About Us

Launched in 2014, the Okinawa Memories Initiative (OMI) is a public history project with a team of faculty, staff, alumni, graduate and undergraduate students. OMI employs methodologies of experiential learning and community service to explore the dramatic changes in life, society and environment experienced by the islanders in the aftermath of the Battle of Okinawa. Training and employing up to 75 undergraduate and graduate students to do oral history interviews, archival research and processing, and media production in collaboration with partners in Okinawa and among the Okinawan diaspora in North America, OMI has conducted 7 research exhibitions on historical photography and 30 oral histories in Okinawa to date. With COR FRG funding from 2021 and a Luce Foundation grant, we are organizing, digitizing and creating exhibitions of the collections of the Okinawa Association of America in Gardena, CA.

In 2024, OMI is launching the first phase of a multi-year food history project based in Okinawa and its global diaspora. Okinawa has drawn international attention as one of the five “Blue Zones” in the world, places with unusually high numbers of centenarians, whose longevity is often attributed to a healthy diet. Yet the “Blue Zone” discourse individualizes and commodifies diet, erasing Okinawan perspectives which have long framed food as “life medicine” (nuchigusui), intrinsically connected to spiritual community and environmental relationships. In fact, Okinawan life expectancies are declining and elders have expressed concern to us about the loss of knowledge regarding the relationship of food and the environment that they see as key to physical and cultural survival. OMI sees these trends, as well as a rise in dependence on industrialized food products imported from Japan and the United States, as key elements of the dramatic change experienced by the islanders in living memory.

With our food history project, OMI will explore this issue as an effective way to link our “on island” research with our work with current and prospective diasporic partners. In Phase One, an OMI team of fourteen is traveling to Okinawa during spring break of 2024 to undertake ten days of research, in collaboration with our colleagues at the University of the Ryukyus. We will participate in coral reef regeneration and seaweed research work at the Onna Village Fisheries Cooperative and interview members about their experience with aquaculture fecundity, crisis and renewal in the postwar period. We will visit a pig farm, a research forest, a farmer’s market and a dry goods store serving clients throughout the South China region. In addition, we will interview an acclaimed traditional Ryukyuan chef, Tsukayama Keiko, with whom we plan to co-curate a fall show at the Cowell College gallery. This pilot phase thus focuses on our community collaborations with partners in Okinawa, including faculty, staff and students at the University of the Ryukyus, as well as food production cooperatives and such business and research and public science institutions as the Churaumi Aquarium in Motobu and Shima Foods in Naha. Developing effective relationships with these groups is crucial to the long-term prospects of the project.

We have several measures of the success of the work. First, the long-term success of the project depends on creating and sustaining working collaborations with partners in Okinawa and the diaspora for these partners are indispensable to accessing our informants, and consistent with OMI research ethics that emphasize co-creation. Second, assessment of the fall 2024 Cowell exhibit, in conjunction with our Okinawan partners, will set the parameters for assessment of phase two work.

Undergraduate students play key roles as researchers, driving intergenerational and intercultural knowledge exchanges between Okinawan elders and the OMI team. Through OMI membership, our undergraduates have extensive, ongoing training in oral history, exhibition design, archival research and media production. Upcoming research will include investigation of the histories of staples such as sugar cane, sweet potatoes, bitter melon and peppers, all of which link Okinawan food to regional and transregional circulations, from Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan, South China, Korea, Japan and even the Andes. Our work will result in an updated, collaborative, and interactive exhibit that will travel to key sites of the Okinawan diaspora, starting with Okinawan Association communities in California, Hawai’i and Washington. We focus on exhibits because they have been one of our most successful community engagement and research practices. Our exhibits function as research with community members as co-curators and visitors as narrators of the display items. At each site, we will work with local partners to adapt or add to the traveling show with materials generated from local engagement. In the future, we hope to expand our multidisciplinary work to Okinawan Associations in Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina.