10 A & Q Okinawan Caves as Sites of Forgetting Jessica Nakamura In Okinawa, the past echoes. The events of the 1945 Battle of Okinawa cannot be left behind. Rather, in the physical spaces of Japan’s southernmost island prefecture, they manifest in unexpected and emotional ways. After U.S. bombs destroyed infrastructure in the months leading up to the battle, ground combat raged across the main island for more than eighty days. The battle’s high number of civilian casualties— more than one- third of the population— reflects Japan’s imperial cruelty. As the nation’s recent imperial acquisition in 1879, assimilationist practices converted Okinawan people into Japanese citizens. Yet, during the battle, Japanese soldiers grew to mistrust Okinawans and demanded or forced them to sacrifice themselves to prove their loyalty to the nation. Today, memories linger in Okinawa’s landscape. Okinawans live among former battle sites, and the battle asserts itself in everyday life when the discovery of unexploded shells closes neighborhoods and suspends residents in fear and uncertainty for hours. Another part of Okinawan life, U.S. military bases, installed soon after the war’s end with no regard for landownership or cultural value, border on civilian neighborhoods. Frequent sightings of soldiers and military machinery haunt the present as lingering ghosts of the war. While memories of the battle besiege contemporary Okinawan life, its commemoration and historicization have been harshly debated in contemporary Japan (1989 to the present). From the battle’s end to the mid-1980s, atrocities from the battle, especially Japanese military violence against Okinawan civilians, remained largely out of the public eye. Today, such topics have been widely documented and circulated, but conservative historical revisionists, aiming to maintain a dominant narrative about civilian sacrifice, continue to downplay the extent of the Japanese Imperial Army’s role in civilian casualties. Conservative historical revisionism, a movement active in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and thus at the center of the Japanese government , aims to control the official past of the Asia-Pacific War (1931– 45), with revisionists enforcing a positivist view of history that calls for written documents to verify and legitimize survivor testimonies. These arguments are built on information- based epistemologies— about what happened in the past, what events should be taught to schoolchildren. The passing of the war generation and lack of official documentation bring these debates to an impasse. As Minoru Iwasaki and Steffi Richter A & Q 11 (2008) argue, historical revisionists claim to seek “objective facts,” but in reality, they advance an emotional agenda driven to vouchsafe Japanese national history. In the face of written documents, revisionists do not alter their interpretations. The contradictions inherent in historical revisionism point to ways in which such epistemologies cannot fully represent the war past. Younger generations in Okinawa are caught between an impoverished “official” past, riddled with amnesia, and their lives amid the pervasive consequences of war. What is the responsibility to this felt, but undocumented, kinesthetic and affective history that erupts in the present? And, beyond Okinawa, given debates about remembering the war, how can and should those without direct connections to the past attend to it? The circumstances of the Battle of Okinawa and its remembrance demand other approaches to the past that fall outside of official forms of commemoration and historiography. Instead, as Norma Field (1997, 36) suggests, we must “extend our imagination” to what can constitute remains of the past. Along these lines, I turn to modes of engaging with the past that may have embodied and ephemeral attributes; these resist documentation but, as Lisa Yoneyama (2016) describes in Cold War Ruins, may be able to provide agency in silence. The landscape of Okinawa already proposes alternative modes of relating to the past. During the battle, many civilians took shelter in natural caves throughout the island; some of these became sites of atrocity when Japanese soldiers forced Okinawans to commit suicide to avoid enemy capture. These caves remain sites of mnemonic potential, active below the surface. Initially forgotten in postwar Japanese discourses of the war, the caves have been forever changed by the events of the Battle of Okinawa and remain as significant spaces in Okinawa’s contentious, packed terrain of U.S. military bases...