Chikako Yamashiro’s new film is the latest to explore historical memory, war trauma and the geopolitical situation of her homeland, Okinawa
In artist and filmmaker Chikako Yamashiro’s latest film, we follow an elderly man who strolls, then rides by bus, through lush rural landscapes before entering an urban area in Okinawa. Sounds innocent enough. But his journey soon unlocks memories of his past. At least that’s what we are encouraged to think via a formal and material shift from the crystalline clarity of digital photography to the grainy, nostalgic world of analogue footage.
To those familiar with the artist’s work, this process will come as no surprise. For the last two decades, Yamashiro has used performance, photography and video to explore historical memory and its relational articulations in response to war trauma and the geopolitical situation of her homeland, Okinawa. The largest of a group of islands that were known as the Ryūkyū Kingdom before being annexed to Japan in 1879, Okinawa was transferred to US military occupation from 1945 to 1972. Suffering double colonisation by Japan and the USA, Okinawa’s complicated war and postwar history – explored by the artist in seminal works such as I Like Okinawa Sweet (2004), Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009) and the influential Mud Man (2016) – translated into an equally complex present. Ryūkyūan people (the island’s Indigenous community) are not officially recognised as an ethnic and linguistic minority by the Japanese government, which consistently advocates for its monocultural identity. In contrast, Yamashiro’s 2019 cultural mashup Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family, whose title alludes to both the traditional pancakelike Okinawan sweet ‘chinbin’ and the film genre of ‘spaghetti western’, while also placing Okinawa as a porous frontier, contributes to the preservation of the Okinawan language and folklore by including tsurane ryuka, a genre of narrative song particular to the island, and a play within the film narrated in Uchināguchi, the autochthonous language. Numerous land reclamation projects also pose a serious environmental threat to the island’s landscape and spark heated public debates, most recently in the case of the relocation of an American marine base to Henoko.
Okinawa’s sociopolitical tensions find their way into Flowers of Belau. In the film’s opening sequence, at the beginning of the old man’s bus ride, we see loader machines scooping up mounds of rock and gravel in a distant quarry, immediately reminding the viewer of the brutalised Okinawan landscape. One of Yamashiro’s most characteristic trademarks is a truthful and unadorned representation of the island in contrast to the glossy, touristic image of Okinawa in mainstream media. This is often coupled with lyrical, enigmatic narratives exploring themes of memory and heritage. In Flowers of Belau the soundscape hints at a possible mnemonic exercise too: sounds of the bus’s engine and of cars passing by begin to dissipate as soon as we glimpse the ocean through the windows; a chorus of voices singing vibrato heralds an array of disarticulated images of a crying child, a couple of deigo flowers lying on the ground, and a man climbing a palm tree. The most evocative moments of Flowers of Belau play out during the film’s central section. Here, sequences of the tropical environment of the Republic of Palau (historically known as Belau) – where part of the film was shot – and of the same child playing on the seashore are accompanied by increasingly muffled sounds of lulling waves and footsteps on the sand creating a multilayered and visually dissonant narrative. However, Yamashiro deliberately avoids suggesting a clearcut interpretation, leaving it to the viewer to make their own assumptions about the relationship between the child and the old man in a film completely devoid of dialogue. What it seems to offer instead is a reflection on the human body seen as a permeable vessel in which memories percolate and are stored, until they can be inherited to overcome mortality.
