Garrison Island (by Stephen Mansfield)

Monochrome images capture the stark realities of Okinawa’s vassal status.

Stephen Mansfield is a Japan-based writer and photographer, one of the leading contributors about contemporary Japan, and a reviewer for The Japan Times. He is the author of 20 books, and his work has appeared in more than 60 magazines, newspapers and journals worldwide. This photo essay appears in the January 2024 edition of the Number 1 Shimbun (the online monthly magazine of FCCJ, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan).

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Guesthouse owner, Masashi Miyagi. Kunigami. © Stephen Mansfield

Visiting Okinawa, a garrison island and holiday destination, can seem like being teleported back to Japan’s agitprop heyday of the late 1960s. Located on the outer periphery of the archipelago, it is part of the modern state but, due to its complicated history, occupies an ambiguous place in the country’s psyche.

The late Masahide Ota, a former governor of Okinawa, insisted that its history was “essentially that of a poor ethnic group at the southernmost tip of the Japanese archipelago, expendable whenever national powers felt it necessary for their larger purposes”. A resurgent pride in island identity, reinforced by challenges to Japanese historical narrative, conflicts with a continued and burdensome U.S. military presence.

The unflappable conviction expressed by young U.S. recruits in their mission, yoked to a strong sense of entitlement, is a reminder that indoctrination is not confined to the training camps of the Peshawar Valley, the terror cells of Mogadishu, or the classrooms of North Korea.

Okinawan photographer and activist, Mao Ishikawa, who is drawn to persistent themes of identity and occupation, believes that historical relations between Okinawans and the Japanese are similar to those between black and white people. On the subject of her own ethnicity, Ishikawa affirms that she is, “not Japanese but an Okinawan”. It is from this firm cultural grounding that her photography draws its strength and inspiration.

My own trips to the islands over the years have provided me with the opportunity to return to an early interest in black-and-white photography.

Okinawa represents – more than any other region of Japan – stark social, political and visual dualities that lend themselves to this more somber, monochromatic depiction.