In September 1970, some twenty months before the United States returned administrative control of Okinawa to Japan, the publisher Shinjidai-sha issued a softcover book of eighty-three pages, almost all of them photographs. Its Japanese title — 沖縄 《百万県民の苦悩と抵抗》 — states its argument in the open: Okinawa, the suffering and resistance of one million people. The Japanese-language volume brings photographs and a collective editorial position together at a tense point in Okinawa’s history.
The book was edited by Okinawa Kakushin Kyotou Kaigi, a committee rather than an individual, and the photographs were not made by one hand. Koshichi Taira contributed images, and other photographers are represented as well. Read as a collective volume rather than a personal monograph, it sets out the political imagery of the pre-reversion years: opposition to the continuing American military presence, appeals addressed to the Japanese government, and the ordinary conditions that gave those appeals their force.
That collective character separates this book from Taira’s later Painukaji, whose subject is island life. The 1970 volume is documentary and public in intent, assembled to press an argument while the argument remained undecided. Its attributed authorship has since been examined by institutions, and earlier descriptions crediting every photograph to Taira have been corrected; readers should take the book as the work of several photographers under editorial direction, and its captions as contested historical material rather than neutral record.
The book’s historical position gives it a particular place in a collection of Japanese documentary photography. It belongs to a narrow interval between publication and reversion, when the question it posed was still open, and it shows how photography was enlisted in that argument. Its collective editorship makes the relationship between photographic observation and political advocacy a central part of the reading experience.
