Delighted to report that Zawawa – a book by Kozo Hiramatsu, Rupert Cox and me – is published by Archive Books. The book is part of ongoing research.
The book is a bilingual Eng/JP presentation with fantastic translations by Asako Murakami. Included are longer discussions with Katsu Kabira and Seijin Yogi – who both survived the horrors of the WWII Battle of Okinawa – and shorter excerpts from our interviews with other ear witnesses such as Setsuko Ikehara, Masakazu Kudaka, Shoichi Chibana, Yoriko Ganeko, Toshihisa Tsuha, Ritsuzen Yamanoha, Yoshiaki Higa, Yoshitaka Ikehara and Tomotsu Tokeshi.
Ethnomusicologist Junko Konishi and Nicholas Friedman (Curator of Ornithology at Leibniz Institute) each provide wonderful contextualising articles and Rupert, Kozo and myself offer extended reflections on our collaboration, on the layered historical backgrounds to the Ryukyuan conflicts and on the process of making our film, which is featured as stills and in transcripts of audience reactions (not always positive!). There are a series of Rupert’s photographs of cloud formations – in part a reference to a sequence of US military footage of the sky we found in the Okinawa Prefectural Archives in Haebaru – and there are some of my field notes as well as Junko’s images of the Shuri Castle blaze and a diagram of Kozo’s 1990s research on effects of noise from US military bases.
Keeping all these layers together in two languages must have been no easy task but the great design is by Sara Marcon. We thank publisher Chiara Figone for keeping the faith on this long journey together.