From Among the Dead: The Transformation of Sacrifice in Postwar Okinawa

 

In early 2022, Gushiken Takamatsu, director of the Okinawan NPO Gamafuyā, began a hunger strike to protest the use of earth dug from battlefields in southern Okinawa in the construction of a new Marine air base miles to the north. The unrecovered remains of the dead are inseparable from the soil where they lie, he argued. Are they to be forced yet again to join in the preparations for war? For decades, he and his friends have searched fields, beaches and caverns for the remains of those killed in the Battle of Okinawa. Their determination to return the dead to their families and their native places is intertwined with a hope that the physical traces of the Pacific War can be used to create the material basis of a new and just community.

 

In his talk paper, Christopher T. Nelson will relate his current activism to a dialog with the dead that began with Gushiken Takamatsu's early efforts to recover their remains. In particular, Nelson is interested in a moment that enabled Takamatsu to radically reimagine the relationship between sacrifice, patriotism, and death.

 

 

Christopher T. Nelson is a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include the relationship between history and memory; the critical study of everyday life; storytelling, ritual and performance; value, exchange and sacrifice. His book, When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Okinawa, an ethnography of laborers, artists, ethnologists, political activists, shaman and the dead in Japan, will be published by Duke University Press in Spring 2025.