As one of Okinawa's most insightful writers and social critics, Medoruma Shun has highlighted the problems and limits of conventional representation of the Battle of Okinawa, raised new questions and concerns about the nature of Okinawan war memory, and expanded the possibilities of representing war through his groundbreaking and prize-winning fiction, editorials, essays, and speaking engagements. Yet, his writing has not been analyzed in regard to how his experience and identity as the child of two survivors of the Battle of Okinawa have powerfully shaped his understanding of the war and his literary craft. This book examines Okinawan war memory through the lens of Medoruma’s war fiction, and pays particular attention to the issues of second-generation war survivorship and transgenerational trauma. It explores how his texts contribute to knowledge about the war and its ongoing effects — on survivors, their offspring, and the larger community — in different ways from that of other modes of representation, such as survivor testimony, historical narrative, and realistic fiction. These dominant means of memory making have played a major role in shaping the various discourses about the war and the Battle of Okinawa, yet these forms of public memory and knowledge often exclude or avoid more personal, emotional, and traumatic experiences. Indeed, Ikeda’s analysis sheds light on the nature of trauma on survivors and their children who continue to inhabit sites of the traumatic past, and in turn makes an important contribution to studies on trauma and second-generation survivor experiences. This book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian literature, Japanese literature, Japanese history, war memory and Okinawa.

A powerful and thought-provoking novel that raises important questions about World War II, war memory, and US imperialism and blowback.

How do the Japanese and Okinawans remember Occupation? How is memory constructed and transmitted? Michael Molasky explores these questions through careful, sensitive readings of literature from mainland Japan and Okinawa. This book sheds light on difficult issues of war, violence, prostitution, colonialism and post-colonialism in the context of the Occupations of Japan and Okinawa.

In 1983, concerned about the need to record and explain the experiences of Okinawans caught up in Battle of Okinawa, the local Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper carried out several hundred interviews with survivors. With explanatory comment added, this was published first in serial form, then later as a book. Tens of thousands of Okinawans were killed in the relentless bombardment by American forces, ten of thousands more local recruits died in Home Guard units, thousands of starvation and malaria in places away from the fighting, hundreds of young students died in the Blood and Iron Student Corps or as nurse's aides tending to wounded soldiers in hospital caves, and hundreds of evacuees lost their lives in ships sunk by U.S. submarines or aircraft. There were even people who took their own lives, or the lives of loved ones, to avoid what they had been told by the Japanese Army would be a far worse fate at the hands of American captors. Descent into Hell is the story of this apocalyptic struggle as told by those Okinawans who survived.

A “hauntingly beautiful memoir about family and identity” (NPR) and a young woman's journey to understanding her complicated parents—her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran—and her own, fraught cultural heritage. Elizabeth's mother was working as a nightclub hostess on U.S.-occupied Okinawa when she met the American soldier who would become her husband. The language barrier and power imbalance that defined their early relationship followed them to the predominantly white, upstate New York suburb where they moved to raise their only daughter. There, Elizabeth grew up with the trappings of a typical American childhood and adolescence. Yet even though she felt almost no connection to her mother's distant home, she also felt out of place among her peers. Decades later, Elizabeth comes to recognize the shame and self-loathing that haunt both her and her mother, and attempts a form of reconciliation, not only to come to terms with the embattled dynamics of her family but also to reckon with the injustices that reverberate throughout the history of Okinawa and its people. Clear-eyed and profoundly humane, Speak, Okinawa is a startling accomplishment—a heartfelt exploration of identity, inheritance, forgiveness, and what it means to be an American.

Okinawa, the only Japanese prefecture invaded by US forces in 1945, was forced to accommodate 146 “military comfort stations” from 1941–45. How did Okinawans view these intrusive spaces and their impact on regional society? Interviews, survivor testimonies, and archival documents show that the Japanese army manipulated comfort stations to isolate local communities, facilitate “spy hunts,” and foster a fear of rape by Americans that induced many Okinawans to choose death over survival. The politics of sex pursued by the US occupation (1945–72) perpetuated that fear of rape into the postwar era. This study of war, sexual violence, and postcolonial memory sees the comfort stations as discursive spaces of remembrance where differing war experiences can be articulated, exchanged, and mutually reassessed. Winner of the 2017 Best Publication Award of the Year by the Okinawa Times.

This book explores how narratives, exhibitions, media representations, and cultural heritage sites that communicate memories of conflicts in East Asia between 1930 and 1945 spread, interact, and are re-packaged for post-war audiences across national divisions. The contributors examine individual case studies of grassroots engagement with war memory, and collectively demonstrate the necessity of remaining aware of the researcher as participating in another kind of engagement with war memory. Contributions showcase a number of ways of doing research on war memory, alongside case studies from diverse regions of the world. Taken together, they bring a fresh perspective to scholarship on war memory, which has tended to focus on space, text, exhibition, or personal narrative, rather than bringing these elements into dialogue with one another.