Shiori Okawa: 30 Years of Time

2019/01/27

My grandfather called that island the South Sea Islands (Nanyo Gunto). After graduating from university, I lived on that island for three years.

"Right after graduation? Why!?"

People are usually surprised, as if I had been sent into exile. When I tell them it was my own choice, they look even more puzzled. If I were to answer this inevitable question seriously, it is because I wanted to make a documentary film that reflects the connection with Japan.

However, some said it was already too late—that the people who knew those times were becoming fewer. So, I hurried.

It all started when I was a sophomore in high school. I searched for keywords that interested me—nuclear, environment, development—and an announcement for a "Marshall Islands Study Tour" caught my eye. The Daigo Fukuryu Maru, Godzilla, Bikini Atoll—it was then that I first learned that the site of U.S. nuclear testing had been under Japanese mandate for about 30 years, and that many lives were lost there during the Asia-Pacific War.

Life on the island was always accompanied by songs. There were Japanese love songs starting with "Koishii wa, anata wa..." (I miss you...), and remnants of the mandate era and memories of the war peeked out from every corner of daily life. Standing before a rusted artillery battery, an elder told me, "The war changed the Japanese people." While I felt the illusion of having traveled back in time, it was the daily life in Japan—where the war felt like an event in a distant world—that seemed like a world of fiction.

Four years after participating in the tour, I wrote my graduation thesis on the Marshall Islands, but I felt the limits of learning about the Marshall Islands while in Japan. Afterward, I worked alone in the Marshalls while learning the local language, and for three years, I collected the oral histories of the islanders while keeping my camera rolling.

In 2015, the summer of the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, I met a son who kept his father's diary as a memento—a diary written in the Marshalls during the war until just before he died of starvation. The following year, I accompanied the son on a memorial journey, and my first directorial work, the film "Tarinai," was born. In parallel with editing the film, I also took on the challenge of deciphering the entire diary. The miracle and trajectory of how the diary reached the family through a comrade-in-arms and led to its full decipherment was published as "The Marshall Islands, My Father's Battlefield: Historical Practice Surrounding a Japanese Soldier's Diary."

In December 2018, the Marshall Islands and Japan celebrated the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations, and I also turned 30. Now that the theatrical release has been realized in a year where I feel a modest connection, I hope to hold a screening in the Marshall Islands next.