The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

79 ARTISTS Top: Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa 1975–77 Gelatin silver print / 15.4 x 23.1cm / Courtesy: The artist and Nap Gallery, Tokyo / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery Collection Below: Miyuki Higa, born in 1985. Distributor (from ‘Fences, Fuck You!!’ series) 2012 Inkjet print / 22 x 31.5cm / Courtesy: The artist and Nap Gallery, Tokyo Born 1953, Ogimi, Okinawa Lives and works in Tomigusuku, Okinawa For over 40 years, photographer Mao Ishikawa has documented daily life in her native Okinawa. Ishikawa was born and raised in a society under occupation, and came of age during the island’s ‘Reversion’ from US control to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. The islands of Okinawa experienced some of the worst fighting of World War Two, resulting in 90 per cent of its buildings being razed, and the loss of almost half of the population. 1 Subsequent US occupation, which lasted 20 years longer than it did on the mainland, was deeply unpopular, and Ishikawa recalls violent crimes committed by American servicemen going unpunished. 2 The Reversion also provoked deeper questions about the nature of Okinawan identity as a culture distinct from that of mainland Japan. It was in this context — through the medium of photography — that Ishikawa focused her attention on Okinawa’s complex racial and sexual politics in the wake of the Reversion. In 1975, wanting to learn more about the US soldiers, Ishikawa took a job in a bar in Koza, near Kadena Air Base, catering to African–American personnel at a time of unofficial segregation; she later moved on to a similar job in Kin, home to Camp Hansen. In both towns, she became familiar with the women who defied convention by dating black soldiers, documenting them over a period of two years in images of remarkable boldness and intimacy for her first book, Hot Days in Camp Hansen (1982). By 1983, she was running a bar in the port near Naha, frequented by heavy-drinking local anglers and dockworkers to whom she grew close, and whose rough, precarious lives became the subject of her second collection, A Port Town Elegy (1990). Throughout this period, she maintained a friendship with the actor Sachiko Nakada, whose theatre company performed folk tales and comedy dramas in Uchinaaguchi, Okinawa’s indigenous language. Images taken between 1977 and 1991 of the troupe both on and off stage appeared in her self- published book Sachiko Nakada’s Theatre Company (1991). Ishikawa’s photographs continue to focus on individuals and communities from across Okinawan society, from shopkeepers and farmers to more marginal figures, such as the Filipina dancers, who, by the late 1980s, had replaced the Okinawan and Japanese staff at her old workplace in Kin. Soldiers figure prominently in her imagery, as do the frequent protests by locals against the bases. She photographs from a perspective of genuine friendship and empathy, a position she explains by saying: ‘I hate the US military, but I love US soldiers’. 3 Ishikawa is fiercely committed to her Okinawan heritage, identifying as Ryukyuan and referring to mainland Japan as Yamato, after its majority population. Her complex relationship to the mainland is embodied in the series ‘Here’s What the Japanese Flag Means to Me’, begun in 1993, in which she collaborates with a range of subjects, including Ainu, Korean and Buraku minorities, across the political spectrum. Her book Fences, Fuck You!! (2012) takes a similarly collaborative approach to the military base fences that are a ubiquitous, much-maligned presence in Okinawan life. As the works from across the artist’s career displayed in APT9 demonstrate, Mao Ishikawa’s images convey the strong emotional connections that characterise what she terms ‘Okinawa soul’, her unique approach to the complicated circumstances of her homeland. Reuben Keehan Endnotes 1 The Cornerstone of Peace memorial in Itoman, Okinawa, is inscribed with the names of nearly 150 000 Okinawan war dead, an enormous proportion of a prewar population estimated at between 300 000 and 500 000; the vast majority were civilians. 2 Mao Ishikawa, Fences, Okinawa , Miraisha, Tokyo, 2010, pp.2–3. 3 Mao Ishikawa, quoted by Sian Dolding, ‘Life in Philly’, Dazed Digital , 12 November 2013, <www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/17842/1/ life-in-philly>, viewed July 2018. MAO ISHIKAWA