Shiori Okawa: 30 Years of Time

My grandfather called those islands the South Sea Islands. After graduating from university, I lived on those islands 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. They said that fewer and fewer people remember those times. So, I hurried.

It all started when I was a sophomore in high school. I was searching the internet for keywords that interested me—nuclear, environment, development—when I came across a notice for a "Marshall Islands Study Tour." 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 islands was always accompanied by song. 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 what I could learn about the Marshall Islands while in Japan. After that, I worked in the Marshall Islands on my own, learned the local language, and spent three years filming while gathering the oral histories of the islanders.

In the summer of 2015, 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 Marshall Islands during the war until just before he died of starvation. The following year, I accompanied the son on a memorial journey, which led to my directorial debut, the film "Tarinai." Parallel to editing the film, I also took on the challenge of deciphering the entire diary. The miracle and the trajectory of how the diary reached the family through a comrade-in-arms and was eventually fully deciphered 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.