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Christopher Nelson, "When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa" (Duke UP, 2025)
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Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format. Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6.
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Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production questions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello everyone. Welcome to the New Books in Japanese Studies. The Japanese of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Ansu Weigenberg. I'm a historian of Penn State and Kyush University. Today I'll be talking to Christopher Nelson about his book When a Bonespeak, the Living, the Dead and The Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa, which came out this year, 2025 with Duke. In when the Bones Speak, Nelson explores how the dead of Okinawa continue to shape the moral, political and everyday life of the living, and how the sacrifices and violence of the battle of Okinawa still impact the landscape and people of Okinawa today. Through ethnography, historical analysis and philosophical reflection, Nelson traces how acts of remembrance, sacrifice and artistic practice animate a fraught dialogue between past and present. I've known Dr. Nelson in his work for many years now, and I'm thrilled to have him on Coscast. Hi Chris, thank you for coming up.
- [02:54]
B
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm really happy to have this conversation with you.
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C
So let me start with the usual question that we ask here and ask you what brought you to write this book and why now?
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B
Well, that's a very long and a very short answer. The long answer would be, I feel as if a project like this is kind of the culmination of everything that I had done up until this point. My previous career, my life before I was an academic as a Marine infantryman, and my work in Okinawa as an anthropologist. All of these brought questions and concerns, senses of obligation and duty and curiosity to me. And that led me to conceive of the broad outlines of this project. But actually, when I set off to do this, I had finished an earlier book and was going to Okinawa to do fieldwork. I had a very, very different project in mind. I was really interested in doing a project that was about communication with the dead and madness. And I had hoped to work more closely with Utah, the self described shaman in the Okinawan communities. And I arrived in Okinawa in 2010 and I set to work on laying the groundwork for an ethnographic project about that. But a friend of mine, an Okinawan anthropologist, called me up and said, hey, there's a really good talk tonight at Okinawa Daigaku. Where, where it's a local activist named Gushiken Takamatsu, and he's going to talk about work that he's doing about recovering human remains from the battlefields in Okinawa. Why don't you come with me? And I said, oh, that sounds like interesting. So I went along to Okinawa Daigaku with him. We took our seats in the auditorium and Gushkin began a presentation about this project that he was engaged in. And you know, he talked about what led him to do it and his experience of recovering human remains from the battlefield. And then he talked about other people who were involved in his project. He talked about how he was involved with a collective of formerly homeless laborers who had been organized by an Okinawan Baptist minister and how they participated alongside him. And he talked about how Okinawan activist artists like Higa Toyomitsu had also joined him in the field. And I just thought, there's this incredible world unfolding in front of me in this discussion. And I got up the next morning and I called him. I went and talked with him, and I just put aside, for the most part, the other project that I was working on and kind of created a new research project about this on the fly. And that occupied me for field work anyway, for about the next three years.
- [05:51]
C
Yeah, I like how serendipity bring us. I mean, my current work also regards human remains and also regards something that accidental, basically taking a stroll through a temple and finding a tomb and asking yourself, how does all come together? I want to dive more into this question of the scholar and how we do our work. And I want to bring a quote that you write in the beginning of the book. And you write that my concerns with sacrifice are different. I have my own obligations to the past, and I bring my own tools as an anthropologist with those. I have tried to understand the ways in which ordinary Okinawans, haunted by memories of their own sacrifice and exploitation, have struggled to live with the unbearable. The past is not simply theirs to work through, to move beyond. They are caught up in a web of people and practices, living and dead, visible and immaterial, that exert powerful forces, often beyond their control. Can we perhaps speak about the triangle, the dead, the living, and the scholars, and who looks at them? Because we are not of the community. And this is, in my work on. This is something that comes up a lot in your book, really spoke to this for me. So I want to talk a little bit more about this relationship.
- [07:11]
B
Yeah, I think that that is a really compelling question and one that we all have to think about reflexively when we're engaging in the projects that we do. In part, for me, I feel as if there are triangles imposed on triangles in my field work. I have always been interested in the way in which local scholars are involved in critique and understanding of the things that interest me. And so I find myself working with mainland Japanese anthropologists, historians, folklorists, Okinawan anthropologists, historians, literary scholars. And I'm interested in this kind of reflexivity that they bring to their own research. But then I feel that that really compels me even more to situate myself in relationship to that. So when the Okinawan people that I know are thinking about the ways in which American military colonialism has impacted the experience of their lives, how combat involving American soldiers shaped the world that they live in today. And I'm not simply an American, but I'm a former American Marine. I have to think about my own participation in that. Members of my family served in Okinawa during World War II. And whether I want to acknowledge having an obligation or not. I'm enmeshed in these kinds of relationships, but not necessarily in the same way that an Okinawa. In fact, definitely not in the same way that an Okinawan or a Japanese scholar, a mainland Japanese scholar, might be. And so I think that it's really important to think about this kind of skewed relationship that we as scholars have to the same kind of triangle that you have laid out. Like, I am a scholar, but I'm not quite the same kind of scholar that the other scholars who are working there are. And I have my own intellectual apparatus that I share in many ways with my colleagues in Japan, but that are also grounded in my own particular experience of university in the United States and of the, you know, particularity of the education at my own university, the circle of anthropologists or whatever that I move in, you know, and I bring that to questions in a way that's also different than the kinds of questions that my friends who are Okinawan scholars might be asking. And yet, at the same time, you know, they're very cosmopolitan scholars, too. They've been educated at universities in Japan, but also at universities in the United States and in Europe. And the texture and the complexity of these discussions and perspectives really gets bound together and interwoven in complicated ways.
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C
Do you ever get any pushback? The fact that you're an American and you used to be a Marine, is it.
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B
You know, I think that much of the pushback that I am attentive to comes from within myself. I feel, of course, you know, I have to always announce these kinds of things to people. I try to let them know about my background and what my interests interests are, what I'm doing when I open a dialogue with them, because I think that it's only ethical and responsible for them to know who I am and what I'm up to. But the truth is that I've always been greeted, I think, with kindness and generosity and openness. I've found people to be extremely helpful, concerned about my work, about me as a person, about my family. And I think that adds to the sense of responsibility and obligation, when you're engaged in a project like that, to the Voices that I hear myself, you know, about what I'm up to and what my concerns are. So I feel that. I do feel pushback and I do hear voices, but I think that most of them come from within my own conscience rather than within the community where I'm working.
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C
Yeah, a lot of it. And I chose not to work on my own community or my own area. I think it'll be more objective, but of course, it never is. You never object about anything. But I can't quite imagine how it is to work on Okinawa and to see the impact and the effect. You write a lot in the book of the U.S. military occupation of the island, and to know that you've been on the other side, it's. It's quite a challenging position. But I want to go. So we talk about the triangle, right? And we kind of COVID the community and the scholar. We didn't really cover. We just touched on. Covered a bit. But then there's the dead right there. So the scholar, the community and the dead. This triangle that you lay out in the beginning, and you talk a lot about the role of. I mean, the whole book, in a way, is about the role of the dead in the world of the living. Right. And in Okinawa, there is actual conceptual or cosmological. You even say a sort of metaphysics about it, and you write it. When you write about, you know, Sean Medaruma's short story, you talk about this discussion of Inochi versus Mabui. So Inochi, maybe the condition of being alive, and Mabui, you write, it's the entity that resides everywhere and nowhere at once. So maybe you can explain a little bit what those two things are, and then how this dual ontology complicated and rearranged Western metaphysical assumption about life, death, and embedded. Because we, again, we're not just scholars, veterans, we're also Westerners. Right. And we deal with the dead of a nun, Western communicator, have very different ideas. So maybe we can unpack this a little bit.
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B
Yeah, I think that one of the things that I became attentive to as I started working on this project is, on one hand, that the dead remain present in many ways. And I think that we often think about that metaphorically, that we think of the weight of the past or of trauma or of these other kinds of historical conditions. But in the course of doing my first project, I began to think that these kinds of formulations of time and memory were not necessarily adequate to understanding the life world that I was experiencing and working with while I was in Okinawa. And that it really requires you to take seriously these claims that the dead have agency and the dead play roles in the lives of the living, that there are these complicated relationships of exchange and communication, obligation and duty between the living and the dead, and that I couldn't really make sense of questions about obligations to the past or issues of memory or problems of trauma without sorting that out. Having said that, I don't think that it necessarily results in a new, entirely coherent model of this relationship between the living and the dead or the difference between life and death. And this is where I became interested in these questions of something like nuchi or Inochi and of mabui, that they're different ways of apprehending similar kinds of phenomena, you know, so that, for example, it's a very common expression in Okino nuchidakara that life is a treasure, and that contemporary activists make arguments about how important it is to avoid the genocidal experience of something like the Battle of Okinawa again, and of truly valuing life and supporting it and cultivating it at the same time. You know, I was attentive to these kinds of entities, as I describe in my book, like the mabui and the way that people understand and experiencing them. And what I found was that there are ways in which you could lose this entity, like a mabwe that represents a kind of a state of being alive, or an entity that you contain within yourself that is about you being alive, and yet you could still remain organically alive as an entity. You would just be diminished. And so I tried to sort out the distinction between those kinds of things early on in the book so that I could talk about the nuances of life and the cultivation of life and the preservation of life and the sacrifice of life later on in the book to kind of get these pieces on the table. Yeah.
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C
And I think sacrifice, again, this is in the title of the book. And it's very, very important, because sacrifice mean different things for different people. And of course, a very loaded term in the context of Bara, Okinawa and Japanese history and memory and. And the most important part of it, of course, the group suicides. I mean, in the history of Okinawa, this the most traumatic, painful experience of group suicides. And you tackle it head on. When you read the Kinjo Shigeki story, When you talk about Kinjo Shigeki story, and maybe you can elaborate a little bit about this story, and then what you call the contradiction at the heart of this sacrificial practice. What do you mean by contradiction? It seems to be pretty straightforward. I mean, this is at least. I'm used to working with activists on this. I never actually wrote. And they see it as very black and white, that, like, the Okinawan people were sacrificed by the state. It's not that black and white. Right. There's more there.
- [17:18]
B
Well, I think that, you know, there are discourses that are necessary that grow up around exactly the kind of problematic that you've described. But I think I was interested in something else. I was kind of interested in the experience of the people who sacrificed themselves. What does that mean? And in some ways, those are the interlocutors who are the most difficult to engage, right, because they have sacrificed themselves so their voices are no longer heard, like they're no longer in the world. But one of the things that came to me through this project was that people like Gushken Takamatsu and Higa Toyomitsu were concerned with those voices and wanted to. To make people listen to the voices of the dead, to see the images of the dead, and to acknowledge and accept them as interlocutors who had something to say in the present, you know, and so I think that that meant to think about sacrifice in a different way. What I mean by the contradiction at the heart of sacrifice is that it requires a life to preserve a life. You know, that a life must be given up, must be sacrificed in order to maintain life. And this is a kind of a fundamental contradiction, right? That if the ultimate objective of your community is to preserve life, how can its continued existence be contingent on your willingness to sacrifice life? And how can we work through those kinds of things? And this is something that anthropologists are quite interested in. You know, I can kind of take. I can learn a lot from the work of everything from, like, the classical texts of someone like Mose to the work of contemporary anthropologists. And I thought someone like Web Keane has written about this, and he says that sacrifice demonstrates the way in which people show their mastery of the prohibition against taking a life. You know, that this is the recognition of existence at its limits. And it's a challenging capacity that one has to develop, and it's constantly pushing against prohibitions that are meant to preserve life. Other anthropologists, like Brad Weiss has written in an essay about butchering meat where he says that it's this violation of a moral order that affirms the truth of a wider moral universe. In other words, this excess illustrates the need to maintain or to preserve life. You know, and the holidays are coming.
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A
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B
I just thought that the people that I was working with rejected this. You know, they said that I'm faced with this history of this incredibly horrifying sacrifice of life. That possibility had to be rejected like that you could no longer think it possible to sacrifice life to preserve life, that the sanctity of life had to be the priority. And this is the argument that people like Gushken Takamatsu advanced in their work. So that's what I think of as this contradiction.
- [21:37]
C
Yeah, and we'll get back to that. Because there is this really pognant quote of Bagushkin that you end with. And this audio sacrifice is something that when I teach World War II history, especially the Toko, the Kamikaze, the sacrifice, like this industrial level sacrifice of lives. And why do people do that? I mean, you always have to kind of work with students and figure out that, like, this is not some crazy quote, unquote Oriental. This is oriental feature of sacrificing life. It's not about not caring about life. It's something that the people who sacrifice themselves or calling for sacrificing as the ultimate kind of way of living, of being, as you said, mastery over life.
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B
Yeah. And I think that it's far from, you know, limited to a Japanese context. In fact, one of the most instructive things that I read in thinking about this was by Walter Benjamin in one of his essays on German fascism. Where he talks about stance like this ability to maintain an attitude towards something to its limit, you know, and that came back to me. I talk about a play about wartime sacrifice in my book. And one of the things that struck me was because the play involves ghosts, you know, you can understand a little bit about life beyond life. And many of these ghosts were discredited in the afterlife, even though they had a long history of heroism in life. Because somehow they wavered, you know, at the last minute, they wavered in their sacrifice of themselves and didn't follow through across that horizon to death. That, like true sacrifice comes from the dead who persist beyond, like, this line between life and death in their commitment to an attack. And to me, that was really instructive in thinking about sacrifice in new ways. I mean, of course, I think that it's through art and literature that we often discover ways to think about the everyday and these kinds of representations through really conventional theatrical performance that I started to think about what it might mean to sacrifice oneself rather than to be sacrificed.
- [24:11]
C
Yeah. And that art always eliminate those contradictions and those things that beyond our normal way of thinking, the stuff that we struggle to teach, struggle to think about. Right. Representing the unprecedented.
- [24:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. And representing an absence of other voices. So I think about something like countless patriotic movies in Japan or images at the Yushukan at Yasukuni Shrine that impose a distance between the living and the dead by imagining images of the patriotic dead in ways that make it palatable to ordinary human beings or to the living, but also impose a distance, you know, by creating these heroic images of someone who died in ugly and brutal circumstances rather than having this immediacy of violence, it's separated out. You know, this kind of erratic distance is created, and they're reconfigured as like a different kind of a subject without any real acknowledgement of what they might have been in life and what their thoughts about themselves might have been.
- [25:22]
C
Especially in Japan in this particular period, it become like a military guide. Right. It's the kind of completely separate being. And it's so alien to us in a way. I mean, we're so used to think about so much beyond the era of heroism since Vietnam. I don't think we can talk all about American ideas of heroism, but let's say in Japan, this idea of sacrifice and heroism and. And the beautification of war. Right. It's so alien to us and even to our students. You know, I teach a lot of ROTCs, a lot of. A lot of soldiers that they're Fascinated, endlessly fascinated by Japanese Bushido and martial arts.
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B
And yeah, I was in my time ROTC student at Penn State, so I could have been a student in one of your classes.
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C
Yeah, well, and I guess our youngest self were a little bit more critical, I guess. But still, it's very hard to find ourselves in relation to this idea of heroism.
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B
So one of the things that I learned in the process of this is that heroism is underwritten by constant concern that you may not be adequate to the sacrifice that you are trying to make. You know, this idea that if you don't carry out your resolve across the horizon of death, then even though you may accomplish some kind of a military objective or demonstrate some kind of resolve, you failed as an entity in carrying out this, this heroism to its limit. And I thought that that was really a kind of a compelling danger that people would experience.
- [27:16]
C
Yeah. And of course, everything in post war Japan, not everything, but a lot of, you know, what you have in post war Japan is this reaction to this idealization and like what it led to. There's some kind of this idea of waking up from this another world and another value system. But of course, again, going back to this idea of sacrifice and post war and pre war and wartime versus peace war, the memory of this also play a very important role. And you can see it in Okinawa all the time. Right. And you have this contrast you put between. And of course it's layered between. There's the statue of Meiji Emperor. I forgot the name of the shrine. It's right, Right. By Gokuji Nami.
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B
No way.
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C
Yeah, the one on the cliff. Right. So there's the Meiji Emperor statue that embodies sacrifice in one way. And then there is the statue of Kinjimonodo, which is very different. Right. So both of those are very different claims of sacrifice. Right. And they're both post reversion.
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B
Right, so yes, that's exactly right. And illuminating different sets of relationships to the past, but also claiming the possibility of reconfiguring historical relationships, you know, that relationships that were broken could be made whole again and could be reimagined in new ways at the same time that existent relationships had to be severed and new sets of connections had to be created, no matter how painful they were. And this has to do then with memorializing, on one hand, an imperial past that is deeply problematic and tragic, and on the other hand is objectifying an almost impossible to speak of past, of death and sacrifice, and making it present in the landscape. And so I think in both cases, these are versions of the past that are open to contestation by lots of other Okinawans, to say nothing of, you know, mainland Japanese who would visit Okinawa or, you know, for that matter, Americans who might be attentive to something like that. So it shows that the past is a place of possibility where art and forms of representation can draw things out and make them whole and present again in new ways. I think you're quite right in suggesting, you know, that these are kind of counterparts to one another, or they're two sets of possibilities among a host of others that have yet to be made visible, you know.
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C
Yeah, and I think when you said about restoration of something, I think in relation to our conversation about sacrifice at this, you know, other, you know, like this idea of sacrificing oneself and all the tragedy and death. Those are both. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the background to both memorials, because for me, it's very interesting their post reversion this idea of, like the Meiji Emperor with this. Like, it says coco, right. It says nation on it. But it's not some kind of a relic of a bygone end. This is a sort of restoration, supposedly, that after the interference of American occupation. It's very different, of course, in King Jim, in the. Which also is a different sort of restoration of a more. A different humanity. Maybe that was the imperial state was what kind of interfered there. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the background and how it war.
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B
I think that, you know, I found the statue of the Meiji Emperor visually compelling because, you know, your first response, at least as somebody who is, you know, in any ways attentive to, like, these questions of colonial history would be to imagine that maybe there is some. This is like an icon of some form of enshrinement of a member of the royal family, which is a pattern that you see throughout colonial era shrines outside of Japan, that some royal relative, some fragment of their spirit is enshrined there to create a material connection between that space into space in Japan itself. But that's not it at all, that the Meiji Emperor was not enshrined. And so this is a kind of a recursive attempt to draw these images of the Meiji Emperor into the present in the time of Shoah, you know, of late Showa. And to suggest that there is this line that goes back into an imperial past and Okinawa is a part of those relationships. And, you know, it's a political argument too, when the statue was constructed during the movement for reversion, you know, this is a really compelling period this time.
- [32:25]
C
Of.
- [32:27]
B
Anti colonialism throughout the world of decolonization, where there's a conflict in Okinawa about what does the future hold in terms of Okinawan relationship to the Japanese state. Put aside this notion of the Japanese state that they have some kind of residual sovereignty over Okinawa and then someday it will return. This is about the aspiration of Okinawans and that it became a understandable political position for Okinawans to try to renew these tokens of an imperial past says something about life in that moment. You know, on the other hand, Kinjo statues in Yomitan are about the traces of imperial sacrifice that already took place, of people whose lives were sacrificed in the caves in the Yomitan era. And also about the fate of these kinds of critical discourses in the present. Because it's not just that a statue was built, but that statue was attacked by rightist vandals. And this damaged statue remains as a token of like these kind of manifold layers of history and of people understanding for their past and what it holds for them in the present and the future.
- [33:58]
C
Yeah, And I think it's very important. I think you make it pretty clear. There is what we will consider right wing Japanese nationalist groups in Okinawa and it's part of political story. Right. I think especially in Okinawa studies in the US There is all this emphasis on anti base and left wing activity, which of course it's more of, I wouldn't say the norm, but it's more prevalent. It's more. We see it more in academia. But there is, I mean, you make it very clear there is this other strand, the outer relationship to the past, utter relationship to the Japanese state within Okinawa. You have a Gopoku shrine, you have those statues.
- [34:38]
B
Yeah. And part of the projects that I have wanted to do as an anthropologist was to try to make sense of the politics and the orientations to life of people who I might not agree with or who I might disagree with. And so I think that it's important to seek out those kinds of positions and people with those kinds of politics so that I can understand who they are and what they think and what they do, rather than just characterizing them in contrast to a political position that I might find more sympathetic.
- [35:15]
C
Yeah. And it's very easy to go and wag our fingers and people. But I think as scholars, at least that's how I see it. Our job is not just to resist, of course, activists, our job is to resist those kind of discourses and the way that they promote this sort of sacrifice that we talked about before. Senseless Sacrifice and death and colonialism and all this stuff. But also try to understand why people do that. Right. And why are the bad guys? I mean, again, this is kind of cliche. No one think they're the baddies, right? I mean, they all think they're even the people who, you know, who attack the Kinjo statue. They see themselves as doing good people enshrined of Emperor Meiji in Okinawa. And they think they are coming from their own place. And I see it as our job to try to understand them. Right.
- [35:56]
B
Yes. I've thought about that meme quite a lot lately. Are we the baddies?
- [36:02]
C
Yeah, this is everyday life now in America.
- [36:06]
B
But I think that to be attentive to the complexities and the textures and the rhythms of everyday life in a place like Okinawa, you have to think about how these kinds of. Of positions are held in many ways. Like they are here by people who are otherwise sympathetic to one another or who are from the same family or who collaborate with one another, who work together. You know, what makes it possible to have these kinds of different political positions. And, you know, that's one of the things that I tried to learn more.
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C
I'm stay with the badis. Well, I don't know about this. I mean, this guy, Okumato Taro chapter, right. I mean, I can talk about it for hours. We can talk for three hours about his chapter. Because he is in any way representing of everything that is wrong in Japanese relationship to the continent. Right. Japanese and mainland to Okinawa. Sorry. But also, he's such a fascinating and complicated character. And I felt that this going back to the triangle of the dead, the living and the scholar, there's a lot of haunting going on here. Right. And hunting Okumato by his predecessor. Right. By Yanagita Kunio and all those other colonial scholars, which he wasn't. Right. He come from a very different place. And you can see it all in the controversy that comes out of this mistreatment of bones. Maybe we can talk a little bit first about this. How does all this complex history and the position of Okamoto Tauru to Okinawa, to the other scholars, how this all comes out of controversy? Maybe we can start with talking a little bit about what he did and then take it from there.
- [37:44]
B
Well, so I would say, you know, I don't know that Okamoto would be a baddie. I think in many ways, he's an incredibly sympathetic figure, but he's complicated. And I think that in many ways, he is a kind of an exemplar for us as scholars to think about the costs of loving something that you study too much, you know, that you could care so much for it, that you're not attentive to its own desires for itself. You know, that. That this is a kind like the Bakhtinian revision of the Golden Rule. Don't think about what it is that you would like to do for other people, but think about what it is that they want. You know, the kind of the dialogic revision of the Golden Rule. And maybe that that was Okamoto's failing, that he was too determined to use his artistic vision to synthesize his ethnographic observations, and that he allowed this kind of question of or the position of Okamoto the creator, to overwhelm Okamoto the ethnographer. And I think that, you know, he's not a despised figure in Okinawa at all, that people flock to his exhibitions, as I said in his book, that many people whose opinions I value say that they appreciate the attention that he brought to Okinawa and the fact that he found in Okinawa the grounds for a very complicated analysis of art and life and performance, all the things that interested him. You know, that. That for him, Okinawa was a crucial text, and they appreciate that. But also people disagree with him. And I think that the question is, maybe this is an issue of life and death, too, that Okamoto can no longer respond to the debate, but the debate continues on beyond his death. And I think that people who spoke up at the symposia that were held when his exhibition was held at the Okinawa Museum, I think that they wanted a moment of accountability. Not that they rejected his attention to Okinawa, but they felt that he should have been open to their response to his work, and he wasn't in life, and then he no longer is in death.
- [40:24]
C
Maybe we can backtrack a bit. Maybe you can explain a little bit what he did and what's so controversial, because it's really, again, one of those episodes that really encompasses the relationship we talk about throughout this hour about the role of the dead in the conversation of the living.
- [40:40]
B
So he wrote a series of ethnographic and kind of picaresque articles about Okinawa. They're collected together in a book about Okinawa. And I mean, this is only part of his real. His body of work as a scholar and an artist. But one of the things that he wanted to do when he was Okinawa was to go to a place called Kudaka Island. And Kudaka, you know, this is an island that is so ethnographically over determined, it's a place that has been written about by Orikuchi Shinobu and Yanagira Kunio, these, you know, really exemplary figures in. In Japanese native ethnology. It's been visited by Levi Strauss, who has written an essay about it. It's kind of the. I mean, it was one of the first places that someone wanted to take me as an anthropologist when I was doing my graduate research in Okinawa. And so in some ways, I think that it is seen as the place where life began in Okinawa. It's seen as kind of meta nymic for all of Okinawa. You know, in this small space, you can learn a tremendous amount about the relationship between humans and the gods, between the living and the dead, the struggles of everyday life, the experience of war. All of these different kinds of things are all condensed in this very small space. But among all of the different possibilities of studying Okinawa, or of me, of studying Kudaka, there's this ritual called izaiho that took place in Kudaka, and it was a women's initiation ritual. And so it took place every 12 years when the calendrical cycle had been worked through once, and all of the women who came of age in that cycle would be, you know, inducted into life as adult women and priestesses in the community. And when this took place the last time, you know, all of these scholars and broadcasters and public figures from the mainland descended on Kudaka. And one of them was Okamoto Taro. And so they were given really unparalleled access to the ritual. There were film crews recording it, and people were watching it. And the ritual itself takes several days. You know, so the people like Okamoto were out there observing it. But at some point in the ritual, maybe he got bored or he had seen everything that he wanted to see, and so he decided to go and explore the island a little bit. And he went to a place on the island of Kodaka where they practiced burial by exposure, which is a little bit different than much of the practices on mainland Okinawa, and certainly different than what you would see in many parts of mainland Japan. And that would be that the remains of the dead were initially exposed along the coast somewhere to the elements, and that once they were decomposed, they would be reorganized, a kind of a form of secondary burial, and reincorporated into the rituals of the community, the practices of everyday life in the community. But for this period, they were left on their own in this space of the dead to decompose before they were brought back and put together. And so he wanted to see this place, but more than seeing it, he photographed it. And not only did he photograph it, but he is said to have rearranged the remains of the dead in order to compose a better photograph. And when he had done this, he published this picture in one of his regular columns about his kind of artistic and ethnographic views of Japan. And so this became kind of a scandal in Okinawa that he had represented the dead without permission of the people who could speak for them on their behalf, and that he had interfered with their progress to the next stage in their relationship with the community. So this created a kind of. Of controversy that I think probably remained more controversial in Okinawa than it did anywhere else in Japan. Certainly, you know, historians and folklorists would talk about it, but I don't know that the ordinary person was really attentive to it. And, in fact, I think that Okamoto himself went through a number of changes. You know, late in his life, he became something of a kind of a talento, appearing on TV as a kind of a strange, avuncular old guy. And then eventually, I think that he was not forgotten, but neglected and sort of slipped out of popular discourse. But people talked about this a lot. Like, I had heard about this incident on Kudaka from the very first time I went to Okinawa as a graduate student to study. Certainly when I went to Kodaka, this was something that people mentioned, you know, and so when the exhibition of his work, and there had been exhibitions also of his work before this in Okinawa, and the issue had been raised then, too, but it kind of returned once more to discussion when I went to the seminar surrounding his work at the museum, you know, during this exhibition of his work on Okinawa.
- [46:51]
C
Yeah. And again, I can talk so much more about him, but I want to take a sharp turn from him and from the dead in a way also, and go back to the living. Because the book is so much more than just, in a way, bones. I mean, bones are always. And the dead are always there. But you also have a big part of the book which about Xhosa and about historians and local scholars. And we talked a little bit about them in the beginning about the relationship of local scholars, their own history, which that I also found quite fascinating, because they're not quite. When you say local scrolls, we're not talking about people in university. Right. We're talking about people who are in the community. And you have a chapter on CAUSA and urban spaces and the history center and activism there. And when you talk about the center, the Histories and the spaces there are crafted to encourage visitors to remember or to reassemble a sense of the past from fragments. And I really like this idea of reassembly because it's a different way of making sense of. And you talk a lot about everyday life, right? And when you talk about reassembly, is this the relationship of history to the present in everyday life, is this kind of idea of mourning? Or, of course, we talk about cause and resistance. Maybe it's historiography. Like, what is this reassembly? What has history done? Moral streets, of course, are different than the history we do. I do, in the academy, I think.
- [48:26]
B
That maybe I would reverse the framing of that. The projects of history that I see taking place in an arcade in Okinawa City is really just a part of the practices of everyday life, of the way in which people move through their world, engaging the things that confront them, working with other people, you know, the ways that we assemble our world on a daily basis. And I think that what I thought was interesting about this in Koza, in Okinawa City, is that this dimension of history is manifestly a part of it. You know, as we go about our life in wherever we happen to be. Well, of course, we're interrogating the past. Like, how can we know the future except through the past? Everything, whether it's the form of language that we use or the images, the. The lessons that we've learned, all those kinds of things are what we mobilize to do the very next thing that we're going to do. What I think is interesting about it is that the local historians in Okinawa City have put a museum in this arcade that encourages people to confront the past on a kind of a daily basis, you know, to kind of be a critic as you're going about the demands of your everyday life, that you. Among all the things that you are to be doing as you live your life, one of them is to be a critic who interrogates the past. You know, the name of this museum is an interesting kind of portmanteau word. It's historito. And so that means it's history and street put together. And so I think that the idea is, of course, history takes place in the studies of historians and in their research labs, at universities and in their classrooms and in libraries and in bookstores and all those places where you could expect to engage history. But it's also there in the streets. And to create a kind of a museum there is to blur the lines between one and the other, you know, to pull the museum into the street and to divert the street into the museum. And I think that that's really provocative. And part of that is just the. Certainly not limited to Okinawa City or even to Okinawa, is the incredible role that community scholars play in Japan. Maybe we could think of them as avocational historians. You know, the high school history teacher who is carrying out research projects in her own community, the people who work at the lowest levels of municipal government in some cultural affairs office, but who are actually engaged in dynamic research programs. I really found that that was an important part of my experience of life in Okinawa, was to get to know these people and to see the things that they were doing, that they were carrying out really dynamic historical research projects, ethnographic research projects, in ways things that paralleled my own interests were taking place at the same time. So I found myself drawn into these projects as a participant that were related in some ways to the things that I was doing myself. And Historito is just a really exemplary case of that.
- [51:56]
C
Yeah, I'm actually going to Okinawa next week, and I just checked. When is it open? It's a fascinating place. And I think, yeah, in Japan, a lot of this community stuff is done. I'm thinking also about all those local libraries. When you have those little kyo doshidoshitsu, this, like, local history room where librarian there are the most knowledgeable people, but anything and everything you wanted to know. It's, you know, I wouldn't be able to write a lot of what I write without those people.
- [52:26]
B
Right. No, that's right. And that they also, you know, articulate with these other kinds of, like, with different registers of scholarship and so that, you know, an important intellectual historian that I know is also involved in the projects of something like Historito, and local activists are, too, and artists. That there will be a panel discussion at a place like that that draws together everybody that I know in these really compelling and provocative ways, or that there will be a program at a mainland university, and all of the people who are related to places like this will also be there and participating in it, along with people who are in local broadcasting. All kinds of other actors are involved in these projects.
- [53:15]
C
I think a lot of it is because history is so present. A lot of the local activism is in relation to history of violence and, you know, all the complications of the history of Okinawa, or in case of my work in Hiroshima and other places where there really is so much history in everyday life. There's so much.
- [53:38]
B
Yeah, I think that, of course, history is present, but even the past is present. And if the past is present, maybe it isn't even the past. Like maybe there's a different spatio temporal formation that represents all of this, you know, where the. The past remains in the present in a way that we have to critically engage.
- [54:01]
C
Yeah. Which goes back to our early conversation about Mabui and Nucci and how the dead are always there, which is a good segue to my next couple questions, even though we're pushing the 50 minutes limit. But I really want to end with Gushken Takamatsu and the relationship to the dead, because bones, the material remains of the dead, play a very, very big role in the book, a very big role in Okinawan's life. Right. They are there, they keep going, they keep coming up. They never really go away. I just been to, a couple weeks ago, just been to an anti base protest where there were those signs about the use of soil from the battlefields to fill up the Haneko Bay and the fact that they had bones in them of the dead. And that was something that is repeatedly invoked in anti base activity that I'm part of. But throughout all the books, the actual material remains of the dead speak. Right. They make material and moral claims. And so maybe we can dive really right into it. How do bones speak?
- [55:20]
B
So that's a very interesting question. If I were to begin with someone like Gushken Takamatsu, I think that he is attentive to the ways in which they call out to be recovered or discovered. And certainly this is a very widespread process that I. You know, I've talked to any number of Utah in Okinawa who have told me that they hear the voices of the dead calling out from battlefields and that they need to be recovered. I've talked to ordinary people who have, as I write about in the book, who have felt the presence of the dead, not just in some kind of a disembodied way, but their determination to be recovered, that they want to be return to the places where they are from, to their own places. And so Gushkin responded to that, but in a very particular kind of way. Inevitably, the remains of the dead will be returned to the Japanese state, in part because I suppose their administrative or their narrative disposal has already taken place. They've already been accounted for. You know, they died. They're seen as having died in Okinawa. And so in some ways their material remains, when they emerge from the landscape are out of time. You know, that they have already been acknowledged in many ways by their families or by their communities, by the state, they have been seen as having died heroic deaths. And so from that perspective, that it's important that they're remains are just gathered up and returned to a national ossuary somewhere. But what Gushkin does is by treating them reverentially, he extends a kind of. He and his collaborators extend a kind of a sense of community, of, you know, we think of a category like N that they're drawn into these other networks, and they're extended the pleasure and the courtesy of these reciprocal networks, if only for a moment, you know, that they are made part of something before they're gathered up by the state and reincorporated into whatever kinds of narratives of patriotic sacrifice or of personal loss or whatever that they belong to. They have the opportunity to be part of something different. On the other hand, the artist Higa Toyomitsu, he does something different with them, particularly by the way in which he aesthetically represents them through his photography. And I think that what he does with the dead, you know, he hears their own voices. So he has told me, and he's written extensively about how the dead called him to photograph them. And the term that he uses for it is sashindari, which is a variation on the category Kandari and Okinawa like to be called by the dead, that Sachin Dadi is to be called to photograph them. And that. So he says that the dead, you know, brought him from his other projects, brought him to the battlefields to photograph them. But I think that what he did in these photographs, you know, it doesn't interfere with the removal of their bones. It doesn't interfere. It doesn't impede any of those kinds of processes of the state. But it does create these incredible, powerful representations that he displays, played at museums and galleries in Okinawa and in mainland Japan. And I tried to think about what this has to do with the possibility of hearing their voices. And I think that what he's doing is engaging through these visual forms of representation in something very similar to kind of traditional forms of Okinawan mortuary practice, that he's preparing the remains to be reincorporated into the community in new ways. He's not putting them in ceramic urns. He's creating these beautiful and horrible, gigantic photographic representations of their remains. And in doing so, then he puts them in a position where they can be engaged in intersubjective relationships with people in Okinawa or in a gallery in Tokyo or in a gallery in Kyushu, wherever they happen to be displayed, that they are now awaiting the living to step before them and to Become a part of a new kind of dialogue with them. And I think that what takes place there is an intervention into the forms of erratic practice that the state or the Shinto might engage in. Otherwise, you know, the Yaskuni Jinja already has representations of these people. This is contesting this. I. I don't think that it's like destroying this sort of erratic representation, but rather reconfiguring it, creating something different where they are seen as dead subjects that can now engage in new forms of sociality, that they're present in a different way than they would have been had they just been tidied up and shipped off to an ossuary, leaving then just these, these pictures, like patriotic pictures of a soldier in their heroic uniform or something, or the photographs, like their last photographs before their death or something. Now this is something different. And Higa argues that they are present because they want to be present, that they want to come out of the ground and be photographed and be incorporated into these new relationships. That's what they said to him. You know, what they say to other people is dependent upon putting yourself in that situation and being willing to. Showing the willingness to be their interlocutor.
- [61:23]
C
Yeah. And I think for me, what really spoke the Gushkin and others like this idea of treating human remains as human, it's really important and it really incorporate them, whether the Japanese or Okinawans, whether as human and, and think about their last moment and their relationship to things other than the state. Right. Because those bones and I work on Holocaust remains in a very similar way. They're so over determined. There's such an ideological tower built on top of those dead people, but they're people. And when you actually, and you work in exhibition, right. And when you actually hold them, when you actually see them, you can actually activate them. And this is for me like actually seeing the dead as historians, like we work on violence, we talk about it and we read about it all the time, but we come numb. But it's different when you actually face the dead. It's emotionally you face their humanity. And for me, what really the work that you write about, really important, restoring this very human and basic relationship, restoring it to our idea of the society that the life that they lived, they're part of it. Not as ideological subject, not as something that part of a memory culture, but just as human. It was very, very important.
- [62:48]
B
And I think that it interrupts the temporality of state practices, that it, it allows them to occupy a place in the here and now where they can be present in the way that the dead ought to be present. So it's not simply acknowledging the humanity of their sacrifice or recognizing the horror of the acts that they committed in order to kill themselves, but also to acknowledge that they are a different kind of a subject now that they've been transformed by their experience of being buried in the earth in Okinawa and by being recovered by these people who brought them out again and by being photographed by Higa Toyomitsu, that they can occupy a new place, you know, that they have a role in a new set of potential relationships.
- [63:45]
C
Yeah. Which is of course, you know, because this also. This all strange alliances that you find with Gushka and Takamatsu works also with right wing people and with the state. They're signified by so many people. But in this particular moment when they're in the ground and those pictures actually when they're coming out of the ground, this is the pictures he take. Right. This is where they kind of disassociate from all those. Because bones are empty signifiers. Right. Everybody can push his meaning onto them. But there's a sort of resistance here, Right. To the signification.
- [64:17]
B
I think that they would argue that their subjects, that they have a subjectivity that emerges through their collaboration. So that the bones have a place in determining their own signification.
- [64:35]
C
Yeah. It's fascinating again that the bones speak. Right. The dead have a role in the world of living. So we're pushing over the one hour stage. So I have more questions here. But I really want to wrap up and ask you before we go, what are you working now? What's next for you?
- [65:01]
B
So I have a couple of things in mind. And one is an ethnographic project about the transformation of militarization along the Pacific Rim. So to think about how places like Okinawa that have historically been seen as the site of battles in the past, or a place where military training are now being transformed by all kinds of state discourses into the site of future conflicts. And so I want to think about what that might be ethnography. And I'm thinking about what the limitations of a project like that would be. In many ways, I think that. But looking at it only in Japan is not enough. And so I'm trying to imagine other ways to do that or ways to do it collaboratively. And I have a kind of a historical project that I've been working on for a while, something that I had originally thought about putting in this book, but it just got too big and took on a life of its own and fell out about the history of colonial anthropology and colonial social science, particularly in Okinawa and the role that Okinawan scholars played in something like this. This complicated position that people like Ihafuyu occupied as being in some ways subject to the work of mainland scholars but also engaged in projects very much their own. And I want to look more closely at the work that they did and how all of these different scholars interacted with one another and participated in research projects and the things that they did like that. So I'm taking a little bit of time and thinking about both of those and trying to decide which is the one that has to go forward first.
- [66:51]
C
I know this problem very well. So yeah. Too much to do. So yeah. Thank you very much. I'm really looking forward to hear more about this and thank you very much for taking the time today. I really enjoyed this conversation.
- [67:02]
B
It's been a real pleasure to talk with you. I learned a lot.
- [67:06]
C
Me too. Thank you.