The Creative Spirit: Okinawa began with a friend’s suggestion. Nagahama’s art-school contemporary Tsutomu Makishi proposed the project; Makishi died before it was finished, and Nagahama came to regard the completed book as a remembrance of him. Wise Publishing issued it in softcover in July 2018 under the Japanese title 沖縄ギラギラ琉球キラギラ 100+2 創造する魂 — the numeral answering to the 102 people portrayed.

Those 102 are Okinawan makers of different generations: musicians, stone sculptors and cafe owners among them. The portrait series centres on the people whose varied activities contribute to the islands’ cultural life. Nagahama’s attention falls on the ordinary persistence of creative labor in a place whose identity has repeatedly been contested and remade.

The project belongs to a longer arc. Nagahama had photographed Okinawa during the American occupation, work published in 1972 around the island’s reversion to Japan; decades later he returned with a different question, this time about who is making Okinawan culture now. The book also follows his earlier Tokyo portrait project The Tokyo Hundreds, carrying over the same method — many sitters, one place, a portrait of a city or an island accumulated through its inhabitants.

For a collector, the interest lies in that double vantage: an established photographer revisiting a subject he first met under very different political circumstances, working cumulatively rather than retrospectively. The 2022 exhibition that set these portraits beside his earlier Okinawan scenes suggests how productively the two bodies of work can be read together. The book brings together individual portraits as an account of creative life in contemporary Okinawa.