Okinawa Memories Initiative

History

WHO: Walter Barnaby, Jaxon Chester, Alan Christy, James Leyton, Geneva Samuelson, Alice Yang, Nixie Young, Noriko Aso, Undergraduate Researchers, Graduate Student Researchers, Faculty/Staff advisors, Alumni advisors

WHAT: The Okinawa Memories Initiative (OMI) is a public history project that explores the postwar history of Okinawa, Japan, from a global perspective through collaborative storytelling. By learning in the field with immersion travel, students participate in global historical understanding in ways they could never achieve in the classroom. Two Lead Interns are responsible for managing the undergraduate division of OMI, and three Team Leads work with undergraduate student researchers on Archival, Exhibits, Oral History, and Media projects.

WHY: OMI’s mission can be divided into four primary focus areas. The first of which is Experiential Learning. We aim to provide inclusive and engaging opportunities for undergraduates to pursue their interests while contributing to meaningful academic research.

We understand how difficult it is for those interested in working in the humanities to have a chance to gain relevant and in-the-field experience, so we want to help bridge that gap. Our second area of focus is engaged research. We emphasize purposeful research that is both ethical and non-extractive. Our work is done intentionally and is built through relationships and participatory practices. Our third area of focus, community service, goes hand in hand with ethical research practices. We work diligently with our community partners to foster a communicative relationship that aims to help preserve and celebrate community and familial histories. Our fourth and final area of focus is public education. We ultimately focus on being a resource for those who want to learn about Okinawa and the Okinawan diasporic experience. We work to make materials on Okinawa accessible and work to elevate Okinawan voices and history. Okinawa is rich in history and has many perspectives to gain through our understanding and engagement with it!

• Public History

• Experiential learning

• Community-engaged research

• To capture the varied Okinawan diasporic experience

• To preserve community and familial histories

• To be a resource for those interested in learning about Okinawa and its diaspora.

• Provide students with opportunities to develop and use research skills.

The purpose of OMI is to

Create meaningful experiential learning opportunities for university students (EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING), build skills, learn

Provide service to our community of those with connections to Okinawa (COMMUNITY SERVICE).

(ENGAGED RESEARCH)–seek to advance knowledge of Okinawa (not just research for research’s sake), building knowledge through relationships, not extractive… Purposeful, participatory

Disseminate historical and cultural information on Okinawa—BUILDING public understanding (PUBLIC EDUCATION)

WHAT'S NEXT:

• Food exhibit at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery

• Continued digitalization of the Yamashiro collection in collaboration with the Okinawa Association of America (OAA)

• Physical Modular Exhibit on Celebrating the Okinawa Association of America, a StoryMaps exhibit worked on with the OAA.

• Community engagement in regards to Oral Histories, further oral histories with community members in the bay and with the OAA

• Continue building our partnership with the University of the Ryukyus.

  • Developing a Japanese translation team in coordination with the University of Ryukyus

• Grant writing and community funding

• Backlog publication of oral histories

• Increase focus on OMI’s online media presence

  • Highlighting student researchers and their word

  • Continue building the new website (https://omi.ucsc.edu/)

  • More active social media

  • Newsletters

• Continue building the curriculum for HIS 150E, History, and Memory in the Okinawa Islands.

• Return to Okinawa

OMI has a lot of exciting things coming up! In terms of exhibits, we are gearing up for an exhibit at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery about traditional Ryukyuan cuisine in the fall. The exhibits team has also worked hard to complete a physical modular exhibit celebrating the Okinawan Association of America (OAA) in Gardena, California. The Archives Team has also been hard at achieving their digitalization of the Yamashiro collection, which contains over 20,000 photographs documenting OAA events and experiences from 1984 to 2010. Regarding oral history, they have been focused on preparing an extensive backlog of oral histories for possible publication and contributing to the fall exhibit with interviews of community members in the Bay Area. Our Media Production and Website teams aim to continue building up our online media presence through our new website and highlight the work that all of our student researchers are doing. As a project, we are excited to continue building our partnership with the University of the Ryukyus after our recent Spring Break trip to Okinawa. We are also continuing to focus on grant writing, community funding, and building the curriculum and course materials for HIS 150E, History, and Memory in the Okinawa Islands.

THE WOW:

The Okinawa Memories Initiative began over ten years ago, in the fall of 2013, when a collection of photos was donated to Special Collections at UCSC’s McHenry Library. Captured between 1952 and 1953, these images depict powerful scenes from Okinawa during the aftermath of World War II.

The Okinawa Memories Initiative consists of multiple undergraduate-led teams. Our student leadership strives to convey the history of Okinawa through various lenses. Some of our teams include Archives, Curriculum, Exhibits, Oral History, Media Production, Website, and Translation. OMI is driven by a spirited collaboration of college students, researchers, oral historians, and artists based at UC Santa Cruz with partnerships with Cal State Monterey Bay, Cal State East Bay, and the University of The Ryukyus.

Since 2013, OMI has taken eight research trips to Okinawa, conducted over 75 oral history interviews, created multiple museum exhibits on both sides of the Pacific, and so much more. Our cohort has included hundreds of student researchers and thousands of community members. We have also been featured in Japanese and American media, such as news broadcasts and scholarly journals.

The OMI Scholars Internship Program allows students to gain hands-on, paid research experience in the public humanities. Anyone can be an OMI Scholar! OMI Scholars are community-oriented and open-minded and represent various academic disciplines.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, offers a specialized class dedicated to teaching students about the history of Okinawa and its relations with the United States, known as “History and Memory in the Okinawan Islands” (HIS 150E). This class was entirely developed by the Okinawa Memories Initiative’s Curriculum Team.

In 2023-2024: With support from crowdfunding, The Dean of Humanities, and The Humanities Institute, the Okinawa Memories Initiative undergraduate team returned to Okinawa for the first time since summer 2019. Ten undergraduate students, some of whom have been working on the OMI team since the beginning of the pandemic, experienced the culture of Okinawa first-hand and showcased the research they do while abroad. None of the ten have ever been to Okinawa before, and many have never had the opportunity to be on a participatory and experiential research trip like this or to partner so profoundly with an international community.

With support from Porter College, the Okinawa Memories Initiative, we updated our media equipment to provide students with experience using industry-standard audio and video solutions tools.