Interviewer sounds out Okinawan women of all ages

WOMEN OF OKINAWA: Nine Voices from a Garrison Island by Ruth Ann Keyso; Cornell University Press, paper, $17.95

By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Book Editor

As the World Uchinanchu (Okinawan people) Conference unfolds here through Tuesday at the East-West Center, it's fitting to consider a book published in America that gives voice to a segment of the population not heard before in this way — the first oral history of Okinawan women from World War II to the present.

Bilingual writer and photographer Ruth Keyso Vail of Lake Forest, Ill., spent a year on Okinawa interviewing women with the aid of a grant from the Ito Foundation for International Education Exchange. She chose women, she said, because they have had the closest contact with the U.S. military, which occupies the major portion of this beautiful island, and because during and after the war women played a key role in supporting their families in the absence of men.

Also, there, as here, women are the keepers of family memory and maintainers of the cultural structures that are especially important in Okinawa, embattled by both U.S. occupation and an uneasy relationship with Japan.

Keyso Vail wisely talked to women of three generations: those who lived through World War II's bloody Battle of Okinawa, their daughters and their granddaughters. Not surprisingly, their attitudes are strikingly different. Her skilful editing of the interviews portrays the complexities of the cultural AmericaniOkinawan nexus represented by the base.

An afterword by former Okinawa Governor Masahide Ota makes the thoughtful point that the younger generation cannot be blamed for being indifferent to the past or more accepting of the American military presence, but this should not deter their elders from seeking the ultimate goal of many: to see their home become a symbol of peace rather than of war.

The book is available online at barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com.