Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are caught up in a web of people and practices—living and dead, visible and immaterial—that exert powerful forces often beyond their control. In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines the myriad ways contemporary Okinawans experience, remember, and contest sacrifice. He attends to the voices of those who find their vocation in service to others, from shamans, fortune tellers, laborers, and artists to dead soldiers, war survivors, antiwar activists, and Christian missionaries. Nelson shows how the memories of past sacrifices, atrocities, and exploitation as well as residual trauma shape modern life in Okinawa and the possibility and hope for creative action grounded in the everyday. Offering new understandings of colonial transformation, wartime violence, and military occupation, Nelson writes from the intersection of temporalities and possibilities, where the hard finality of the past may be broken open to reveal a “not yet” that has always remained just beyond reach.

Christopher T. Nelson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa, also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Opening a Rift in the Everyday  13
2. Iphigenia in the China Sea: Confronting the Memory of Sacrifice  53
3. Unburying the Future: Okamoto Tarō and the Dialectics of Sacrifice 102
4. From Among the Dead: The Transformation of Sacrifice  157
Conclusion  231
Notes  237
Bibliography  263
Index  281