Visualizing (im)mobility in post-reversion Okinawa: a comparative study of NDU’s Asia Is One (1973) and Chinen Seishin’s The Human Pavilion (1976)

This article compares two influential visual media works produced in post-reversion Okinawa: the film Asia Is One (1973), produced by Nihon Documentarist Union (NDU), and Chinen Seishin’s experimental play The Human Pavilion (1976). The performative deconstruction of Okinawan regional identity in these works reflects the emergence of (im)mobility as a critical concept for approaching Japanese ethnonational discourse and its mediated enactments during this period. Asia Is One employs a complex spatio-temporal mapping of Okinawa’s diverse historical networks of labour and cultural exchange to challenge visions of ambivalent synchronicity between Okinawa and the mainland advanced within the event of reversion. The Human Pavilion challenges structures of spectatorship developed in the 1975 Ocean Expo to demonstrate the limitations of visualizing ethnocultural particularity, gesturing to a pervasive and self-perpetuating silence integral to the production of ‘Okinawa’ as an ethnographic object. Reading these works in the context of post-reversion media ecologies offers a sense of the complex negotiation of Okinawan identity that developed in the Ocean Expo and the reversion, events that exposed and reproduced transhistorical legacies of (im)mobility in Okinawa.