Keep Them Sweet

I Like Okinawa Sweet (2004) is a short video directed and performed by Chikako Yamashiro as part of her Okinawa Tourist Series. It opens with a sensual and somewhat comedic view of the Okinawan island paradise: a young woman in a bright floral blouse leans against a chain-link fence in the summer heat. Her eyes are partially closed, and her head sways gently back and forth as beads of perspiration slowly drip down the sides of her neck. Her expression brightens as she eagerly reaches for an ice cream cone offered to her from offscreen. She enthusiastically savors the frozen dessert, suggestively licking and biting into the pink strawberry scoops while coyly addressing the viewer. After finishing the first cone, she is left to sweat and writhe under the scorching sun until she is handed another ice cream, which she lunges forward to devour. Her gestures become more animated as she races to consume the quickly melting scoops. By the third serving, this salacious spectacle of consumption devolves into a nauseating display of stickiness and over-indulgence (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1

Chikako Yamashiro, I Like Okinawa Sweet (still), from the Okinawa Tourist Series, 2004. © Chikako Yamashiro. Reproduced courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

For most Okinawan viewers, Yamashiro’s choice of ice cream would be easily identifiable as Blue Seal, a specialty brand described as ‘born in the US, raised in Okinawa’ (Kumano, 2009). In 1948 its American parent company opened a dairy factory in Okinawa to satiate the appetites of US servicemen stationed there after World War II. Blue Seal was exclusively sold on US bases until the mid-1970s, when the company rebranded itself to appeal to the larger Okinawan public by featuring uniquely ‘local’ flavors, including bitter melon, sugar cane, and purple sweet potato. Yamashiro performed her ice cream action at the edge of a US military base in Okinawa. Her video not only emphasizes Blue Seal’s ties with US military occupation, but also the company’s appropriation and commodification of indigenous Okinawan food in order to establish itself as a local favorite and leading tourist attraction for Japanese and international visitors.

Yamashiro produced I Like Okinawa Sweet as part of a series of works criticizing the Okinawan tourist industry. The humor and failure of Yamashiro’s tropical ice cream fantasy pokes fun at Okinawa’s superficial attempts to present an alluring image of the islands despite its depressed economy in Japan’s poorest prefecture. The push to promote Okinawan heritage and leisure tourism is part of a larger Japanese national campaign to reimagine Okinawa as an exotic destination replete with nostalgia for the castles and customs of its premodern Ryukyu Kingdom. One goal of this campaign is to replace the current image of Okinawa as a barren landscape of battle ruins and memorials attesting to the mass violence, compulsory suicides, and deaths that Okinawans suffered during the Battle of Okinawa and beyond (see Figal, 2008). Rebecca Jennison (2014: 186–187) observes how

Yamashiro’s playful ‘interventions’ in public spaces aim not only to disrupt the commodifying gaze of tourism in a style that produces powerful images of ‘girl power,’ but also to disturb or ‘haunt’ our complacency and state of amnesia, raising questions about Okinawa’s traumatic past and militarized present …

Born in 1976, Yamashiro is part of a postwar generation of Okinawans who were raised under the influence of Japanese nationalism and American popular culture. Yamashiro’s work reminds us how the allure of sweets can lock us into cycles of dependency. In the video, she is literally overwhelmed by the ice cream cones that keep coming and won’t stop melting. The artist uses durational performance to demonstrate the Sisyphean dimensions of her task. Her love–hate relationship with Blue Seal ice cream mirrors the ways Okinawans have grown up embracing and consuming products that are so intimately tied with their own oppression. For decades the Japanese government has promised ‘sweet compensations’ to Okinawa by offering its citizens large monetary incentives to lease their land for US military expansion, with the threat of hostile seizure if they refuse. Japan adopted this ‘carrot and stick’ approach from the US military administration during occupation. Today this strategy is aptly referred to as ‘candy and whip’ (ame to muchi) in Japanese (Rabson, 2012). In other words, Japan ‘keeps Okinawa sweet’ by ensuring its citizens’ acquiescence through coercion and intimidation.

Finally, I Like Okinawa Sweet speaks to vulnerability. Yamashiro created this piece as a private performance for the camera but, throughout the video, the military servicemen on the adjacent Ginowan base can be seen in the background moving in and out of small buildings surrounded by security lights and barbed-wire fences. On the soundtrack, an American male voice repeatedly asks, ‘Hey there, hey, how ya doin’?’ Although Yamashiro carefully selected a location for her performance that was not frequently patrolled by military police, the artist’s physical vulnerability is evident by her proximity to the compound and the suggested implicit danger of sexual assault. For viewers who saw Yamashiro’s video at the inaugural opening exhibition of the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum in 2007, this scene might also evoke traumatic memories of the 12-year-old school girl who was abducted and brutally gang-raped by three US servicemen stationed in Okinawa. This violent crime of 1995 incited outrage and mass protests among Okinawan citizens and gave rise to the Okinawan feminist resistance movement (see Angst, 2001). Yamashiro continues this legacy of Okinawan feminism in her art practice as visual activism. Through her enticingly rebellious mode of critique, Yamashiro condemns the ongoing appropriation, exploitation, and oppression of Okinawan lives and culture by actively and defiantly refusing to stay sweet.