Introduction​

This is the third book in the "Okinawa Island Exploration Series," following "Okinawa Island Architecture: Records and Memories of Buildings and Lives" and "Okinawa Island Cuisine: Records and Memories of Food and Lives".
So far, we have focused on architecture and food in Okinawa, and have interviewed the people who live there to trace the postwar life and history of Okinawa.

This time, we attempted to trace the transition of life, culture, and customs in postwar Okinawa by comparing "photographs of Okinawa before its reversion" taken mainly by Americans with "photographs taken from the same location with the same framing as much as possible," and adding columns and short but detailed captions by four people who have deep knowledge of Okinawa. The challenge was to trace the evolution of life, culture, and customs in postwar Okinawa. This was not simply a matter of using the photographs as material for the book, but of considering how the people of the time lived and how the photographers looked at the Okinawan people of the time.
What emerged was a picture of the Okinawan people living in the midst of postwar reconstruction, the American eyes that encountered them, and what they had gained and lost over time.

I spent a great deal of time selecting photographs and determining the locations where they would be taken, and then went out to the places where they would have been taken at the time. Cameras of the time were equipped with a 45-50 mm single focal length lens and did not have zoom lenses, as is the case today. The photographer would have loaded Kodak "Kodachrome" film into the camera and looked through the viewfinder to find the best composition.
We traced the past, present, and future with the help of the remaining photographs, just as a historian traces the past through documents to illuminate the present and future.

Each page has a QR code attached.
Reading this code with a smartphone or other device will link to a map and take you to the approximate location where the photo was taken. With this book in hand, you can embark on an imaginative journey into the past, or you can head to the actual location where the photographs were taken more than half a century ago and reconfirm the eyes of the people who captured them, which is also an exceptional experience.

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Naofumi Okamoto