The Wounded Landscape I: Okinawa

At the Battle of Okinawa a total of 200,000 had died by the end of March of 1945. A significant aspect of the Battle of Okinawa was great loss of civilian life.  At more than 100,000 civilians losses far out numbered the military death toll.  Some were blown apart by shells, some finding themselves in a hopeless situation were driven to suicide, some died of starvation, some succumbed to malaria, while others fell victim to the retreating Japanese troops.  Under the most desperate and unimaginable circumstances, Okinawans directly experienced the absurdity of war and atrocities it inevitably brings about. — From the Peace Memorial Museum, Naha

Sixty five years ago, tesu no ame – the Rain of Steel – came to the Ryuku Islands.

The final battle of the Pacific war, the Battle of Okinawa began on April 1, 1945. Before it ended on June 21, more than 70,000 Japanese died in defense (some estimates put the number at 100,000), and more than 12,000 Allied troops died taking it.
By that late date, Japan had, for all intents, been defeated: its navy had been virtually destroyed, and Okinawa represented the battle on what was, for all intents, home turf. Although the Japanese considered the Okinawans an inferior people, the island had been a colony since the 17th century. Only 350 miles from the southern tip of Japan, Okinawa was all that separated the Allies from the homeland.

The Japanese adopted a desperate plan: prolong the war. Hoping to break American nerve, their soldiers would fight to the death, with the Okinawans by their side. The bloodbath would, it was thought, so horrify – so demoralize – the American troops that Truman would negotiate a peace acceptable to the Japanese, one that would preserve the Imperial order.

The Japanese fought cave by cave. Interpreters begged them to come out — to no avail — and the Americans sealed the caves up or hit them with flame throwers.

Carrying tales of American atrocities, the Japanese soldiers goaded the civilians into suicide. To avoid capture, people threw themselves and their families from the cliffs, called banta, to the ocean hundreds of feet below. The beaches were strewn with corpses. Again, estimates of the casualties range, from 40,000 to 150,000.

What Remains
Sixty some years later, James Osamu Nakagawa began documenting what remains of the bloodbath. In his first foray on the island and nearby Saipan, he sought out the ghostly traces of the long-ago battle – an abandoned tank swamped by the sea, a cliff face pock-marked with bullet holes, a human skull – but also evidence of the lingering American occupation. Aptly named Remains, that series depicts the hard-edged reality of the military presence: an airplane overhead, a security wall surrounding an airfield, the forlorn site where the Enola Gay took off. A moving memorial to the islands, the series is presented in an artist’s book consisting of 40 images with words in both Japanese and English letter-pressed onto the paper in a reference to carved stone war memorials.

But Okinawa was not done with Nakagawa. In 2008, he returned to photograph the site of the island’s long-ago nightmare: the Suicide Cliffs, where Okinawan civilians jumped to their death, and the caves, where Japanese soldiers were incinerated by American flamethrowers.

The Banta series – banta means cliffs in Okinawan – are large-scaled, oriented vertically, much like a classical Japanese hanging scroll. The images are far from traditional but, rather, have been meticulously constructed from multiple digital shots. At first glance, these pictures look like straight-ahead shots but, studying them, you get a touch of vertigo. In stitching together these images of the cliff face, Nakagawa effects subtle shifts in perspective that throw you off balance.

“Standing at its feet for the first time,” Nakagawa writes, “I felt in the cliff’s full visceral weight something so powerful that I was initially unable to take even a single photograph. The shadows seeping from the cliff's surface, the white craters riddling the cliff's coral limestone, and the charred black caves were stark reminders of all that these cliffs had witnessed.”

Returning home with thousands of digital files, Nakagawa stitched together the final images, recreations of the “hyper-real vision of [his] experience standing between fear and beauty on Okinawa’s banta.” Most disconcerting among these photographs are those shots from the cliff’s edge that leave you peering over the precipice down into the breakers below – sharing the last sight of the people who took their own lives rather than face an American occupation.

Last year, Nakagawa transferred his gaze to the fortified caves – gama in Okinawan – that harbored the Japanese soldiers making what was to be their last stand and the terrified civilians they had persuaded to join them. Rather than surrender to the advancing Americans, some of the soldiers committed seppuku, while others – by some counts, around 20,000 – were buried alive in the caves under the enemy fire.

At a conference this spring, Nagakawa showed some of the Gama images – I couldn’t find many of them online – and spoke about the experience of descending into them. He spoke about being swallowed up by the darkness and about encountering the vestiges of those who lived and died in the caves.

Awe has two faces: wonderment and terror. Just so with Nakagawa’s photographs. A first, cursory look delights you. The sumptuous textures and swirling ocean are gorgeous. Look closer, though, and you notice the slashes of red sandstone, like blood that will not fade, and you understand that the places these beautiful images document for us are swamped in grief.

Next time: Nakagawa is memorializing the very particular tragedy that played out on the island of Okinawa from April to June 1945. But his photographs belong to a larger archive of photographs that document the wounded landscapes of virtually every major war fought since the camera came along. More on those next post.