Project History

Gail Photos are Rediscovered​

In 2011, Geri Gail, campus auditor at the time, first reached out to Shelby Graham of the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at UCSC about preserving and presenting the photos that her father, Dr. Charles E. Gail, had taken of Okinawa between 1952 and 1953. Ms. Graham initially brought the photos to the History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) professor Stacy Kamehiro, who recommended that the photos be brought to Dr. Alan Christy, a professor in Japanese history.

Usage of the Gail Photos​

In 2012, actions regarding the Gail photos were mainly focused on figuring out the legalities of usage. Dr. Alan Christy was getting requests from students during this time about doing research on Okinawan history, however, he had no real outlet for them aside from the Gail photos. He advertised that he wanted to go forward on a project with the photographs but he had not yet gotten permission on his ideas from Geri Gail and was waiting for her to call him back.When a student asked again he told them about how he had been calling and called Ms. Gail to show the student. She picked up! She then approved the Gail Project with the students, and Toshiro Tanaka and Dr. Christy began talks soon after they finished their previous project. This all took about a year or two from when the photos had first been passed to Dr. Christy in 2011.

Okinawa History Seminar​​

In the spring of 2013, conversations about starting formal work based on the photographs began to ramp up. This was because of Dr. Christy’s Okinawan history seminar in the fall of 2013, where he told the class about the Gail photos and promised them a trip to Okinawa. In his first student trip to Japan, Dr. Christy brought four undergraduate students from this class to Yokohama in December 2013, along with Ph.D. student Dustin Wright, who was working on his dissertation in Tokyo based at Waseda University and funded by Fulbright Hays. In the summer of 2013, Dr. Christy and his family went to Okinawa and met with museum personnel, such as Nakamoto Kazuhiko from the Okinawa Prefectural Archives (OPA).

While Gail photographs have yet to be shown in the archives, Dr. Christy established a lasting relationship with the archives and brought students there on later trips for independent research.

The Start of the Gail Project​

In the fall of 2013, the Gail Project (a predecessor to OMI) was officially launched as an undergraduate student historical research project. Students used Gail’s photos as a starting point for an elaborate scavenger hunt of research through which students could begin to understand post-war Okinawan culture and the history of the Okinawan people. Around the same time, UCSC’s history department offered History 194, an Okinawan history seminar focused on Gail’s photos.

In December of that year, History 194 took a class trip to Yokohama to work with Yokohama National University students and professor Hiroyuki Matsubara. Dr. Matsubara, a former Ph.D. student mentored by Dr. Christy and Dr. Alice Yang, was a faculty member at Yokohama National University. Dr. Christy and Dr. Matsubara’s classes teamed up and Dr. Wright accompanied them, arranging a trip to a former protest site at the Tachikawa Air Force Base in Western Tokyo outside of Tachikawa, in a town called Sunagawa.

The First Project Trip to Okinawa​

In September 2014, the Gail Project traveled to Okinawa as a student research team for the first time. Six members went on the trip: Dr. Alan Christy, Toshiro Tanaka, Rei Coleman, Conner Lowe, Natanel Miller, and Madeleine Thompson. One of the goals of the trip was to try and locate the specific locations of Dr. Gail’s photos. They were successful in doing so when they visited Nakagusuku Castle where they were able to confirm Gail had taken photos when they found a staircase. Another great find of the trip was a pair of shisa (stone lion figures) near the castle, which had been depicted in the Gail photos in a very different place, a warehouse of some kind.

At first, they could not find these lions, however had Conner Lowe found a book published in 1958 that depicted them before traveling to Okinawa, leading them to assume they were in a museum. Before going to the castle, they bought tickets for Tama-Udun, a tomb just west of Nakagusuku Castle, where they asked about the image of the shisa and found they had been restored to their original place atop the tombs! Members of the project wrote about their experience finding the shisa which can be read here.
A highlight of the 2014 trip was when the Gail Project visited the Himeyuri Peace Museum, which contextualizes the tragic story of the students and teachers of Okinawa Daiichi Women’s High School and Okinawa Shihan Women’s Schools. They were mobilized to be nurses for the Japanese army during WWII in what would be called the Himeyuri students corps (or Himeyuri gakutoutai). Out of 270 students and teachers in the mobilized nurse corps, the 13 sole survivors spent the next 40 years working to preserve the memory of their classmates and instructors, which led to the building of the Himeyuri Peace Museum. This peace museum thoughtfully captures WWII from an often underrepresented perspective: the civilian perspective. Dr. Christy, after this initial visit to the museum, would make visiting the Himeyuri Peace Museum one of the first agenda items in every student trip to Okinawa thereafter.

Classes and New Members​

From 2015 to 2017, Dr. Wright taught an Okinawa history class at UCSC titled the History and Memory of the Okinawa Islands and another class about Anti-Base Protests in Asia. Many students of these classes were involved with the Gail Project.
Late 2015 introduced a new member and focus to the organization. Cameron Vanderscoff, a former student of Dr. Christy, reached out to the Gail Project expressing interest in collaborating with the Gail Project and expanding its research scope to include life story oral histories with Okinawans from all walks of life. With the expanded scope, Vanderscoff proposed renaming the project Okinawa Memories Initiative. While the Gail Project focused more on the post-war photos they had acquired, the Okinawa Memory Initiative would focus on recording and sharing the stories of the survivors and descendants of the war. The lasting effects that the war had on the Okinawan people meant that more trips to Okinawa would be essential. Mr. Vanderscoff was able to receive a $10,000 grant from the Davis Projects for Peace which made it possible for both the Gail Project and the Okinawa Memory Initiative to visit Okinawa the next year.

The First Project Trip to Okinawa​

In September 2014, the Gail Project traveled to Okinawa as a student research team for the first time. Six members went on the trip: Dr. Alan Christy, Toshiro Tanaka, Rei Coleman, Conner Lowe, Natanel Miller, and Madeleine Thompson. One of the goals of the trip was to try and locate the specific locations of Dr. Gail’s photos. They were successful in doing so when they visited Nakagusuku Castle where they were able to confirm Gail had taken photos when they found a staircase. Another great find of the trip was a pair of shisa (stone lion figures) near the castle, which had been depicted in the Gail photos in a very different place, a warehouse of some kind.

At first, they could not find these lions, however had Conner Lowe found a book published in 1958 that depicted them before traveling to Okinawa, leading them to assume they were in a museum. Before going to the castle, they bought tickets for Tama-Udun, a tomb just west of Nakagusuku Castle, where they asked about the image of the shisa and found they had been restored to their original place atop the tombs! Members of the project wrote about their experience finding the shisa which can be read here.
A highlight of the 2014 trip was when the Gail Project visited the Himeyuri Peace Museum, which contextualizes the tragic story of the students and teachers of Okinawa Daiichi Women’s High School and Okinawa Shihan Women’s Schools. They were mobilized to be nurses for the Japanese army during WWII in what would be called the Himeyuri students corps (or Himeyuri gakutoutai). Out of 270 students and teachers in the mobilized nurse corps, the 13 sole survivors spent the next 40 years working to preserve the memory of their classmates and instructors, which led to the building of the Himeyuri Peace Museum. This peace museum thoughtfully captures WWII from an often underrepresented perspective: the civilian perspective. Dr. Christy, after this initial visit to the museum, would make visiting the Himeyuri Peace Museum one of the first agenda items in every student trip to Okinawa thereafter.