Uncollected Bones and Ambiguous Loss: Okinawan Mourning Rituals in the Northern Mariana Islands

Abstract

The study expounds upon the psychological concept of ‘ambiguous loss,’ proposed by Pauline Boss. The article attempts to broaden the concept’s individualistic focus by offering a more ethnographically nuanced and socioculturally contextualized application of the concept. It examines how Okinawan WWII survivors, who repatriated from the Northern Mariana Islands after the war, relied on their belief system to make sense of ‘abnormal’ deaths during war, and the lack of proper mortuary rituals usually conducted for ‘normal’ deaths. The article argues that religio-spiritual rituals during their pilgrimages to the Marianas were the means with which those struggling with ambiguous loss attempt to deal with their psychological trauma and spiritual pain. It is also argued, however, that the uncollected bodies/bones continue to haunt the bereaved families, so their struggle with the loss cannot come to a complete ‘closure,’ resulting in their repeated visits to the sites of their loved ones’ violent deaths.

Keywords

ambiguous loss war dead Okinawa Northern Mariana Islands ritual spiritual care

Introduction

Nomura Hideko¹ was born in Garapan Town, on Saipan Island in the Northern Mariana Islands in 1938, when the archipelago was under Japanese colonial rule. Her stable and happy childhood there abruptly ended with the Battle of the Marianas in 1944, which killed her parents and younger brother. After being interned in the civilian camp for eight months, she and other Okinawan settlers, including those born and raised in the Marianas, were all repatriated to Okinawa after the war. She did not share her war experience with anyone after the repatriation. It was “too painful” to talk about. She has long participated in the pilgrimage tour to Saipan and Tinian for pacifying/consoling the spirits of the dead (irei), a total of six times, along with the sister and brother who also survived the 1944 battle. The first time she returned to Saipan, she “could not stop crying” and “could not even stand on [her] feet” when the group went to Banaderu, in northern Saipan, where she lost her parents. At each of the places she visited, she remembered the war and her losses. She did not know “where exactly [her] father and brother died or how they died,” and she had “no mementos or bones” of them to bring back to Okinawa. She hoped to continue visiting Saipan every year as long as she is physically and financially able (Interview, June 20, 2014). After interviewing dozens of Okinawan repatriates who survived the 1944 battle, but lost their loved ones in the chaotic battlefields, I learned that many repatriates participated in the irei visits to the Northern Mariana Islands for multiple times, and for them the missing bodies and bones of loved ones, which they believed to still be on the islands, were a key motivator for their repeated visits. I was often told that they didn’t know exactly where, when, and how the loved ones died, because they were estranged during their frantic escape from the aerial attacks, and that they still wished to find and retrieve bones, but, given that this is virtually impossible now, they just wanted to visit the places they believed their loved ones died and offer a prayer.

This article relates the desires expressed by the Okinawan repatriates to what Pauline Boss (1999) called “ambiguous loss”: uncertain, traumatic and uncanny loss that haunts those who have experienced it. Although the concept is typically applied to those who are suffering from missing family members—physically absent but psychologically present—or those with family members who are incapacitated—physically present but psychologically absent—due to mental illness or Alzheimer’s, I suggest that ambiguous loss can also apply to the suffering of those who are unable to retrieve physical remains and properly conduct mortuary rituals. The ambiguous loss concept has been widely used in the writings of psychologists and social workers, but, perhaps due to its individualistic inclination, few anthropologists have engaged with the concept. I suggest that, by applying the concept in a socioculturally contextualized manner, anthropologists of death and bereavement could expand the concept’s scope to examine collective loss and healing. In examining the Okinawan war survivors’ and repatriates’ attempts at coming to terms with the violent deaths, the article demonstrates that their belief system, with regard to life, death and spirits, shapes the ways in which they make sense of the senseless and “abnormal” deaths, as well as the absence of proper mortuary rituals usually conducted for “normal” deaths. The article further suggests, though, that the uncollected bodies/bones and/or unwitnessed deaths continue to haunt the surviving families, and their struggle with ambiguous and unresolved loss is never truly overcome (Boss & Carnes, 2012).

Ambiguous Loss and Missing Bodies

As a child who witnessed her immigrant parents quietly suffering a deep sense of loss of homeland and family members far away (Tippett, 2016), Boss conceptualized ambiguous loss as the loss experienced when one “cannot tell for sure if the loved one is dead or alive, dying or recovering, absent or present,” or, more succinctly, a loved one “leaving without [a] goodbye.” This type of loss causes a range of stressors that “freeze” the grief process and effectively prevent closure, because “there is no official or community verification that anything is lost—no death certificate, no wake or sitting shiva, no funeral, no body, nothing to bury” (Boss, 1999, p. 6). While Boss and others have applied this concept to understanding the loss of people perceived by family members as “physically absent but psychologically present” (Boss, 1999, p. 8; Blaauw, 2002; Kajtazi-Testa & Hewer, 2018; Luster et al., 2008; Parr et al., 2016; Robins, 2010), Boss (1999) and Kajtazi-Testa and Hewer (2018) also suggested that deaths that have left surviving family members without retrieved bodily remains, such as deaths in armed conflicts and abductions, could also be considered ambiguous loss because “loss is not clearly definable as death because there is no body to bury” even with the overwhelming evidence of death (Kajtazi-Testa & Hewer, 2018, p. 335). The importance of the unrecovered bodies as a cause of ambiguous loss is underscored by Parr et al. (2016) in their studies of British families with missing family members; they claim that ambiguous loss “may also be evoked as a time/space of uncertain waiting that cannot [be] straightforwardly ended unless there is a body located” (p. 68). Under such circumstances, the grief of families who face ambiguous loss lingers, and there is no such thing as clear-cut “closure” to the grieving process (Boss & Carnes, 2012).

The ambiguous loss concept has been widely referred to in the writings of psychologists and social workers, but few anthropologists have drawn on it in their studies (see, however, Parr et al. 2016). Furthermore, most existing studies on ambiguous and unresolved losses, as Robins (2010) pointed out, have been conducted largely in “a single cultural context, namely, that of Western and largely North American, families” (p. 253), with some exceptions (Kajtazi-Testa & Hewer, 2018; Luster et al. 2008; Robins 2010; Thornton 2000), even though Boss and Carnes (2012, p. 466) suggested that different cultures may approach ambiguous loss in different ways. Robins (2010) argued that “cultural factors are a determinant in when ambiguous loss occurs and how it manifests itself” (p. 255). Moreover, how individuals cope with the loss is shaped by specific cultural contexts. In their study of Sudanese “lost boys,” who had been separated from their parents when they were young to join the paramilitary, Luster et al. (2008) found that the Sudanese youth drew on their culturally-specific notion of control—many things in life, such as war and separation, were beyond their control (p. 453), and through this, they came to terms with their ambiguous and unresolved losses.

Ethnographies of Battlefield Pilgrimages

Many anthropological studies have examined how collective trauma of ambiguous and unresolved loss has been dealt with by people through ritualistic acts. For instance, there are numerous studies on how mourners attempt to find missing bodily remains after mass violence (Ferrándiz 2006, 2013; Ferrándiz & Robben, 2015; Kwon, 2006; Merridale, 2000; Sanford, 2003), attempting to understand how the family members and relatives of the victims are trying to make sense of senseless deaths. Similarly, there are many studies on pilgrimages to former battlefields and war memorials dedicated to the war dead (Dubisch, 2008; Eade & Katić, 2017; Lloyd, 1998; Scates. 2013; Walter, 1993). Other scholars (Camacho, 2011; Kitamura, 2009; Kwon, 2006; Nishimura, 2008a, 2008b; Peterson, 2017; Sikimić, 2017) have also ethnographically studied the importance of folk beliefs and religious rituals for properly mourning the war dead in their effort to come to terms with the ambiguous and unresolved deaths without bodies/bones. For some, like an Australian battlefield pilgrim who “walked his or her path with a deep sense of history, hoping to recover a memory that might otherwise be lost” (Scates, 2013, p. 272), constructing the memory of the loved one through a journey is their paramount goal. For others, like those who examined in Dubisch’s (2008) study on U.S. veterans’ annual motorcycle pilgrimage to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., the pilgrimage has become an important healing ritual as “a profoundly spiritual journey” and “a journey with and for the dead [that] bridges the mundane and the invisible worlds” (p. 321). Similarly, Walter (1993) noted that for the battlefield and war grave pilgrims, the sites are “sacred” because those they “love and admire have died there.” By visiting the battlefields and war graves, walking around or standing near them, “the pilgrim is healed and becomes whole, complete, in the presence of the bones” of the war dead (p. 86). Despite the richness and diversity of these studies, none of these studies have engaged the ambiguous loss concept in their interpretations of the mourners’ attempt at coping with their loved ones’ violent, abrupt, and unwitnessed deaths. With my present study, therefore, I suggest that anthropologists could make much contribution to the study of ambiguous and unresolved losses by ethnographically situating the people’s efforts to come to terms with violent losses of their loved ones in broader sociocultural contexts.

My study examines how Okinawan civilian survivors of the Battle of the Marianas who lost family members during the battle cope with loss through practices shaped by the Okinawan folk belief system, which is drawn from indigenous ancestor worship, Japanese Shintoism, and Buddhism. Many of these survivors did not know exactly where, when or how their loved ones died during the battle, or they witnessed the brutal deaths of their family members but were unable to bring their bodies back to Okinawa after the war to bury them in family tombs. Due to the highly unusual circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths, they suffered from ambiguous and unresolved loss that cannot be properly grieved after their eventual repatriation to Okinawa and rebuilding their lives there. What I will portray here is how the rituals, founded upon Okinawan folk beliefs about death and spirits of the dead, helped them cope with the ambiguous loss, or death without bodies/bones. Building on Boss’s (2007) work, which maintains researchers must examine “movement, paradoxical possibilities of change, and diverse paths to resiliency” (p. 108), this study suggests that through these mourning rituals, the Okinawan repatriates and family members of the war dead attempt to overcome the “freezing” effect of loss in relation to the dead and missing, and to become “active agents in responding to this particular kind of absence” (Boss, 2007). Yet, as Boss also suggested, the Okinawans’ struggle to cope with ambiguous and unresolved loss is not always or completely successful nor it ever really ends, even after conducting the proper mourning rituals at the sites of the deaths. Many continue to search for bodily remains—bones—of loved ones on the islands, or, at least, continue to get as close to the places of their presumed deaths as possible by visiting the islands and offering prayers for their peaceful afterlife.

Methodology

My research was conducted between June 2013 to June 2015 in Okinawa and the Commonwealth of the Norther Mariana Islands (CNMI). I conducted open-ended interviews with 47 repatriates from Saipan and Tinian Islands, aged late-60s to mid-80s. Not all of them had family members who died in the Battle of the Marianas in 1944, but the vast majority did. Three of them were orphaned as the result of the war. The interviews were conducted in Japanese. While some of them were more comfortable communicating in the Okinawan language (uchināguchi) than “standard” Japanese, those repatriates who spent their childhood on the Mariana Islands had in fact learned the “standard” Japanese first, before they later learned how to communicate in the Okinawan vernacular upon their repatriation to Okinawa. I was also permitted to join two pilgrimage tours, in 2014 and 2015, organized by the Micronesia Repatriates’ Association (MRA), an organization for the Okinawan repatriates from the colonial Micronesia founded in the 1950s. I was a participant-observer of official MRA memorial ceremonies at Saipan and Tinian and accompanied three repatriates’ private trips to search for their childhood homes and the places of their loved ones’ deaths. I had numerous casual conversations with the repatriate-pilgrims during the trips and have included some of the information I gathered through these conversations in this paper.

Okinawan Migration to the Northern Mariana Islands and the Battle of the Marianas

The Mariana Islands are an arc-shaped archipelago in the north-western Pacific Ocean, south of Japan and north of New Guinea. Following Ferdinand Magellan’s arrival on the islands in 1521, Spain formally claimed them in 1667. After its 1898 defeat in the Spanish-American War, Spain ceded Guam to the United States and sold the northern islands of the archipelago to Germany in 1899. Japan took over the German islands, including the Marshalls, Carolines and Northern Marianas, when the Central Powers lost in 1918 to the Triple Entente, which Japan had joined as a British ally. These islands became Imperial Japan’s mandate territories, entrusted by the League of Nations. The Japanese government established Nan’yō-chō, or the South Seas Agency, in 1921 to govern the islands, and the government-backed Nan’yō Kōhatsu Kabushiki Kaisha (South Seas Development Company), or NKK, began investing heavily in sugarcane production and phosphate mining on the islands, especially on the Northern Marianas.

NKK targeted Okinawa as a principal source of the migrant labour and actively recruited Okinawans to work in Micronesia. Okinawans had struggled with severe poverty after the Ryūkyū Kingdom was annexed by Japan in 1879, as the Japanese government enforced mono-cultural sugarcane farming and a heavy tax burden on Okinawa Prefecture. In particular, during the late-1910s and 1920s, when Okinawa experienced a famine against the backdrop of a global decline in the price of sugar, thousands of Okinawan emigrated. For them, the Northern Marianas represented an attractive migratory destination because of the relative proximity to Okinawa, and as a Japanese territory, no visa was required. The Japanese population in the Marianas, including that of Okinawans, exploded in the 1930s. In 1935, more than 19,000 Japanese lived on Saipan, outnumbering some 3,500 indigenous islanders and 200 Koreans. Okinawans made up approximately 60% of the Japanese population in the Northern Marianas. They made a living as tenant farmers on NKK-owned sugar plantations, tuna fishermen, clerical workers for Nan’yō-chō or small business owners.

During the Battle of Marianas in 1944, around 44,000 Japanese soldiers, 10,000 Japanese civilians (more than half of whom were Okinawans) and an estimated 1,000 Koreans and indigenous islanders (combined) were killed. In the entire Japanese mandate territory in Micronesia, 13,000 Okinawans were estimated to have died in battle in 1944–45 (Aniya, 1995, p. 16). Many Okinawans died not only from the relentless shelling by the American fleets, but also from group suicides. Through the militaristic school education that emphasised unconditional loyalty to the emperor, many Okinawan colonists had come to believe that it was shameful to surrender to the enemy, and that if they were captured by the Americans, the men would be enslaved, tortured and killed, and the women would be gang-raped by their captors (Shimojima, 2012). The battle was traumatizing for many Okinawan survivors, who lost family members, relatives, friends and neighbours in the bombings and suicides. My interviewees had horrific memories of their loved ones killed right in front of their eyes or had to leave the dying family members on the ground, unable to carry them to safety or properly bury them, due to the relentless bombardment. Many were separated from their parents and siblings during the chaotic escape in the jungle and never saw them again, without knowing where or how they died.

The survivors who were captured by the Americans were interned in displaced persons’ camps on the islands, then were repatriated to Okinawa from January–December 1946 (Imaizumi, 2005, 14). Approximately 33,000 Okinawans were sent to Okinawa (Aniya, 1995, p. 13). After arriving in Okinawa, they had to re-establish their livelihoods from scratch in the war-ravaged “homeland.” The U.S. military government of Okinawa, which needed a large number of labourers to build and operate the quickly-expanding military bases, became a major employer of repatriates from former Japanese colonies, such as Micronesia, the Philippines and Taiwan (Toriyama, 2013, 43). Many of the male repatriates I interviewed joined the fast-increasing number of Okinawans working in U.S. military jobs as soon as they were able, while also maintaining small farms in their home villages. The repatriates from the Marianas, who had already worked under the Americans at the Mariana internment camps before repatriation, could find military work with relative ease, though they did not enjoy it. The Okinawan military workers were not only profoundly ambivalent about their role in helping the foreign military occupy their home island, they were also resentful of what they perceived as American racism, such as the wage gap between American and Okinawan employees (Okinawa Taimusu Chūbu Shisha Henshū-bu, 2013).

Under these circumstances, hundreds of Okinawan repatriates connected with other repatriates from colonial Micronesia and formed the MRA in February 1948, initially to launch a campaign to convince the U.S. military government of Okinawa to permit them to re-migrate to the Northern Marianas (Imaizumi, 2005, pp. 28–30). In Okinawa, a group of repatriates, led by a formerly-successful business owner and the president of the Okinawan Association in Saipan during the colonial era, conducted the first ireisai, or a memorial ceremony to console the spirits of the dead, in Okinawa. In 1963, the MRA began to organise pilgrimages to the Marianas and other Micronesian islands. In its peak years of 1970s and 1980s, a group of more than 1,000 Okinawans travelled together to the CNMI on a MRA-organised trip, and more than 6,000 Okinawans have joined the pilgrimages over the years.

Collecting Bones

Starting from the 1950s, the Japanese government responded to the pressure from bereaved families to collect bones from the former battlefields in the Western and Southern Pacific, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, China and other countries, where approximately 2.4 million Japanese nationals died. In 1953, the Japanese government dispatched bone collection teams to the Pacific islands that were under U.S. control: Minami-tori-shima, Wake, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, Angaur, Peleliu and Iwo Jima. From the Central Pacific region, which includes the Northern Mariana Islands, approximately 74,000 sets of bones were retrieved, far below the estimated number of 247,000 war dead (Hamai, 2008, p. 202; Kurihara, 2015, pp. 124–126).² Most of the bodily remains of the Japanese and Okinawan fallen soldiers and civilians, as well as Americans, Koreans and indigenous islanders, therefore, remain uncollected. The families, including the Okinawan repatriates from the Northern Mariana Islands, then, not only suffered horrific traumas during the battle when they were children, but also were unable to retrieve their loved ones’ bodily remains or bones.

The repatriates have struggled to come to terms with their losses. They were separated from family members during the chaos of escape from the bombardment and lost their loved ones without knowing specifics of their deaths. Under these circumstances, very few of them had a chance to bury or cremate their loved ones’ bodies or collect their bones. Many Okinawan repatriates travelled to Saipan and Tinian to look for remains, usually unsuccessfully. Iha Seigi lost his father in Saipan on 25 June 1944, from a fragment to his face from the naval bombardment when he, his family of seven, and other relatives sought refuge. They carried the body of their lost father in a two-wheeled cart, dug a hole and buried him. Then, they held an impromptu ceremony by joining their hands and praying. In 1976, Mr. Iha and his brothers joined the MRA’s pilgrimage. During the trip, they relied on their childhood memories and visited the place they believed they had buried their father, with the thought of gathering at least pieces of their father’s bones (Interview, June 9, 2015; Kuniyoshi, 2009). They were unable to find any.

Kinjō Takeshi, along with his mother, also looked for the bones of his father, younger brother and two younger sisters when they went to Saipan in 1976. He rented a car and went to look for the bones in northern Saipan, where their family members’ bodies were left behind in July 1944. By 1976, however, the topography had changed dramatically, and they had difficulty tracing the exact route of their escape. He was unable to find the location but tried three more times over the years to look for the remains, all in vain (Interview, March 27, 2014). Unlike those looking for missing family members (Kajtazi-Testa & Hewer, 2018; Luster et al., 2008; Parr et al., 2016; Robins, 2010), these families did not doubt that their loved ones are dead; however, they grapple with their ambiguous and unresolved loss because of their inability to retrieve physical remains from the places of their deaths that they believe would give them a sense of closure.

Many repatriates have quietly suffered from their traumatic losses on the islands over the years, even as they worked hard to re-establish their lives in the post-war Okinawa. Many interviewees told me they had rarely spoken about their war experiences and tried not to think about it. Shimoji Sōei was orphaned during the Battle of the Marianas when he lost his father to suicide, after suffering from a severe injury from a piece of naval bombshell. Mr. Shimoji lost consciousness when a bomb exploded nearby, and when he woke up, he realised that he was separated from his mother and all but one of his siblings. He never saw his mother or other siblings again. He told me that he never talked about his days in Saipan to his wife or children; in fact, he believed his children did not even know that he was born and raised in Saipan or that he was an orphan. He tried not to think about his youth before, during or after the war, “Because if I talk about the past, I would have to mention the war. That would make me insane. I just can’t talk about it” (Interview, June 8, 2014).³ Mr. Shimoji has visited Saipan four times as part of the MRA pilgrimage groups, and during each visit he looked for both the natural cave where his family took refuge before most of them were killed, as well as his family home. Although he was unable to find the location of their former family home, as the area was fenced off by the U.S. military facility, he wanted to visit because his mother, whom he was estranged from at time of the 1944 battle before learning about her death, “might have come home” before her death. He wanted to see the place his mother might have spent the last moments of her life, looking for “anything that reminds of her and our family” (Interview, June 8, 2014).

Retrieving the Spirits From the Places of Death

How do the Okinawan repatriates attempt to come to terms with the ambiguous and unresolved loss due to the lack of physical remains and bones, and, therefore, their inability to give a proper send-off to their lost loved ones? The unusual circumstances of their families’ deaths prompted bereaved family members to resort to their folk belief system and its rituals. In Okinawan folk belief, which blends indigenous nature and ancestor worship with Buddhism and Confucianism, brought to Okinawa from Japan and China during the Ryūkyū Kingdom (1429–1879) era, the central idea is mabui, the “soul” or “spirit” that all living beings are controlled by. Mabui is invisible, but it is a spiritual entity that possesses agency just like a physical body, thus, it acts like the person’s alternate-self (Sakai, 1987, p. 177). Hamasaki (2011) summarised the eight characteristics of a deceased’s spirit in the Okinawan worldview: 1) It is highly mobile; 2) It is highly adhesive and attaches itself to anything anywhere; 3) It can be split into many parts, and a partial spirit can attach itself to anything; 4) The place it attaches itself most commonly to is where the person died; 5) It remains where an altar, dead body, and/or bones exist; 6) It can suck life energy out of the living by attaching itself to a living person; 7) The spirits of someone who died without accomplishing their goals can turn into an evil spirit and harm grieving family members; and 8) The power of evil spirits increases if the mourning family fails to hold ceremonies to console/pacify the spirit.

An indispensable ceremony in the mortuary ritual of Okinawa is mabuiwakashi, or detaching mabui from a corpse. By separating mabui from a corpse, the death becomes complete, as the animated spirit is detached from the body of the deceased. At that point, mabui transforms from ichimabui (spirit of the living), inside the living person, into shinimabui (spirit of the dead), which hovers around the dead body and wanders between this world and the world of the dead, or gusō, until the proper rituals are conducted. The people living in this world are expected to keep paying respect to, communicating with, and pleasing the mabui of dead ancestors. After mabuiwakashi, the soul of the dead person is led into the family tomb, where the spirit, after numerous soul-pacifying rituals, steadily turns into a god and, after the 33^rd annual pacifying ritual, finally completes its transformation into an ancestral god, or ukami (Hamasaki, 2011).

What needs to be done, then, when one dies outside of their family home, let alone overseas? How does the bereaved family properly guide the spirits of the dead to the family tomb? In the cases of deaths away from the home village, such as those from traffic accidents or war, it is believed that mabui want nujifā, or the “syphoning out spirits” ceremony. In those cases, the spirit cannot leave where the person died and is suffering, because it is unable to move into gusō. The idea is similar to what Kwon (2012) found in the mortuary rituals of central Vietnam. According to Kwon (2012), the Vietnamese view that in a “good death,” or “death at home,” under peaceful circumstances, surrounded by loved ones and after enjoying longevity, the material soul eventually perishes with the decomposing body, while the spiritual soul survives, and “the ritually appropriated pure spirit travels across the imaginary threshold between the world of [the] living and the world of the dead eventually to join the pure domain of ancestor worship” (p. 232). In contrast, in a “bad death,” or “death in the street,” a violent death away from home often causes souls to be captivated by the memory of the violent death event, and the material soul remains largely intact due to the absence of a ritual separation. As a result, “[t]he material soul linger[s] near the place of death and the place where its decomposing body is buried. It feels the discomfort of improper burial and awakens the spiritual soul to the embodied memory of violent death” (Kwon, 2012). Okinawans’ view on unusual, violent deaths “in the street” also prompts them to ritualistically cope with these deaths with a sense of urgency. Nujifā is often accompanied by unchikē, or an “accosting” ceremony, a ritual that transmits the soul into a material object, such as a stone or incense, as a vehicle (yorishiro) to the family tomb in the shima, or natal community, in Okinawa (Inoue, 2007, p. 169). Nujifā and unchikē, in other words, are ceremonial techniques to cope with a “death in the street/bad death” by removing the spirit from the “street” and bringing it “home” to the family tomb to facilitate the spirit’s smooth and peaceful transformation.

The Okinawan repatriates who were unable to retrieve the bones of their loved ones left on the Mariana Islands conducted the nujifā and unchikē rituals collectively and individually during their pilgrimages to the islands. As collective rituals, the MRA conducts official ceremonies at the Okinawan memorial markers in Saipan and Tinian, which commemorate the Okinawan war dead, and all pilgrims who lost their loved ones on either island participate. Each ceremony ends with shōkō, a ritual of burning powdered incense, the smell of which is meant to approximate the entry into the afterlife, to offer it to the spirits of the dead and join their hands together for a silent prayer. Many repatriates consider these memorial monuments their loved ones’ tombs away from home and view offering the prayers there as an equivalent of the same ceremony conducted at the family tomb. Individually, they continued to search for the proximate locations of their loved ones’ deaths and offer incense, water, Awamori spirits, fruits, other food items and uchikabi, or mock money given to the dead for their needs in the afterlife. If they are unable to locate the site, they instead pray in their hotel room facing in the direction of the place their loved ones died (Interview, Nomura Hideko, June 20, 2014) or try to locate their family homes while living on the Marianas. As Sakai (1987, p. 512) stated, the dead’s mabui and family homes are in an inseparable relationship, so it is believed that at least part of the spirit of the dead has found a way to the family house on the island, even if it was unable to travel all the way to the Okinawan family tomb. As most of them are unable to find any bodily remains, they typically bring home a rock from the approximate place of their loved ones’ deaths or where their former house stood. The rock is referred to as reiseki, or spirit stone, and carries the spirit of the deceased loved one home (Interview, Nomura Hideko, June 20, 2014). As a proxy for bones picked after cremation, as “peaceful” death “at home” would have done for the bereaved family members, the Okinawan repatriates place these rocks inside the family tombs in their hometowns.

Hamasaki (2011) argued that these mortuary rituals and prayers (or ugwan), including nujifā and unchikē, function for the grieving family members as a mechanism of spiritual healing, or what he called “spiritual care.” In this view, the pilgrimages to the Northern Mariana Islands and conducting both collective and individual rituals, such as official shōkō ceremony and private nujifā and unchikē rituals, can be understood as an effort to provide spiritual care for those repatriates suffering from the ambivalent loss of their loved ones. These rituals are meant to provide spiritual care for the dead’s mabui, but, at the same time, they work to reduce the spiritual pain for the surviving family members and provide them with peace of mind by assuring them that the dead’s mabui has now peacefully moved into the family tomb, and, therefore, gusō. Indeed, by spiritually treating the dead and living alike, these rituals help the living achieve what Boss and Carnes (2012) called “resilience for the long haul,” which nurtures a capacity to “live with the paradox of ambiguous loss” (pp. 463–464). Jahana Takeko, who lost her older brother during the 1944 battle have conducted nujifā ritual at the place of his death, which was identified with the help from yuta. After conducting the ceremony, Ms. Jahana had a dream of his brother thanking her for “coming to see” him and conducting the ritual, which made her happy and finally at ease with the fact that his spirit was now in the right place (Interview, October 18, 2013). By conducting spirit removal and accosting rituals, and bringing a “spirit stone” home, these Okinawan repatriates attempt to achieve some sense of certainty that their loved ones’ spirits are, at least partially, brought “home” and properly processed to send them to the peaceful world of afterlife, and gain some peace of mind for themselves as they fulfilled the duty as the bereaved family members.

Mourning That Never Ends

Boss argued that those who struggle with ambiguous loss often “counteract helplessness and regain control” by tolerating contradictions: “‘He is both here and not here.’ ‘She is both absent and present.’ Out of necessity, we move to a both/and mindset” (2009, p. 142). Similarly, Klass et al. (1996) proposed the “continuing bonds” thesis that the deep sense of connections between the living mourners and dead loved ones continues to exist. Arguing against what they perceived as the Western psychologists’ tendency to view the mourners’ continued attachment to the deceased as unresolved grief to be overcome, they argued that it is “normative for mourners to maintain a presence and connection with the deceased” (Silverman & Klass, 1996, p. 18). Indeed, when I asked those repatriates who have been unable to retrieve bones from the Northern Mariana Islands but completed the nujifā and unchikē ceremonies, where their loved ones’ souls are located today, their answers indicated the both/and perspective they have come to gain. They believed that they had completed their family duty to remove the spirits from the places of their deaths and transferred them to their family tombs in Okinawa, but they still believe part of their souls remains in the Marianas. The interviewees told me that before they participated in the MRA’s pilgrimage to Saipan and Tinian, they would “inform” the deceased family members about their upcoming visits at the family altars at home (“I would tell them that I would see you again soon”), and they would greet them again on the island (“I have come again to see you”). In other words, the dead’s spirit is both “here” in Okinawa and “there” on the Northern Marianas at the same time, because their bones were never retrieved and brought home, and their death ultimately remain ambiguous.

This seemingly contradictory attitude toward the location of loved ones’ spirits indicates that bereaved families who continue to mourn deal with the ambiguous death with a “spiritual tolerance” for ambiguity and the need to continue to be bonded with the dead. This and/both mindset, particularly necessitated by their ambiguous and unresolved loss, explains why so many Okinawan repatriates travel to the Northern Marianas multiple times. For those who lost their loved ones on the islands and are unable to retrieve the bones for their family tombs, the mourning process never really ends. Despite the challenging travel itinerary for those in their 70s and 80s—the group typically leaves Okinawa in the morning, arrives in the Tokyo-Narita airport in the early afternoon, only to wait for the sole Tokyo-Saipan flight that leaves Tokyo near midnight and arrives in Saipan in the early morning—and high cost—the tour package costs nearly US$3,000 per person—and that many have retired and are on a fixed income, dozens of elderly repatriates nonetheless continue to participate in the pilgrimage every year. They may no longer be able to wade into the jungle in their attempt to find the final resting places of their loved ones or rediscover their family home, now located inside private property, but their desire to get as close as possible to these crucial locations seems never to fade. Mr. Shimoji told me that he becomes restless every spring, when the June pilgrimage approaches: “I don’t know why I want to go, but when June approaches, I can’t help but want to…My mind goes crazy…For me and other bereaved families, the dead remain on the islands, just like they were [at the time of their deaths]. We can’t help but want to see them” (Interview, June 8, 2014). Indeed, ambiguous loss and mourning can never truly be complete or over, but the mourners continue to try to cope with the loss through ritualistic travels and various ceremonies that help them to come to terms with their losses and remain resilient.

Conclusion

Despite the abundant literature that draw on Boss’s concept of ambiguous loss, there have been relatively few attempts to ethnographically examine how sociocultural factors, such as religious beliefs, shape people’s view on such loss and how they cope with it. The article sought to demonstrate how religious and folk beliefs mediate the coping process for those who are suffering from ambiguous loss. I argued that Okinawan repatriates suffered ambiguous and unresolved losses of their loved ones after the Battle of the Marianas in 1944, which resulted in either estrangement from their loved ones who (reportedly) died or deaths on the battlefields that did not allow them to retrieve mementos or bones for cremation. Their cultural beliefs place prime importance on retrieving the dead’s spirits from the body and transporting them to the family tombs in Okinawan hometowns. Therefore, these unusual and violent deaths on faraway land, which are left unprocessed by proper mortuary rituals, have left them with deep psychological scars. Their remedy was to not only mourn their deaths “at home” in Okinawa but also to visit the locations of their loved ones’ deaths and conduct ceremonies to “remove” and “accost” the spirits of the loved ones and bring them home to Okinawa. These religio-spiritual practices are the key means with which the Okinawan repatriates attempt to come to terms with the unresolved and unprocessed deaths that they experienced in the war.

The process of mourning for an ambiguously lost loved one, though, can never come to a satisfactory end. Even after the ceremonies to bring the spirits home, without physical evidence of their deaths (bones, mementos), many repatriates keep going back to the places of their loved ones’ deaths. As Boss and Carnes (2012) suggested, the goals of coping with ambiguous loss are never to achieve a complete “closure,” but to focus on “how to make sense of one’s loss, clear or ambiguous” and to feel comfortable with “paradoxical thinking”—as in “My loved one is both gone and still here”—because such contradictions are the reality of their life (pp. 460, 464). The ongoing and repeated participation in the pilgrimages and offerings of prayers both at home and at the places of their loved ones’ deaths, then, can be viewed as their attempt at achieving such “paradoxical thinking” of a both/and mindset. These spiritual practices, therefore, are an indication that “[e]ven after certainty of death, a relationship often continues on some level through rituals of remembrance and symbols of affection” (Boss & Carnes, 2012, p. 465) between the dead and those who deal with their loved ones’ losses in the battlefield.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research leading to this article has been supported by the Japan Foundation’s Japanese Studies Fellowship (2013–14), Denison University’s Robert C. Good Faculty Fellowship (2013–14) and Research Foundation Grant (2014, 2015) and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s Individual Japan Travel Grant (2015).

ORCID iD

Taku Suzuki

Notes

Author Biography

Taku Suzuki: is professor of the International Studies Program at Denison University in Ohio, USA. He is an anthropologist whose research interests include transnational migration, diaspora, collective memory, and citizenship. He has conducted field research in Bolivia, Okinawa/Japan, the United States, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. He is the author of Embodying Belonging: Racializing Okinawan Diaspora in Bolivia and Japan (University of Hawaíi Press). His research on the Okinawan diaspora and their embodied senses of belonging also has appeared in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Critical Asian Studies, and The Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, among others. His later works on Okinawa “battlefield tours’, guided by peace activists and educators, have been published in Tourist Studies, The Discourses of War and Peace, and Journal of Cultural Geography, among others, and his recent works on the collective memories among the Okinawan former colonial migrants in Micronesia have appeared in PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

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