Okinawa, Tokyo, Palau: a polyphony of war memories and landscapes etched across three places and various individuals
The widely discussed 2025 art exhibition travels from Naha to Tokyo’s theater space

A cacophony of voices and gestures—testimonies, reenactments, musical performances, and comedy routines—resounds and overlaps from screens scattered across the space. Enveloped by these elements, the audience comes to physically experience how World War II is not simply something of the distant past.

Chikako Yamashiro, a video artist from Naha, has visually investigated Okinawa’s history, politics, and culture through photography, video, and performance. Yamashiro has generated significant attention through the striking imagery of works such as “A Woman of the Butcher Shop” (2012), which uses a tacitly permitted farming plot within a U.S. military base as one of its settings, and “Your voice came out through my throat” (2009), in which Yamashiro projects footage of an elderly man recounting his wartime experiences onto her own face, attempting to let his voice resonate through her body. This latest work resonates deeply with the concerns and practices that underpin Yamashiro’s previous works.
Okinawa, which has experienced colonization and intense ground battles, continues to grapple with complex political and social circumstances to this day. This work brings together and layers those histories, incorporating diverse narratives, bodies, and even unspoken silence.

Shot between 2023 and 2025, the footage features Pastor Osamu Taira, who carries memories of Okinawa’s postwar history; jazz singer Teiko Saito; musician Shoukichi Kina; Toshiko Kametani, a witness to the Great Tokyo Air Raid; and scenes from Palau in the South Pacific, where Yamashiro’s father, novelist Tatsuo Yamashiro, spent his prewar and wartime years as the child of Okinawan immigrants.

This strikingly powerful work, which expresses the multi-layered nature of history and memory in both content and form, was presented as an installation at the Artizon Museum in 2025. Subsequently, as a special project marking 80 years since the end of the war, the work was reconfigured for the theatrical space at the Naha Cultural Arts Theater NAHArt. For this edition of Autumn Meteorite 2026 Tokyo, the composition has been further reconfigured for the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre. In this version, the audience moves through the space while viewing the work. As the performance unfolds, the audience’s perspective and sensory experience shift, creating an experience within the theatrical space where multiple memories, voices, and bodies overlap.