OKINAWA: THE AFTERBURN

Okinawa_p

Illuminating a Troubling History of Ongoing Occupation and Resistance

Venue: Hibiya Convention Hall (Hibiya Library and Museum, B1)
Oct. 06 (Tuesday): 18:30~21:00 (doors open 18:15)
Official website: okinawa-urizun.com
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUWJtY4G0-8
Tariff:  General: ¥1,500, Students: ¥1,000
Advance tickets: NA
Talk event: Post-screening talk with John Junkerman and Political Science Prof. Koichi Nakano of Sophia University

Title: 沖縄 うりずんの雨 (Okinawa Urizun no Ame)
Director: John Junkerman (ジャン・ユンカーマン)
Duration: okinawa-urizun.com

In this 70th anniversary year marking the end of World War II, Japan’s southernmost island continues to be a reminder of the war’s appalling toll. Seven decades after the 84-day-long Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest conflict of the Pacific War, the landmark new documentary Okinawa: The Afterburn illuminates the island’s troubling history of ongoing occupation, human and civil rights violations, and dogged resistance.

Oscar-nominated filmmaker John Junkerman’s sobering work reveals how America has always treated Okinawa as the spoils of war — its “keystone in the Pacific.” Today, the US military occupies nearly 20 percent of the small island, accounting for a staggering 74 percent of its military presence in Japan. With the active support of the Japanese government, a huge new Marine base has long been planned for construction in Henoko to replace the Futenma Air Station, despite endangering a fragile marine ecosystem and prompting constant protests.

John Junkerman is an American writer, educator, filmmaker and activist who has lived in Japan for over 40 years and produced some of the most important topical films. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his first film, Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima (1986), had an international hit with his 2002 Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, and provided the first in-depth look at the government’s plan to revise the constitution and jettison its famous no-war clause, Article 9, in Japan’s Peace Constitution (2005).

Junkerman lived on Okinawa in the mid-1970s, and was struck by “the pervasive and abiding rejection of war among the Okinawa people, and by how incongruous and violent the American military presence on the island was. Over the decades that followed, it troubled me that Okinawa was forced to continue to endure this incompatibility. This is largely a consequence of the ignorance of the American public, and I felt a responsibility to make a film that would penetrate, if only in a small way, this shroud of apathy.”

Junkerman and his close collaborator, Tetsujiro Yamagami, attempt to pierce the shroud through interviews with American, Japanese and Okinawan survivors of the Battle of Okinawa, tracing its fraught legacy. He makes crucial use of footage shot by the US during the course of the war; but the director’s trademark approach is to allow eyewitnesses to relate history as they lived it, and Okinawa: The Afterburn features several revelatory accounts. Issues of wartime guilt are movingly recalled by such survivors as Hajime Kondo, who admits that the Japanese sense of superiority over the Ryukyuan people accounted for some of the war’s worst atrocities: “We committed many abuses here in Okinawa,” he laments. Others recall the Chibichiri-gama mass suicide-murders, the comfort stations staffed with “pigua” (comfort women), and the students who were forced by Japanese troops to throw bombs underneath US tanks.

Although there have been frequent problems with the US presence over the years, from dangerous helicopter crashes to water supplies poisoned by jet fuel, opposition to US bases expanded most dramatically after the 1995 rape of a 12-year old girl by three American servicemen. One of them is interviewed to devastating effect in the film, and his chilling testimony is just one of the many reasons that Okinawa: The Afterburn is a must-see work.

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