Questions Hidden Within Cornerstones: Who Are You?
Nakagusuku
August 28th 2017
“I’m Robert, from the Podcast team! I’m interested in the identity of Okinawans.” I know the names of everybody on this trip to Okinawa already, but the introductions are for the relatively unfamiliar people joining us on this trip across the world.
“I’m Lex, previous CUIP. I’m interested in assimilation in indigenous communities, especially tattooing in Okinawa.”
“I’m Ted, I’m part of the content team, interested in Christianity in Okinawa.”
“I’m Jasmine, from the Podcast team, I’m researching resistance of indigenous societies and their cultural identity.”
The circle comes around to me. I falter — smile hesitantly. “I’m Nirupama. I’m Alan’s intern, I guess?” The circle moves on, but I’m left with the question of: what exactly is it that I do?
In the later half of August, I found myself on an airplane flying to Okinawa, the other side of the world, on a research trip that would profoundly change my relationship with history.
I’ve never really been able to see myself doing research as an adult. I mostly skipped over that in my mental imagination to my successful, famous future, and one of the main reasons for this is that I’ve never found that one, main, obsession. Other researchers, especially in the sciences, seem to have it sorted. A huge guiding question: what do I want to contribute to the world? I didn’t know. I still didn’t know, so I felt a bit like a fraud, stepping off that stale-aired airplane, into an almost stifling humidity, without any question or theme.
I had expected to feel more connected with the history by walking Mabuni Beach, peering into the limestone caves, stopping at the protest sites, and talking to the survivors of the gruesome Battle of Okinawa. And although I was horrified, traumatized and deeply sympathetic to experiences of the islanders while going to these locations, sick to my stomach at some of the acts of violence done to them, I was not so piqued as to pursue this topic any further. I had seen enough to understand the trauma felt by the land and the deep plight of the people.
War has never been an interest or forte of mine.
So it was a surprise, when on a sleepy Monday, hoping to kill time between Airbnbs and perhaps do a rephotograph of a rephotograph, we stopped off at Nakagusuku. Nakagusuku was an old castle, fortification and sacred place, possessed by an aji, a local chieftain, during the Gusuku Period–-which was all I knew about the location at the time. Upon arriving at the visitor’s centre, the lady at the ticket booth gave us a lovely leaflet, and was quick to tell us that there were no amenities like bathrooms or vending machines in the actual castle, and we would not have access to much up there. It didn’t occur to me that there would be something significant in its remoteness at that point.
We were prepared to hike our way to the top of the hill, where the castle entrance was, when we were taken up instead by a repurposed golf buggy (conveniently free). This was where I lost the leaflet out the side of the cart, trying to take a picture of my teammates doing something funny, which was both a mistake and a great boon.
When we arrived, we came out onto a plateau right above the ocean, a bucolic vista where the ocean was blue and there was nothing but vegetation around us. It was beautiful, but not more so than the rest of the island, which was also almost entirely ocean and green, swaying grass. As the rest of my teammates took photos, I wandered to the mountain, where a peculiar indent in the side of the cliff-face was marked by a plaque that glinted out to me. The plaque spoke about how this was a blacksmith’s workshop most likely, and all I could think about was how far removed from the rest of the castle it was. Was it to vent the smoke out over the hill? Had the plateau we were all taking silly selfies on been the site of a marketplace filled with similar vendors of products, or been a place where soldiers trained and wanted a blacksmith close by? Did the blacksmith only make weapons for the palace?
I had no way to know, and the plaque had precious little information, so I kept walking, abandoning the rest of my team to venture forward. I had questions I wanted answered, and it was as I went through the undergrowth to reach the front entrance, that I started to realize I wasn’t going to get any.
The castle around me was vast and empty and quiet. The ruins loomed over me, an imposing presence in the hot summer sun. It felt a little like entering an alternate dimension from the more urban Okinawa we’d seen so far. Ivy and moss had engulfed the walls and stones, but it had clearly been cleaned out for tourists to comfortably walk upon.
Except there was nobody there at the time, not one person except us.
It was midday, and a Monday, and the entire castle was breathtakingly empty and quiet, save for the breeze rustling through the swaying trees.
It was nothing like the view that a returning aji would have had upon coming home from a long weary battle, and yet I was seized by the imagination of that particular moment, as I hiked up the stone steps. What would he have seen? What would he have thought? Was it wood that built up the outside of the castle, or would he have seen the rock covered in fluttering pennants? Where would he have dismounted his horse? Where did he sleep and stay, in what looked like three huge rooms meant for entertaining visitors, cooking, and holding state meetings? Did his staff also live in the castle?
And the more I looked, and the less I saw, I felt something very soothing descend over me. Had I gone to the well-labelled Nakijin Castle or to the meticulously reconstructed Shuri Castle first, I wouldn’t have asked any of these detailed questions. With answers already present, no questions would ever find their way through. But the less answers I had, the more my curiosity was stoked.
As we slowly made our way through the castle in the sweltering heat, looking for the castle wall that Charles Gail had photographed, we relaxed. Something about the stress and deeply emotional sites we had visited in the days prior, about Okinawa’s long-gone wars, and the struggles they continued to fight to today, unwound. Instead, we looked at the remnants of a very distant past, of which we had very little information and just took it in for what it was. We stood atop castle walls and looked out to the ocean, and like many a guard of Nakagusuku must have done before, we saw Okinawa through a unique vantage point. We clambered down the steps of the utaki, into the cool shade and gazed down at the wells that somehow pumped water all the way to the top of the mountain. We sat down before the shrines to the gods of old and imagined ourselves in the positions of priests and ruling lords.
The walls of the enclosure curved onwards and onwards, with no mortar to keep it together against the elements. As we took a break in the shade, none of us could quite imagine trying to build a wall like that: despite that being the main project of the keepers of the castle. Who made these walls? Servants? Master architects? Common constructors? Slaves? Who knew? We didn’t.
In the main enclosure, the reason, perhaps, for the relative deserted nature of the castle could be discerned by the presence of three archaeologists on their lunch break. The archaeologists stood near a long sectioned-off area, filled with individual stones, taken from a wall we could no longer see. Each rock had a label, of its row and column: where it fitted, in the elaborate puzzle of construction. We couldn’t tell if the archaeologists were in the process of pulling down a wall, or reconstructing it, and we didn’t have the courage to interrupt them to ask, but it surprisingly fit into the landscape of it all. Even if the society was long gone, people still interacted with it, felt something from restoring it, and that it was important, crucial.
After stopping off to re-enact the taunting frenchman scene from the Mython Python movie, having found a perfect replica wall, I couldn’t help but reflect on how familiar and unfamiliar Nakagusuku was. Growing up in England, castles were as aplenty as they are in Okinawa (there are estimated to be around 300–400 gusuku on the archipelago) and I had visited several. The architecture, the looming walls, the stones and the view of the ocean were both familiar and unfamiliar, from childhoods spent wandering Glastonbury, Warwick and the several other ruins of old from around England. I felt both closer to the aged stone remembering England, and fundamentally estranged from the history in an indescribable way, that only incited my curiosity to know more, a feeling that couldn’t quite be captured through pictures or virtual tours.
And I realized, standing at the edges of the wide gardens, staring up at the wall we thought Charles Gail might have photographed, I had found my question. I had found hundreds of questions, that each could make up a small research topic on their own, and I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been clueless. Unaware. Out in the open without a guide.
In a classroom, the teacher already knows most of the answers, and when given one sufficiently large answer, it’s hard for students to question miniscule things, because of constraints of time and constraints of imagination. Asking insightful questions about daily life and how people live and position themselves is hard to do in a classroom, from one picture of one angle of a huge building. Asking questions, building interest is easy, when you stand in the footsteps of giants and wonder where they must have lived like humans, performed their politics and reached for something greater.
I had walked into Okinawa without questions, knowledge or awareness, and I walked out with all three, and a renewed drive to investigate and bring light to my questions.
A month later, the Sesnon Gallery at UC Santa Cruz opened, showcasing Charles Gail’s photos and our own hard work, and I knew exactly what to say.
“Hello, I’m Nirupama, one of the Gail Project researchers and Alan’s Christy’s intern. I work with ancient Ryukyuan history, exploring the daily lives of people in the past and how much they were influenced by trading connections with the rest of the world! If you have any questions about the Gail Project Exhibitions, or would like a tour, please come to me!”
The Gail Project: An Okinawan-American Dialogue is free and open to the public through Dec. 2 at UCSC. More info at http://art.ucsc.edu/galleries/gail-project-okinawan-american-dialogue. Inside the Gail Project: An Experiential Research Odyssey is also free and open to the public through Dec. 6 at UCSC. More info at https://cowell.ucsc.edu/smith-gallery/current-exhibition.html
