Flowers of Belau

On Jeju Island and in Okinawa. A film that incorporates allegories in order to depict the anguish of regions that bear U.S. military bases.

An old man recalls his childhood in this installation which interweaves narratives, songs, and prayers with the complex history of World War II memory of the bombing in Okinawa and Palau, and the Tokyo Air Raids.

A voice not addressed and thrown away is assimilated to a bunch of microphones under the sea. The artwork throws an ambivalent question to the audience – striving to listen to the singing voice drifting on the wave and the mind of resignation that it won’t reach to anyone.

Captured in black and white, Chikako Yamashiro is in tennis wear dancing in frenzied fashion to club beats in front of a tombstone in broad daylight. As her miniskirt gleams in the dazzling sunlight, a sun visor casts a dark shadow over her face. The video bursts with a vitality that seems to brazenly declare "I will embrace even conflict and wounds and dead, and live with them all."

A woman in black dances with single-minded intensity before a grave. Eventually her steps lead her away from the grave and along the US military base fence strung across the island. A video shot almost by feel, as Yamashiro attempts to pin down the true nature of the doubt and disease she harbours in everyday life, Border ends on the beach at Henoko in Nago, a location rocked by controversy over construction of a new American base.

Yamashiro Chikako channels the stories of survivors of the Battle of Okinawa through lip-synch and superimposition. With her body as an archive, she stages the link between the donors and inheritors of trauma and, ultimately, the impossibility of transferring memory across generational lines.

A story goes around two families in Henoko, Nago city, in Okinawa, Japan where plans for construction of a new US military base are ongoing yet unsettled and in an unstable stage. Complicated feelings of two families in the area are depicted. A must-see is a duet of Opera and Ryuka (traditional Okinawan song) singing.

Leaning over a fence surrounding a U.S. military base, a woman is happily eating ice cream someone gave her. Those who know the status quo of Okinawa will realise that the ice cream symbolises both a promotion policy in compensation for the accepted bases and an image of tourism unilaterally imposed. The filmmaker herself plays the role of the woman who plays the role of (the people in) Okinawa itself (themselves) relying on such realities. Through simulationism, the film embodies the present tense of the local culture’s disappearance, transformation into tourist attractions and rapid homogenisation.