June 2012
A Yamatonchu (Japanese) Who Kept Portraying Okinawa
Kiyoshi Nanasawa
Tokyo-born Katsu Moriguchi moved to U.S.-controlled Okinawa and became a journalist for a local newspaper in 1959 to “convey the suffering of Okinawa to mainland Japan” at the age of 22. Mr. Moriguchi then joined the Nippon Television and kept reporting to mainlanders, via news and documentary programs, how the local residents hoped for the restitution of Okinawa to Japan while struggling against poverty, as a “special correspondent.” His 1966 documentary Okinawa no ju-hassai [18 year-olds in Okinawa], which portrayed the desire for and despair over Okinawa’s reversion to Japan from a viewpoint of high-school students, became a TV series -- a valuable archive of the reversion that also recorded Okinawan’s dismay after the restitution. In Himeyuri senshi: Ima tou kokka to kyoiku [History of Himeyuri Student Corps: Questioning the Role of Nation and Education] (1979), survivors of the Himeyuri student corps gave testimony to the cruelty of the battlefield and the guilt of Japanese soldiers for the first time. Furthermore, the program inquired into the responsibility of adults including a schoolmaster, who escaped for his own safety, and examined the “responsibility for wrongdoing” of the Japanese. Mr. Moriguchi also introduced Okinawa’s climate and harsh livelihood to the mainlanders. To do so, he visited all inhabited remote islands of Okinawa. Yukui: Okinawa Hatoma-jima [Yukui ritual: Hatoma Island, Okinawa] (1974) depicted the woe of the depopulated island where local residents struggled to bring in children from other islands in order to keep their school. This documentary was followed by three sequels and a drama. How did Mr. Moriguchi come across and created a relationship with Okinawa? How has he been portraying it? Why has the flame of his enthusiasm been burning for more than 50 years, even after his retirement and even now, at the age of 75? The author traces the footprints of a rare TV producer who never satisfied with mere transient news coverage and kept reporting Okinawa.