Echoes of Okinawa

This episode of The Reader is a basket of sounds and verses collected on a recent visit to Okinawa.

I used a long time find, Matthew McKinney’s live rendition of his emotional “War is Over, Forever!” as the opening tune, because Okinawa was commemorating her brutal saga 80s year after.  The trumpet was a field-recording by a youngster sitting under the tree of a large collective tomb of unknown sacrifices of war on the day when I visited.  I went to the Okinawa Museum in Naha, and saw this beautiful calligraphy of a Japanese verse on display.  Photography was forbidden, thus I took out my handy recorder and started reading the English translation underneath.  I mixed my recording inside the museum with the kid’s trumpet.  The next verse was taken from writings on a cross made to deter American soldiers from killing, when they rampaged the fields of Okinawa during their invasions.  I sampled a hip-hop beat and lay over it the writings on the cross, broken up and juxtaposed.  The last verse was, I realized later, a quotation from the same verse on display inside the museum, but on another platform.  I did the English translation from a Chinese pamphlet, and read it over Leo Brouwer’s breathtakingly beautiful “Un Dia De Noviembre” played by Daniela Piasecki.