Zawawa: Listening to the Aftermaths of Conflicts in Okinawa

The research for our project "Zawawa" began on April 21st, 2011 when acoustic scientist Kozo Hiramatsu, anthropologist Rupert Cox and artist Angus Carlyle met in Okinawa.

A previous collaboration "Air Pressure" had explored the environmental stresses on a family of organic farmers living in the midst of Narita airport. "Zawawa" centres on the Pacific island which was devastated by the last battle of World War II, was subsequently occupied by the United States for 27 years and is where a considerable presence of military personnel, infrastructure and overflying aircraft persist today.

Over thenext seven years, Hiramatsu, Cox and Carlyle's fieldwork was devoted to learning from the islanders' listening experiences and using these to direct their sound recording, filming and subsequent interviews, taking them to the edges of airbases and jungle warfare training camps, to bars and music venues, markets and lagoons, to sacred groves and ceremonies with priestesses and villagers at the edge of the sea. The film was premiered in ten civic centres on Okinawa before touring festivals worldwide and being short-listed for the Jean Rouch Award in 2019.

This illustrated, bi-lingual book begins with extended original interviews with two survivors of World War Il's Typhoon of Steel. These are followed by ten further testimonies of auditory life on the islands and by verbatim audience reactions recorded during discussions at the film's premieres. The book includes extended essays by Hiramatsu, Cox and Carlyle recounting their own sound-orientated perspectives which are in turn contextualized by Okinawa-based responses from musicologist Junko Konishi and biodiversity researcher Nicholas Friedman.

Angus Carlyle's contributions to the book include the 8000 word essay, a series of fieldnotes detailing research activities on the project between 2011 and 2020 and devising the volume's structure.

The essay introduces the idea of the sonic sublime and explores the Battle of Okinawa by listening to its literature comprising first hand accounts by Japanese soldiers, American soldiers and civilians, and extends that listening to accounts from ear witnesses to Okinawa of post-World War II and post-Fukki (the Reversion of the archipelago in 1972). The essay develops an idea of listening to warfare that encompasses soldiers and civilians and accounts for the sonorities of conflict exceeding any focus on the punctual event of the battlefield - either spatially or temporally.

The book is published by Archive Books, whose mission statement reads "As a community of practitioners collaborating across regions and socio-political environments, at the core of our work lies a commitment to disrupt Eurocentric epistemologies. As a result, our work is deeply rooted in a sustained scrutiny of the role of languages, visuality, and archives in the perpetration of the coloniality of knowledge."