A history of Okinawa, through photographer Mao Ishikawa’s lens

Photographer Mao Ishikawa captures the rough reality of life around American military bases in Okinawa, the Japanese island where she was born. In a retrospective at Coventry’s Mead Gallery in the United Kingdom, the artist showcases over 100 works, dating back to the 1970s. “Ishikawa has never had such a comprehensive exhibition at a publicly funded institution before. This show brings her most seminal works to Europe,” exhibitions curator Thomas Elmer noted to STIR. Elmer was first introduced to Ishikawa (b. 1953) in 2023 at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and was immediately intrigued by the complexity of her documentary photography.

In her early 20s, while working at a bar near a US military base frequented by African American soldiers, Ishikawa worked on the photo series Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa (1975-77). At the time, segregation and discrimination were still a daily part of the lives of these soldiers and any Okinawan women, like Ishikawa, who decided to have relations with them were also derided as ‘pan pan’ or prostitutes, a description accompanying the display notes. Shot in black and white, Red Flower features these women in a myriad of settings: like a domestic scene where two women lie entangled with three Black men, or another image of a woman in a long dress at a bar, surrounded by young African American soldiers. Elmer noted that  Ishikawa was “taken aback when she met African Americans because of the shared experience of being ostracised from the main narrative and the complexity of being of a different race”. Her photographs document the influence of Black culture on Okinawan women and are a microcosmic representation of the longstanding American military presence in Okinawa, which dates back to the the Battle of Okinawa during the Second World War, from April - June 1945.

Okinawa was returned to Japanese sovereignty in 1972 after nearly three decades under US administration. A year earlier, in 1971, Japan and the United States had signed the Okinawa Reversion Agreement, which allowed US military bases to retain a presence on the island, triggering a widely felt sense of abandonment among the residents of Okinawa. Ishikawa’s work captures this state of conflict and unrest through portraits of people and glimpses into their everyday lives.

At Mead Gallery, works from nine distinct series are brought together, with only one - Life in Philly (1986), set away from the island. All the works in the exhibition were transmitted digitally and printed locally on Hahnemühle paper to make the show more sustainable. Life in Philly was made during a trip to Philadelphia, where Ishikawa visited an Army veteran she met during her bartending days. It highlights Ishikawa’s ability to get to know people, documenting them in intimate settings. For instance, one image shows a cramped home packed with belongings, with clothes and other objects hanging from the walls. In the centre of the frame, two young children stare excitedly at something obscured from view while their father looks on, holding another child (whose gaze is focused on Ishikawa) in his arms.

While a majority of Ishikawa’s early works were shot in black and white, in the course of her career, she moved from film to digital photography and began to experiment with colour, also incorporating landscape imagery in her work. Here’s What the Japanese Flag Means to Me (1993 - 2011), for instance, captures the relationship that people from Okinawa, mainland Japan and the Indigenous Ainu people have with the Japanese flag, using movement and embodiment to express their relationship with the flag and by extension, with their country. This results in a series replete with emotive, staged poses – in one photograph, a man looks squarely at a flag hung on the back of a dumpster truck; in another image, a woman floats in the water, holding a partially submerged Japanese flag, seeming to signify the blurred boundaries between her country and her body.

Through her work, Ishikawa tries to capture the political, cultural and social environment of Okinawa, in an effort to document its history and heritage. Speaking about the series Okinawa and the Japan Self-Defense Forces, Elmer said, “She also documents the coexistence between civilians and soldiers, distinguishing the institution and the individual in her photographs.” This allows her to capture barbed wire fences, the aerial and military presence and tanks even as she captures “people in hospitals, people in temples, people being at the beach, but living alongside soldiers, creating a realistic example of life in Okinawa”.

'Mao Ishikawa' is on view at Mead Gallery from May 1 - June 23, 2025.