Forming an ‘Activism Bubble’ in Tourism: Peace Guiding at Okinawa’s Battle Ruins

Abstract

Peace activists in Okinawa, Japan, serve as tour guides, or ‘peace guides’, for school excursion tour groups from Japan’s main islands. Their purpose is to encourage the students to learn about the devastating Battle of Okinawa in 1945 and engage in current issues of war and peace. By historically contextualizing the emergence of school excursion and peace guides in Okinawa, and ethnographically portraying the peace guides’ narrative and performative tactics in a natural cave and at a war memorial, the essay demonstrates that the guides attempt to form a spatiotemporal bubble within which the students develop an active learning community with a critical awareness of militarized realities of the past and present.

Keywords

activism dark tourism educational tourism Japan memorialization Okinawa performance tour guide

Introduction

In June 2008, I interviewed members of Okinawa Peace Network (Okinawa Heiwa Nettowāku, or OPN), a citizens’ group based in Naha, Okinawa, Japan, whose goal is to offer ‘a meeting space for individuals who are willing to share time for learning together, walking together, and listening to people’s voices together, and participating in a peace movement as “ordinary living people”’ (OPN brochure, n.d.). They were OPN’s volunteer tour guides, referring to themselves as ‘peace guides’ (heiwa gaido), mostly for student-tourists from Japan’s main islands, or Naichi, at the sites related to the Battle of Okinawa at the end of the Second World War, and at the US military bases across Hontō, the prefecture’s largest and most populous island.¹ I asked the OPN peace guides how they could reach beyond those student-tourists who come to Okinawa on school excursions, or shūgaku ryokō, which typically include what is called a ‘peace study’ program, and begin to engage other mass tourists in the issues related to war and peace. One interviewee, who had been a peace guide for more than 30 years, appeared offended by my query and told me, ‘What you have to understand first is that what we are doing is entirely different from what tour guides are doing. ... What we do here is [political] activism’ (interview with OPN peace guides, 9 June 2008). In his view, tour guiding for ‘fun’ tourism and peace guiding for ‘serious’ peace study were completely different.

I learned, however, that shūgaku ryokō, which typically features a visit to the popular Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, beaches in north-western Hontō, historic Shuri Castle, and Naha’s famous Kokusai Dōri shopping district, actually resembles a commercial packaged tour; there are few identifiable attributes that distinguish shūgaku ryokō from ‘mere tourism’ (Brown, 1996: 40–41). Thereafter, I joined sightseeing coach tours of the southern Okinawa Hontō battle ruins led by the bus operators’ guides and tagged along with shūgaku ryokō groups led by peace guides, observing how the guides explained the meanings of the sites and interacted with the tourists or students. I also compared the travelogues and weblog entries of those tourists who visited the southern Hontō battle ruins on commercial tours with the response letters to OPN sent by the shūgaku ryokō students. The diversity in the impressions of the tours within each group of tourists notwithstanding, both I and they felt that there were certain differences between the two forms of battle ruins tours; the commercial tour at the battle ruins was a ‘moving’ experience and the peace study was a ‘thought-provoking’ one, despite the objective similarities between their itineraries (Suzuki, forthcoming).

Many different factors shape tourists’ experiences – individual motivation and expectations (Gnoth, 1997; Maoz, 2007; Morinis, 1992), travel itineraries (Wang, 2006) and ‘myth and fantasy’ (Rojek, 1997) about the travel destination created through advertising (Miyamori, 1993), travel guidebooks (Bhattacharyya, 1997; Laderman, 2009) and other mediated information (Selwyn, 1996) – even before they embark on their trip, or during and after their trips (Harrison, 2003). Inspired by Feldman’s study of a Jewish youth group’s tour to Holocaust-related sites in Poland (2008), this essay proposes that narrative and performative acts within a tour group are key mechanisms that shape the character and meaning of touring experiences. To illuminate this point, I focus on tour guides, or, in this case, peace guides, as a crucial factor in shaping the internal dynamics of a tour group. More specifically, I argue that peace guides’ narrative performances aim to form and maintain a spatiotemporal bubble (Edensor, 2000) in which student-tourists learn and develop critical perspectives on war and peace in the past and present. By trying to make a certain part of tour experiences more educational and inspirational than diversionary and recreational for the student-tourists, peace guides attempt to provide them with opportunities for two crucial elements of activism participation: community-building and critical consciousness-raising (McGehee, 2002; McGehee and Santos, 2005).

Much of the data for this article are drawn from my field research in the summers of 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. I became an OPN member in 2008 by paying annual membership dues (10,000 yen, or about US$120), because I became sympathetic to the aforementioned OPN’s goals, even though I, as a US resident, could rarely participate in OPN workshops, lectures, and field trips. My OPN membership is significant for this research not only because it implicates bias in my interpretation of peace guiding practices by OPN members, but also because it shaped my positionality in my participant-observations of the peace study tours. I joined and observed seven tours guided by the members of OPN and the University of the Ryukyus Peace Guiding Club. Of these seven groups, two were private high schools from Tokyo, four were public high schools from Kanagawa Prefecture, and one was a private college student group from Kyoto Prefecture. Although I was aware of the problems in an ‘overt’ participant-observation of a tour, such as a researcher-observer’s potential influence on the group’s internal dynamics (Lugosi, 2006; Seaton, 2002), I informed all the peace guides of my research interest prior to joining their tours, and the OPN guides, in turn, introduced me to the school teachers, students, and travel agency’s tour conductors as a US college professor who was interested in learning about peace guiding. It is common, as I will address later, for OPN members to accompany the fellow OPN peace guides to learn from watching the veterans’ guiding practices; it is, therefore, unlikely that my presence in the group significantly impacted the guides’ performances. When the opportunities arose, I had informal conversations with the guides, teachers, and students before, during, and after the peace study tours to learn their goals for the tour and its outcomes. To supplement the small number of participant-observations of peace study tours, I also conducted formal interviews with 11 OPN peace guides, officials for the Okinawa prefectural government’s tourism division, and the staff members of Okinawa’s two major peace museums, which are commonly featured in shūgaku ryoko itinerary.

I begin by locating my study within two theoretical contexts: ‘dark’ and ‘educational’ tourisms. In the literature review, I focus especially on scholars’ efforts to distinguish ‘educational’ aspects of tourism from ‘recreational’ and ‘voyeuristic’ ones, and on tour guides’ use of dramaturgical performance to create an extraordinary environment for tourists, that is, an environment separated from their ordinary surroundings. I then provide a history of shūgaku ryokō and peace guiding in Okinawa. Finally, I present two ethnographic ‘snapshots’ of peace guiding, in which I demonstrate how peace guides’ narrations and performances seek to shape the environment of tourists’ travel experiences.

‘Pleasure’ and ‘learning’ in travels to ‘dark’ sites

Scholars have variously defined and theorized ‘dark’ or thanatourism, referring to tourism at sites of past mass violence and death, such as military graveyards, prisons, battlefields, and concentration camps (Lennon and Foley, 2000; Seaton, 1999). Echoing MacCannell’s (1976) vision of the tourist as a tireless seeker of elusive authenticity, they argue that the ‘dark’ sites attract tourism because they ‘directly feed the tourist’s desire for “aura”, a quality deemed absent in the mediated world’ (Diller and Scofidio, 1994: 25), and that the popularity of dark tourism reflects the people’s ‘anxiety and doubt about the project of modernity’ (Lennon and Foley, 2000: 11). Others are more cynical, likening ‘dark’ tourists to Urry’s (1990) ‘post tourists’, who delight in inauthentic and playful spectacle and want to satisfy their insatiable curiosity with the ‘unusual’ and ‘horrific’ (Ashworth and Hartmann, 2005; Dann, 2005). In response, others claim that the tourists visiting these ‘dark’ sites are motivated by their ‘feelings of moral obligation’ (Thurnell-Read, 2009: 47–48) and are trying to ‘(re)construct the moral geographies which bring events of the past into proximity’ (Hughes, 2008: 328). Reflecting on the debate and numerous efforts to classify dark tourism (Stone, 2006; Strange and Kempa, 2003), Bowman and Pezzulo (2010: 199) suggest that given the complexity and diversity in tourism at sites of tragedy, ‘it may be time to abandon the term “dark tourism”’ because it appears to be ‘an impediment to detailed and circumstantial analyses’ of travel experiences at these places.

The debate on dark tourism/tourists closely mirrors the debate on the distinctions between ‘educational’ and ‘leisurely’ tourisms.² Educational tourism is typically defined as ‘tourist experiences that aim to provide structured learning, in situ, through active and engaged intellectual practices’ (Pitman et al., 2010a). This form of ‘niche’ or ‘alternative’ tourism could include ‘information centric’ commercial tours, for-credit study tours for college students, and expedition volunteer tours (McGehee, 2001; McGehee and Santos, 2005; Pitman et al., 2010b). By traveling with like-minded individuals as a ‘learning community’ based on ‘a shared intention and expectations’ (Pitman et al., 2010b: 234), the learner- and/or volunteer-tourists are expected to be intellectually stimulated and morally inspired. McGehee (2001) argues, therefore, that educational tourism can be a catalyst for the tour participants’ participation in activism, through the tour’s capacity for connection-building and consciousness-raising. Among these forms of tourism is ‘educational dark tourism’, in which tourists visit in populo sites, or the sites that ‘embody and emphasize the story of the people to whom the tragedy befell’, such as a Holocaust memorial museum, to learn about historical atrocities (Cohen, 2011). Cohen (2011: 196) argues what makes an in populo tourism different from voyeuristic and recreational dark tourism is its inclusion of ‘an educational dimension’, which may ‘encourage tourists to be more “mindful”’ about what they witness during the tour.

What aspects of travel make an educational dark tourism more thought-provoking than voyeuristic? Motivations and expectations of learner-tourists, along with their subjective interpretations of travel experiences, are tempting answers to the question, but they also make it difficult to identify key effectual factors within travel experiences. Typical educational tourists, including volunteer and educational dark tourists, have been both ‘highly efficacious actors’ for certain social and political causes before they signed up for the tours (McGehee, 2001: 140) and highly motivated ‘existential’ tourists ‘seeking profound and meaningful experiences’ through the tour (Cohen, 2011: 203). Their interpretations of a tour often mirror their prior motivations and expectations, as they view the travels as ‘reinforcing ... rather than challenging’ their previously held values (Pitman et al., 2010a). Moreover, the tourists’ own narratives about their motivations and self-reflections cannot be regarded as definitive, ‘raw’ materials, because tourists possess ‘motives [that] are often mixed – and are just as often not fully known to themselves’ (Tumarkin, 2005: 52), and ‘the language used among [tourists to describe their travel experiences] is itself influenced by the media and therefore often consists of idiomatic narratives’ (Margry, 2008: 19).

In this article, I explore tourism mechanisms that could make travel experiences more educational and inspirational: How could tours create and maintain an environment which promotes non-recreational goals, such as intellectual stimulation and activism participation through community-building and consciousness-raising? Although this article cannot address all of the potential answers to this question, one important and empirically observable factor that I examine is tour-guiding performances.

Guides as theatrical directors and performers

Recognizing the fact that tour guides ‘play perhaps the most important determining role’ (Schmidt, 1979: 454) in shaping tourists’ experiences, sociologists and anthropologists have attempted to define tour guides’ roles. They claim that theatrical directing, narrating, and acting are the key techniques used by tour guides to effectively demarcate the group tour experience from not only the tourists’ routine lives ‘back home’, but also the surrounding social environment of the places they visit.

Performative and theatrical metaphors and concepts are commonly found in these studies of tour guiding. Some liken the tour guide to a shaman, as both must tell stories, translate the unfamiliar, and act as a danger-minimizing mediator between tourists and the environment, while others emphasize the guide’s roles as ‘entertainer’ or ‘animator’, using his or her ‘acting ability’ and ‘dramaturgical skills’ to offer an extraordinary experience for tourists while trying to ‘screen out’ what is deemed irrelevant to them (Cohen, 1985; Holloway, 1981: 388–389, 399; Resinger and Steiner, 2006). Building on MacCannell’s semiotic analysis of tourism (1976), Fine and Speer (1985: 92) argue that tour guides perform the rites of site- and sight-sacralization through which they help accomplish ‘a ritual transformation of socially segregated tourists into a community who share experience with the hostess, the tour sight, and each other’. Edensor (2000: 327, 339) compares tour guides to theater directors, stage-managers of space, and choreographers of tourists’ movements. Guides not only deliver scripted commentaries to tourists, suggest places for tourists’ ‘photographic and gazing performances’, and control the tour’s tempo by managing the tourists’ walking and stopping; they also police the boundaries of the group’s ‘mobile enclavic space’, and when necessary, remove the ‘surplus stimuli’ surrounding the group to direct the tourists’ attention toward particular objects. In a similar vein, others have examined the performances of tour guides with specific purposes such as the perpetuation of nationalism, religious missions, and peace education (Bowman, 1991; Brin, 2006; Dahles, 2002; Feldman, 2007, 2008; Katz, 1985; Kitamura, 2006).

These studies emphasize the importance of guides in forming and maintaining an ‘environmental bubble’ (Edensor, 2000: 330) within which they attempt to convey particular knowledge and ideology to the tourists. Feldman (2007: 356) suggests that tour guides who lead foreign pilgrims to Jerusalem use narration and performance to attempt to ‘bracket and shift between spatiotemporal frames of pilgrimic and touristic behavior and, thus, guard the purity of the pilgrimage frame’. Building upon Feldman’s premise that guides ‘bracket and shift’ the spatiotemporal frames of tours, this essay examines how peace guides’ narrations and performances at the sites related to the Battle of Okinawa seek to create an environmental bubble that facilitates student-tourists’ solemn learning and critical engagement.

Okinawa shūgaku ryokō

Shūgaku ryokō began in 1886, shortly after the institutionalization of Japan’s modern educational system, and became part of the regular curriculum in nearly all junior and senior high schools (Kasama, 1987: 287; Takahashi, 2006: 33). As Imperial Japan rapidly militarized and strengthened its identity as a unified nation under the emperor, who was to be revered by his subjects as a living god, shūgaku ryokō became a means to bolster the youth’s patriotism, physical and mental strength, and knowledge about the nation’s culture and history (Zenkoku Shūgaku Ryokō Kenkyū Kyōkai, n.d.). Shūgaku ryokō groups also went to the empire’s prospective territories such as the Korean peninsula and Manchuria ‘to carry the banner of Japanese imperialism to the future colonies’ (Kasama, 1987: 289). However, Shirahata (1996: 119) notes that, in reality, teachers and students in Imperial Japan often put ‘more emphasis on “ryokō” [travel] than “shūgaku” [educational]’ and cherished the joy of group travel in itself.

In 1946, shūgaku ryokō was resumed by teachers who valued its educational and community-bonding capacities, preceding the government’s official designation of the trip as part of school curriculum in 1958 (Takahashi, 2006: 33). Many features of shūgaku ryokō remained similar to those in the pre-Second World War years – visiting famous temples, castles, and other historic sites to broaden the students’ intellectual horizon and foster camaraderie – but the key objective of cultivating reverence for the emperor and patriotism was abandoned. Instead, ‘peace study was chosen [as an objective of shūgaku ryokō] by school teachers ... due to their remorse’ for not fighting the militaristic educational ideology in Imperial Japan (Takahashi, 2006: 33).

During the 1970s and 1980s, teachers across Japan were alarmed by the youth’s increasing ignorance of the Second World War and what they perceived as the government’s reactionary turns, symbolized by such decisions as censoring of history textbooks to soften the description of Imperial Japan’s aggression and enforcement of national-flag raising and national-anthem singing at school ceremonies. These concerned teachers began to push for more robust peace education, and made shūgaku ryokō integral to their effort. They shifted the shūgaku ryokō destinations from popular Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara, to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and later, Okinawa (Takahashi, 2006: 35–37).³ In short, the growing popularity of Okinawa shūgaku ryokō during the postwar years, especially after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, was a product of the progressive-leaning teachers’ condemnation of Imperial Japan’s nationalistic militarism in past school education and their fight against its potential resurgence in the future.

Peace guides: Tour guiding as activism

Before shūgaku ryokō became the mainstay in tourism in Okinawa’s battle ruins after the 1972 reversion, the most common form of tourism there was the pilgrimage by Naichi Japanese to the ossuaries and cenotaphs that memorialized those who had died in the war, typically referred to as a battle ruins pilgrimage (senseki sanpai).⁴ Postwar tourism in Okinawa, in fact, developed through the senseki sanpai that flourished from the 1950s to the early 1970s, when Okinawan bus guides blatantly sensationalized and sentimentalized the heroic yet tragic deaths of Japanese soldiers and the Okinawans who helped them, in an attempt to sell the nationalistic melodrama to the visitors from Naichi to generate their sympathy toward Okinawans, who lived under US military rule until 1972 (Figal, 2007; Hamai, 2005, 2006; Kitamura, 2005, 2009).

Peace guiding for shūgaku ryokō emerged in the 1970s as a critical response to the tour guiding practices in senseki sanpai at war memorials (Aniya, 1974; Aniya et al., 1974; Ōshiro, 2004). The vocal criticism of tour guiding coincided with Okinawans’ disappointment in the 1972 reversion to Japan that allowed the disproportionately large US military presence to continue in Okinawa, and situated within a larger movement in the 1970s, to reexamine the history of the Battle of Okinawa from the viewpoint of the Okinawan masses rather than of military commanders and government officials (Aniya et al., 1974; Kitamura, 2004; Ōshiro, 2004). In July 1972, only a few months after the reversion, the national convention of the Committee of History Educators in Japan was held in Naha. In preparing to host the convention and show the Naichi teachers around Okinawa, local Okinawan teachers chartered a guided commercial sightseeing bus tour around the former battlefields and US military bases. The group was stunned by the bus guides’ melodramatic and celebratory narration of the battle and its casualties, their exclusive focus on the military personnel’s experience at the expense of Okinawan noncombatants, and the numerous factual inaccuracies in their script (Kitamura, 2004: 65–66; Ōshiro, 2004: 4). Therefore, these local educators decided to guide the visitors to the battle memorials themselves, marking the unofficial introduction of peace guides as the ‘antithesis of sightseeing tour bus guides’ (Kitamura, 2004: 65).

From 1986 to 1987, teachers, scholars, journalists, and battle survivors organized an 8-month seminar series called ‘Training Course for Guiding Battle Ruins and Military Bases’ that included lectures by historians and activists and field trips to the battle ruins and US military bases. The goal of the course was to educate the public about various related subjects in the hope of helping ‘as many people in Okinawa become storytellers [kataribe] of peace as possible’ (Kitamura, 2006: 59; see also Yoneyama, 1999). In 1987, some course participants formed the Okinawa Peace Guide Association, which became OPN in 1994 (Kitamura, 2006: 59–60). As the number of shūgaku ryokō from Naichi increased, more schools requested guiding by OPN and other volunteer peace guide groups. OPN peace guides are Okinawa- and Naichi-born Okinawa residents of both genders and various age groups; however, most of them did not experience the Battle of Okinawa firsthand. By 1998, more than 60 percent of all shūgaku ryokō groups participated in some sort of peace study program assisted by peace guides (Murakami, 1999: 30).

OPN has no formal training program for its peace guides. In fact, its website states that ‘there is no specific definition for peace guide’ and that ‘everybody who pursues and takes action for the creation of peace is a “peace guide”’ (Okinawa Heiwa Nettowāku, n.d., a). To educate themselves and build connections with other activists and scholars, those who are interested in peace guiding typically participate in numerous OPN-organized public lectures and activist-, scholar-, or survivor-guided field trips to battle ruins, military bases, and sites where the US military plans to build new facilities. Some of the current OPN peace guides participated in a 6-month guide training course offered by the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum between 2004 and 2007 that featured a format and content similar to the aforementioned 1986 guide training program. Most accompanied other veteran peace guides on shūgaku ryokō to learn guiding techniques before guiding on their own. In short, OPN peace guides are activists who have chosen tour guiding as a key venue of their political activism and have developed their skills largely on their own.

The initial hurdle for the peace guides pursuing this form of activism was the lack of appropriate sites to which they could take shūgaku ryokō students. Most memorials glorified the deaths of Japanese soldiers (Yasukuni Jinja Kokueika Hantai Okinawa Kirisutosha Renrakukai, 1983), and there were few ‘genuine battle ruins’ where the guides could accurately narrate the horror of the battle (Shima, 1983: 49). In addition to visiting memorials, cenotaphs, and museums, the peace guides created what would become known as the ‘backstreet’ itineraries of Okinawa’s battle ruins tours (Asahi Shinbun Seibu Honsha Shakai-bu, 1982: 2; Kitamura, 2004), which typically featured a natural cave, or gama in Okinawan vernacular, that had been used as a civilian shelter from the US warship’s bombardment and the military’s field hospital (Figal, 2003; Kitamura, 2006). Gama was also a site of the Japanese military’s violence against Okinawan civilians; not only were some forced out of the cave to make room, but others were killed by the soldiers for espionage charges, stemming from the Naichi Japanese soldiers’ suspicion of local Okinawans as the colonized ‘Others’ who were not quite the same as the Naichi Japanese (Allen, 2003; Bhabha, 1994; Tomiyama, 2000). In contrast to commercial sightseeing tours, therefore, gama experience is a focal point of a peace study tour’s itinerary.⁵

Peace guiding narrations and performances: Snapshots and analysis

It is common for a typical 4-day-long shūgaku ryokō to be split into peace study and ‘cultural and natural studies’; the first part involves visiting battle-related memorials, museums, gama, and the US military facilities during the day and attending a lecture given by a battle survivor, peace activist, or municipal government official in the evening. Most high school shūgaku ryokō groups comprise sophomores (that is, students in the second of three school years).⁶ During the sophomore year, prior to the trip, teachers prepare the students by teaching them about Okinawa in various courses such as language, geography, and history, requiring them to write response papers on a novel or film on Okinawa, and inviting a Battle of Okinawa survivor to give a lecture (Iijima, 2003; Kanda, 2000). Despite this preparation, many students confess that their prevailing images of Okinawa before shūgaku ryokō are its hot weather, blue sky and ocean, and white-sanded beaches (Den’en Chōfu Kōtō Gakkō, 1996). OPN peace guides told me that the students’ eagerness to learn during shūgaku ryokō peace study varies greatly, often reflecting their teachers’ enthusiasm, or lack thereof, for peace education and Okinawa. During peace study, the accompanying teachers generally transfer their narrative authority to the peace guide and are responsible merely for disciplining the students and ensuring that they follow the guide’s orders.

The peace guides either join the students at the site or ride in the bus with the group for a full or half day, where they offer extensive guiding for the students along the way. Here, I provide two ethnographic ‘snapshots’ of peace guiding narrations and performances to portray how the guides attempt to create a spatiotemporal bubble that encourages the students to distinguish what they are experiencing from sightseeing. These descriptions of peace guiding are drawn from my participant-observations of high school shūgaku ryokō from Naichi. The guiding narrations and performances, of course, vary from one guide to another and from one group to another, but the peace guides I interviewed believe that most cover similar themes and topics and use similar guiding techniques (interview with OPN peace guides, 9 June 2008).

Snapshot 1: At a gama

Three peace guides and 46 sophomores from a high school in Kanagawa Prefecture, having just flown in from Tokyo, disembarked the bus and settled near the entrance of Garabigama in Yaese Village. The guide showed the group a rusted piece of metal, and he asked: ‘What do you think this is?’ There were a few murmurs, but no firm reply. He continued,

This is a piece of a bombshell. I will pass it along, so please take a look, and feel its weight. As you know, during the Battle of Okinawa, a lot of bombshells fell. Here in Okinawa, we call it ‘Typhoon of Steel’, because the bombs rained on the earth. But what is scary about a bomb is not that it falls from sky, but the chunks of iron surrounding the bomb [that is, shell] scatter when it has fallen and exploded. ... These [iron shells] are coming at you really fast from all sides. How fast? It depends, but if a big one like this fell and exploded ... its shells would fly about 400 meters in the air. ... If I throw this one at you (motioning to throw it), which I wouldn’t (smiling), it would fly about 20 meters at most. It would still hurt you, wouldn’t it? [The power of the actual explosion] was much bigger than that, because this thing would come at you sideways at a speed [that would enable it] to travel 400 meters. ... Under such a condition, where would they go? They hid in the caves, like the one we are about to enter. Remember, that is why we are entering the cave.

He then gave some instructions about entering the cave and reminded the students that the cave is ‘very dangerous if you are not serious’ and that ‘it is up to each of [the students] to protect [his or her] safety’.

The students from the urban high school, fresh off the plane and still giddy about their group travel, were struggling with the slippery ground and expressed their disbelief that the trip to Okinawa, a subtropical paradise, was starting with a climb up a muddy slope to enter a damp cave while bugs swarmed around them. The students whined: ‘I want to go home now’; ‘We should have gone to Hokkaido [instead of Okinawa]’; ‘This is seriously scary!’; ‘This can’t be shūgaku ryokō!’ The teachers helped them climb into the cave while trying to cheer them up: ‘You can’t come to a place like this on a [sightseeing] tour’.

After entering the cave, holding flashlights and advancing about 50 meters, the students gathered around the peace guide. He told them that the cave had been used as a field hospital, filled with severely injured soldiers lying on wooden makeshift beds with straw mats, and later, on the cave’s rocky bare surface. He continued,

You guys must have thought, ‘This is a terrible place. I hate it’, but back then, it was much worse. Now, it is clean. There are no patients. We hear no groaning. Plus, there was an unbearable odor then, which we can’t smell now. (A student asked, ‘Odor of what?’) What do you think was smelly? (Another student: ‘Dead bodies’.) Yes, there were odors of corpses, blood, and oozing puss. ... Many of you must have thought, ‘Wow, living here must have been horrible’, when you came in, but I want you to imagine a situation much worse than this.

He went on to describe how the cave had been used as a hospital:

What sort of lighting do you think they had back then? [A student: ‘Candles’.] Candles? No, they used kerosene lamps that were as bright as candles. ... I have a [cigarette] lighter here with me. Let me light it for you ... . Would you all turn off your flashlights, so that we have only the lighter’s flame here? [The teachers ordered the students to turn off the flashlights; they complied.] Like this. According to [the survivors’] testimonies, they could not see much of the surroundings, but they could see the faces of the people close by. Look at your neighbors’ faces; you can sort of see them, can’t you? [The students murmured: ‘Kind of’; ‘Not really’.] In any case, kids your age [during the battle] worked here as nurses in this darkness.

The guide then described the situation after the cave was abandoned by the military command:

When the field hospital relocated to the south, some patients were left behind here. Why were they left behind? This was a military hospital, so those who were no longer useful [for combat] were abandoned ... . Of course, they were left in complete darkness, so let’s turn off the lights again to understand how their situation was ... . Let’s recreate the sceneries they saw.

The guide turned off his light; the group was engulfed by the absolute darkness. The students groaned: ‘No!’; ‘Aahh! I can’t see anything!’; ‘They wouldn’t be able to get back out on their own power [in this total darkness] even if their injuries had healed, would they?’; ‘My eyes are starting to hurt’; ‘I am scared’. The guide asked the students to be quiet: ‘Listen to the sounds ... because that is what those who were here back then heard. [A student: “Ugh, dripping water is so annoying”.] After turning the light back on, he continued:

I want you to listen to one more testimony. I often hear from those who worked here during the Battle of Okinawa, ‘It was a good thing that it was really dark’ ... . Do you understand what they mean? Had there been enough light for them to see everything here, they could also have seen others in awful conditions ... . That would have been more frightening, they say. Many survivors have said that they could maintain their sanity because it was dark. So, it is really difficult for us, including myself, to even imagine what they underwent. I understand that you guys were scared because of the darkness, but the things the war survivors saw and felt were far beyond our imaginations. I think we all need to acknowledge this fact.

Then, the guide led the group back outside the cave.

Snapshot 1: Analysis

The peace guides I observed all emphasized the potential physical danger of the gama before leading the group into it. The danger is indeed real, as the slick rock surface and protruding stalactites and stalagmites can cause serious accidents. The warning also served to initiate the students into the ‘serious’ educational time-space of peace study; although they might have learned about the battle’s horror in school prior to the trip, they were caught up in the excitement of traveling with their friends. In contrast to the memorials and museums built in the postwar era, the rough natural features of the gama, largely unchanged from their appearance during wartime, compelled the students to take their experiences seriously, if only for the sake of their own safety. The accompanying teachers, one of whom had come to Okinawa previously to explore the potential peace study sites and set up the shūgaku ryokō itinerary,⁷ sided with the peace guides when the students complained, using the occasion to remind the students that they were on an educational, not a sightseeing, tour.

It is also common for peace guides to use concrete material or an anecdote, such as a piece of a bombshell, a defused grenade, or a survivor’s detailed depiction of the situations in gama, to help the students visualize what the people experienced during the battle. This tactic is particularly useful because without the injured soldiers, doctors, nurses, starved civilians, and rotting corpses, gama would just be caves. The peace guides are aware that their role is ‘to let a “voiceless witness” – battle ruins – “speak”’ to the audience (Yoshikawa, 2003: 101–102). To do so, they try to provide the students with sensory details, such as smell (for example, ‘oozing puss’, ‘corpses’) and sound (for example, grunts of the injured soldiers, dripping water), which were crucial parts of the people’s realities at the site during the battle, but could not be recreated and re-experienced during the tour.

According to the peace guides, teachers, and prefectural officials I met, turning off the lights in a gama is a fixture of peace study, as many shūgaku ryokō students report that it is the most memorable moment of the entire trip, often dubbed ‘gama shock’, which sometimes triggers panic among the students (Murakami, 1999: 32).⁸ This ritual is used by the peace guides not only to simulate the wartime experience in Okinawa, or, more precisely, the experience of those who were severely injured in the battle and subsequently abandoned by the Japanese Army, but also, more importantly, to help the students ‘stare at the invisible trace’ of the past and ‘attempt to have a dialogue with the dead through the medium of darkness’ (Kitamura, 2006: 69–70). The peace guide literally shuts off all the ‘surplus stimuli’ (Edensor, 2000: 339) surrounding the students by depriving them of their vision and prohibiting them from speaking. If pleasure tourists enjoy the power to visually ‘gaze’ upon the different, exotic, and amusing (Urry, 1990), one could view the peace guide’s tactic of stripping the students of their ability to gaze as an important technique to distinguish the peace study setting from that of pleasure tourism.

The uncompromising criticism of military violence and refusal to romanticize war are also common features of peace guiding. Other peace guides I observed, for instance, frequently quoted a former nurse corps student’s recollections of the scenes of surgeries without anesthesia, or the Japanese commanders’ attempt to poison the injured and immobile soldiers to death, because, according to a former soldier who survived the poisoning and escaped from the gama, they did not want the US soldiers to capture them and extract the Japanese military strategies from them. The peace guides’ calm and unsentimental narrations of brutal military violence leave little room for the students to consume the past tragedy as an object of ‘melancholic nostalgia’ (Sturken, 2007) as the battle ruins pilgrims did in the 1950s and 1960s.

Another significant aspect of this peace-guiding performance is the guide’s keen awareness that what he was narrating to the student audience in the gama was not a mere transfer of information obtained from written texts and survivors’ testimonials. Even though he had interviewed and spent a significant amount of time with the battle survivors, the guide never pretended to speak about the battle on behalf of those who had experienced the war, and frankly acknowledged the limitations of the second-hand testimonies he narrated to the students. The peace guides do not appear to attempt to maintain ‘temporal authority’ (Cohen, 1985: 23) over the student-tourists by using the survivors’ testimonies and learned ‘facts-as-weapons’ (Handler and Gable, 1997: 101); on the contrary, many peace guides envision their missions to be, as one peace guide writes, ‘to throw questions such as “What is peace?” and “What was the Battle of Okinawa?”, to which there are no answers, at the shūgaku ryokō students, and contemplate about these questions together’ (Kitaueda, 2005: 70). As he quotes the battle survivors and describes their battle experiences in detail, ‘the two voices – the survivor’s and peace guide’s – echo polyphonically’ inside the cave, as the memory of the battle is passed on to the new audience (Kitamura, 2006: 70).

Snapshot 2: At the peace memorial

On a hot, sunny late August morning, 32 high school students from Tokyo, along with three teachers, stood in front of the Cornerstone of Peace, a massive memorial built inside the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Park in the Mabuni area of Itoman City to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War and the Battle of Okinawa. Modeled after the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, DC, the names of more than 240,000 people who died in the Battle of Okinawa are engraved on waves of marble walls. This was the group’s second day of shūgaku ryokō. The previous evening, an OPN peace guide had held a workshop at the hotel where the group was staying. He introduced them to a variety of topics that he hoped they would explore during the trip: Okinawan language, music, and vegetation, as well as the potential relocation of Futenma Air Station currently located in the densely populated Ginowan City, a hotly debated subject in Okinawa.⁹

He briefly explained the Cornerstone’s design, including a unique feature frequently advertised by the prefectural government (Okinawa-ken Bunka Kankyō-bu Heiwa/Danjo Kyōdō Sankaku-ka, n.d.): going against the grain of nationality and military-bound war memorials, it lists the names of ‘all those who lost their lives in the Battle of Okinawa, regardless of their nationality or military or civilian status, including Okinawans ... and Japanese from the main islands, American soldiers who were seen as enemies back then, and [Korean] victims who had been brought here from the Korean Peninsula’. The planners of the Cornerstone envisioned the engraved names of the dead as ‘the substitutes for thousands of corpses that would still have lied in the battlefield’ by making ‘the abstract number of the war victims materially visible’ (Ishihara, 2002: 320). The guide quickly moved on, however, telling the students, ‘Just by glancing at it, all you can think of would be, “Wow, that’s a lot of names”.’

He led the group to the wall listing the names of the dead who were originally from Yonaguni Island, some 600 kilometers west of Okinawa Hontō. ‘Here is what I want you all to look at’, the guide said as he pointed to two names on the wall with the same surname:

Can you read the names? Mr M.O. and Ms K.O. I would like to talk a little about these two people. Mr M.O. is frequently mentioned by the battle survivors ... because he was praised as a military god (gunshin) before the Battle of Okinawa ... . People in [Okinawa] Prefecture remembered his name well ... . This Cornerstone lists the names of those Okinawans who died not only during the Battle of Okinawa, but before it began. Mr M.O. died on Guadalcanal Island in 1943. He was born in Yonaguni Island ... and went to [high school in Naha], where he excelled academically ... . He then graduated from a military academy in Tokyo as the head of the class. He was part of the elite. He was then sent to Guadalcanal, where he died. For his Okinawan contemporaries, he was a big deal. Okinawan leaders, like teachers, mass media, and prefectural officials, praised Mr M.O. and encouraged many young people to become like him... . Teachers handed his portrait to kids around your age and asked them to bring it ... to school every day.

He then pointed to Ms K.O.’s name:

She was Mr M.O.’s sister and was a student in the nurse corps during the battle... . She was injured by a bombshell near the coast over there [pointing in the direction of the rocky shore], and in the end ... she couldn’t move, and her accompanying friends had to leave her there, because there was nothing they could do. The last person who saw her, Ms H., as the danger [of the US attack] was approaching, simply placed a helmet on Ms K.O.’s head and ran. Ms K.O. was presumed to have died at the shore around here in June [of 1945]. So, the names of the brother who was worshiped as a military god during the Battle of Okinawa and of the sister, as if following her brother’s path, who went missing at this coast, are engraved on the wall [side by side] ... . There is a unique story for each individual which you can’t capture just by looking at [the names on the wall]. I only talked about two people, but there are stories for all 240,000 [dead whose names are engraved] ... . When you look at [the Cornerstone], I want you to imagine how many life histories are behind these names.

He moved the group to another wall that lists the names of those who died in the war who were originally from Kagoshima Prefecture. He asked the students to locate the name of the 32nd Army’s commander. [Students: ‘Oh, he is Ushijima something ... . I found it!’] ‘Wow, that was fast ... . That’s correct. Mr Mitsuru Ushijima’s name is here. Let me tell you what Mr Ushijima did and why I think he did it.’ He then outlined the decision-making process of the 32nd Army’s retreat to southern Hontō after losing the fierce battle with the advancing US Forces in central Hontō:

By the end of May, it is reported that Japanese Forces had lost about 70 percent of their soldiers. At that point, on May 22nd, the Japanese Army commanders held a meeting at their headquarters [in the Shuri area of Naha City]. During that meeting, they discussed three options regarding what to do, with only about 30 percent of the solders left. First option: remain in Shuri and battle it out. Second option: ... move to Chinen Peninsula [in south-east Hontō]. Third option: ... move to Kyan Peninsula near Itoman. Among these three options, the Commander [Ushijima] chose ... the third ... . The last Army headquarters were located in ... the cave in the middle of the hill beyond the bathroom over there (pointing to a hill behind him) ... . The Commander moved here, so, of course, the entire Army moved south, and the battle victimized a lot of local residents in the process ... . Eventually, Mr Ushijima released the final order on June 18th: Everyone must fight until the very end, until the last person dies. Then he, along with General Isamu Chō, killed himself on June 22nd.

He continued:

Why did the Japanese Army move from Shuri to this place? ... The reason was very simple; although other places had their own merits, Kyan Peninsula was chosen because it has numerous caves. If [the Japanese Army] took advantage of them in their combat, they could buy time even with a small remaining Force ... . Do you get what I am saying? [A few students nodded.] If Okinawa fell into American hands, [Naichi] certainly would be the next offensive target. [Naichi] was not ready [for the defense] yet, so they needed to buy some time ... . The point is that many [Okinawan] people were victimized by this decision. Had someone at the [May 22nd] meeting brought up the fact that many local residents had already evacuated to [southern Hontō], things might have been different. In fact, there is a testimony that the Japanese Army actually ordered the civilians to move from [the Shuri area] to [the south-east], but ... the order was not delivered effectively ... . I want you all to know that this is why so many people became the victims of the battle around here.

He concluded the narration by referring to the topic raised in the previous evening’s workshop:

What we can get out of this question relates to today’s problem. Although there are many different opinions among them, many Okinawans, in contrast with those on the main islands, doubt that the military presence offers them peace. They doubt that the US military’s presence actually ensures their safety ... . Why is there this doubt? The answer is simple: because of this history. As I said, the Okinawans tried really hard to help the Japanese Army because they believed they had come to protect Okinawa. But what did the Japanese military value most? It was not the Okinawan people’s lives ... . Because of this experience, we, including myself, ask, ‘Does an armed force really exist to protect kokumin (people/citizens)?’ One might say that it protects kuni (country/state), but ... what about kokumin? These are the questions we must continue to ask today ... . You all must think for yourselves by looking with your own eyes and shaping your own perspective ... . Okay, let’s move over there, near the cliff, and take a group photo. Then we will spend 45 minutes or so in the museum.

Snapshot 2: Analysis

The Cornerstone is often regarded as a prime example of the shared pacifist beliefs of Okinawans (Arashiro, 2005; Hiyane, 2005; Ōshiro, 2005; Ōta, 2006). The peace guide, however, wanted the students to look beyond the overwhelming number of names on its walls and pay attention to the unique individual experiences behind them. He was aware that for these students, these names might appear as meaningless signs, or worse, symbols of patriotic sacrifices made by Okinawan and Japanese during the war (Kitamura, 2007; Suzuki, 2012).¹⁰

The peace guide tried to highlight the diverse and rich individual lives prior to the deaths that are not manifested on the Cornerstone’s walls and invisible to the student-tourists’ eyes. By detailing the siblings’ life trajectories, he put human faces to the individual lives and deaths that could not be characterized with such simplistic adjectives as ‘tragic’ or ‘heroic’ (see also Ōkubo, 1999). Referring to Yoneyama (1999: 29), who calls for a ‘historical materialist’ approach to the past that ‘brings to light the numerous counterpoints – the revolutionary “now-time” (Jetztzeit) – to the known course of the past and questions history’s inevitability’, Kitamura argues that the peace guide at the Cornerstone of Peace whom he observed attempted to ‘evoke the presence of the 240,000 people whose “biographies” (personal histories) were ruptured, and demanded of his listeners the capacity for unrestrained imagination’ (Kitamura, 2007: 63). By describing the dramatically different lives and deaths of the siblings, which rendered the Okinawans before and during the battle more complex than the oversimplified images of either the victims (of Naichi Japanese oppression and US attacks) or assailants (against Japan’s Asian neighbors), the peace guide urged the students to think beyond the normative discourses of war and its outcomes.

His description of Commander Ushijima’s decision to retreat to southern Hontō, and his last order to the remaining soldiers and noncombatants to fight until death, was neither melodramatic nor resentful, even though he was obviously critical of Ushijima’s decisions, which were intended only to buy time for the Naichi Japanese to defend their land at the expense of Okinawan lives. Instead, he acted as a thought-provocateur, who, like the atomic bombing survivors in Hiroshima who recount their experiences to the youth, ‘compels audiences to envision the possibility that the suffering and agony of an enormous number of war victims ... might have been averted, that they were never inevitable’ (Yoneyama, 1999: 135).

More crucially, the guide attempted to link the Commander’s decisions during the Battle of Okinawa, which slighted the safety of civilians in the name of ‘national defense’, to the controversy surrounding the presence of military bases in Okinawa today. His narratives about the Commander’s fatal call were ‘deliberately fashioned to induce [the] young audience to begin to think critically about their knowledge of the nation’s past and its supposedly “peaceful” present’, because in order for their visit to Okinawa’s battle ruins to be effectual, learning about the past events must be ‘resonating across time: the [students] must be able to imagine the story about the past as a possible future event’ (Yoneyama, 1999: 134). His narrative performance here can be viewed as what Tomiyama (2006: 47, 46) calls ‘an attempt to bring battlefields into everyday lives’:

Battlefield is neither an aberrant state of life nor is it a state of insanity cut off from people’s everyday lives. [The life in] a battlefield is born in people’s mundane daily routines. Let us stop viewing our everyday lives as the polar opposite of [the lives in] a battlefield.

In so doing, peace guides, unlike sightseeing tour guides, who attempt to maximize the gap between mundane lives ‘back home’ and extraordinary travel experiences (Cohen, 1985; Holloway, 1981), seek to minimize the imaginary distance between ‘now’ and ‘then’, and ‘here’ and ‘there’. By creating an ‘enclavic’ (Edensor, 2000: 328) time-space of peace study, distinct from leisurely sightseeing, the peace guide tried to tear down the spatiotemporal boundary between the battlefield in Okinawa’s past and the students’ present daily lives in Naichi. He urged the students to question the conventional wisdom that the presence of a robust military force is indispensable for a state to protect its citizens (Enloe, 2007). He narrated the historical events to the students, in other words, to urge them to imagine what the past could have been and the future could become.

Even after the serious discussions on military power and peace, during which most of the group remained quiet and looked solemn, the peace guide ensured that the students found shade and sat on the ground during his talk, kept them engaged by asking them to look for names on the Cornerstone wall, spent no more than 15 minutes narrating in front of each of the three Cornerstone walls, and eventually led the group to a location where the teachers could take a group photo with the scenic Mabuni coastline in the background. By managing and directing the tempo and movements of the group, his guiding attempted to ‘encapsulate’ (Edensor, 2000: 339) and maintain this particular part of the Okinawa tour as an educational and provocative one. His narrations and performances at the Cornerstone of Peace suggest, therefore, that he was mindful of the fact that his role as a peace guide is not to define the students’ entire shūgaku ryokō experience – after all, he knew that the group would head to a beachside hotel later that day – but to ‘bracket and shift between spatiotemporal frames’ (Feldman, 2007: 356) of educational and inspirational peace study and leisurely sightseeing within the same trip.

Conclusion

What I have tried to demonstrate in this essay is not that the peace guides turned all of the shūgaku ryokō students into devoted peace activists after a few days in Okinawa; after all, as Yoneyama notes regarding the young audience hearing the Hiroshima survivors’ stories, the impact of the peace study program on the students is not guaranteed ‘to be sustained until the young people mature into full-fledged political subjects’ (Yoneyama, 1999: 134). Instead of generating an abstract classification scheme for this form of educational dark tourism, my study attempted to focus on particular ‘touristic situations’ (Castaneda, 2010) in which one can observe and analyze the specific narrations and performances of peace guides during shūgaku ryokō in Okinawa and their intended functions within group travel.

The peace guides’ narrations and performances portrayed here attempted to create an enclavic space in which the shūgaku ryokō students from Naichi could learn about the Battle of Okinawa in particular and the issues concerning war and peace in general, and to facilitate the two processes essential for experiential education and social movement participation: community-building and consciousness-raising. The various narrative and performative tactics that peace guides employed encouraged students to vividly imagine and deeply connect with the experiences of those who experienced the war by placing them in a physically demanding environment, heightening their senses, encouraging them to form and express their opinions while downplaying the guides’ intellectual authority, and conveying the unsentimental testimonies of the battle survivors. By connecting the past events to current issues, their guiding also attempted to help the students question the rigidity of the boundary between the past war and its violence and the supposedly peaceful present to which they would return.

Moreover, the peace guides’ guiding techniques were shaped within the larger contexts of school educational trips in Japan and Okinawa’s peace activism; shūgaku ryokō and Okinawa tourism have never constituted a ‘mere’ travel industry, but have been an arena of struggle over not only the interpretation of the past war but also the vision of the future peace. In the eyes of the teachers and peace guides, the school trip to Okinawa is an act of antiwar pacifism against the authoritarian government, behind which the desire to return to militaristic nationalism is lurking, and tour guiding at in populo sites such as the gama and peace memorial marker served as a medium to spread their message to a wider range of Japanese youth.

One major limitation of this study is that it did not assess the extent to which the peace guides succeeded in convincing the students to carry what they learned during the peace study tour with them after shūgaku ryokō, although I had numerous conversations with students and teachers during tours and read students’ reflections on the tours later published by several schools. For numerous methodological reasons (McGehee, 2001: 133), it is nearly impossible to assess the long-term emotional, intellectual, and behavioral effects of the peace study tour on the student-tourists, and, as Feldman (2008: 233) found after conducting numerous interviews with the Israeli students who made a trip to the Holocaust-related sites in Poland, ‘[l]ong-term changes in behavior cannot be inferred from the students’ reactions in the short term, and the influence of a single [trip] is difficult to isolate from a person’s life history’.

Despite the name, shūgaku ryokō peace study programs are not guaranteed to compel students to seriously contemplate war and peace, even if they include such activities as listening to the compelling stories of the war survivors, visiting thoughtfully designed peace memorials, and entering the natural caves that used to be military bunkers and field hospitals. What potentially makes the travel and programs educational and transformative are individual peace guides who direct, narrate, and perform in front of, and along with, the students. Considering their tactics for creating and maintaining a learning community of student-tourists, teachers, and the guides themselves, within which critical consciousness about war and peace is encouraged, as well as the historical contexts within which Okinawa shūgaku ryokō and peace guiding emerged, we can indeed understand the guiding of student-tourists from Naichi by Okinawan peace guides as a form of activism – an endeavor to ‘activate’ others and themselves – as the OPN peace guide I quoted in this essay’s introduction insisted.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank peace guides and activists in Okinawa, especially Reiko Akamine, Akira Gotō, Tsutomu Inafuku, Gen Kitaueda, Sanehisa Ōno, Kazunori Ōshima, Makiko Ōshiro, Kiichirō Yogi, Mariko Yokota, and Yuki Yoshikawa, for offering inspiration, access, and guidance for my field research. Dr. Keisuke Enokido and Ken Sonohara also helped me shape the core ideas for this essay.

I also thank Tim Edensor, anonymous reviewers for Tourist Studies, and Donald Donham for their constructive criticisms of the earlier version of this article.

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