunities ISSUE 3 – Visuality and Fictionality of Japan and Europe in a Cross-Cultural Framework ISSUE 4 – Japan and Asia: Representations of Selfness and Otherness. The illustrations and photographs, in particular, are reproduced in low digital resolution and constitute specific and partial details of the original images. They perform a merely suggestive function and fall in every respect within the fair use allowed by current international laws. SCIENTIFIC BOARD Jean-Marie BOUISSOU, International Research Centre, European Training Programme Japan, Sciences Po CERI (France); Christian GALAN, Centre of Japanese Studies (CEJ), INALCO, Paris (France); Winfred KAMINSKI, formerly Faculty of Media and Media Education (IMM), TH Köln (Germany); Ewa MACHOTKA, Department of Asian, Middle. OTMAZGIN, Department of Asian Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel); ŌTSUKA Eiji, The International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyōto (Japan); WONG Heung Wah, School of Modern Languages and Literature, The University of Hong. Art and Remembrance: Gima Hiroshi, the Marukis, and the representations of the Battle of Okinawa
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