Living in Okinawa | The Island That Outlived the Empire | 4K Documentary

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:10]Outside the community center in Ogimi village, an elderly woman walks past a stone marker that begins, "At 80, you are still a child." She is 92.

[00:00:32]On the southern coast in Ittoman, a fishing town since the Ryuku Kingdom, a man pushes a Sabani off the morning key and steps in barefoot, the way his grandfather did and his grandfather before that In Naha, the prefectural capital of 320,000 people, an elderly shopkeeper unlocks her store on Kokusai Dori, the road they rebuilt first after the war and adjusts the pair of stone shisa at a doorway. They have been there longer than the shop has.

[00:01:25]This is Okinawa, not the postcard tropical Japan beach of the brochures. The working country, the one that was a kingdom before it was a prefecture.

[00:01:45]Okinawa has one of the highest densities of centinarians on Earth.

[00:01:51]It is also the place where 1 in4 civilians died in the last 3 months of the Pacific War. The country lives with both numbers.

[00:02:10]What follows is what daily life actually looks like in a country still working out which of its inheritances it wants to keep.

[00:02:28]The day in Idamman has begun before the post office has switched its lights on.

[00:02:34]The fisherman who pushed off the key at 5 is 48 years old and has been working the same line of reef since he was 12.

[00:02:52]The boat is a Sabani, a small wooden Ryukuan sailboat with a curved hull and an outrigger, the same design that has been built in this town since the kingdom era. He uses an outboard motor now. The sail is folded under the seat.

[00:03:10]He still keeps it.

[00:03:21]The catch he brings back will be at the Iman fish market by 7, sold by 8, and on a kitchen counter somewhere by 10:00, 100 km north of him, the morning has reached the reef at Bisay on the Motibu Peninsula on the western coast.

[00:03:51]An old woman has been on the limestone reef for an hour. The tide is at its lowest of the month. She has bented the waist over a shallow pool, gathering mazuku into a wicker basket she has used for so long, the rim has gone soft.

[00:04:18]Mazuku is a long stranded brown seaweed.

[00:04:21]It grows attached to coral and limestone in shallow water. It is the food the centinarians of this island ate and still eat. It has been cultivated commercially since the 1970s.

[00:04:37]Before that, it was foraged on mornings exactly like this one.

[00:04:50]The basket is 2/3 full.

[00:04:54]By 8, she will be home. By 9, the seaweed will be rinsed and weighed and packed into a plastic crate. By 10 she will have started the next thing.

[00:05:16]Higher on the same coast, the cliff at Cape Manzamo is a flat shelf of limestone the color of bone.

[00:05:24]The Cape is named 10,000 seats because in 1726, King Sh stood here, looked at the limestone shelf, and said it could seat 10,000 people.

[00:05:46]The shelf has been called that ever since. The sea has been at work on the limestone for 10,000 years. The cliff face drops 50 m into the water. Below it, the morning current runs north toward Yayyama.

[00:06:12]and 410 km beyond the main island. The morning has reached Kabira Bay.

[00:06:19]Kabira is on Ishigaki in the Yayyama group almost as far south as Taiwan.

[00:06:27]The water at Kabira Bay is the color of glass that has been broken into smaller pieces of glass and then into smaller ones still.

[00:06:46]The reef begins where the white sand ends.

[00:06:50]Glass bottom boats are tied to the wooden key. The first of them will leave at 7.

[00:06:57]Black pearls have been cultivated in this bay since the 1960s.

[00:07:02]They are grown inside black lipped oysters held in cages below the surface.

[00:07:16]The cages are checked once a week. Each pearl takes around 2 years to form. The color of the water above them does not change.

[00:07:28]By the time the second wave brings the first catch into Itaman, a different building in the capital has begun to wake.

[00:07:46]The building is on a hill above Naha.

[00:07:50]It has been on this hill since the 14th century. It has burned and been rebuilt more than once.

[00:07:58]The most recent fire was on the 31st of October, 2019 at 2 in the morning.

[00:08:06]>> By dawn, the main hall was charcoal.

[00:08:18]The red roof tiles fired in the same color the Ryukuan court had used since the kingdom unified were broken on the courtyard.

[00:08:28]They have been rebuilding it ever since.

[00:08:32]Shuri Castle was the royal palace of the Ryukyu Kingdom. The kingdom was founded in 1429 by King Sho Hashi who unified three smaller principalities, Hokuzan, Chuan, and Nanzan into a single state.

[00:08:51]The Sho dynasty held the throne for 450 years.

[00:09:06]Ryuku paid tribute to Ming China and traded with Korea, Sam and Vietnam.

[00:09:14]It had a language, a court dress, and a cuisine the rest of Japan would not have recognized.

[00:09:21]Japan annexed it in 1879.

[00:09:25]The last king, Shoai, was taken to Tokyo.

[00:09:30]The kingdom was renamed Okinawa Prefecture.

[00:09:44]In the courtyard this morning, scaffolding rises along the south wall.

[00:09:50]Workers in white helmets are fitting beams to the rebuilt frame.

[00:09:55]The roof tiles made by hand at a kiln in Yumatan to the original specification are stacked under Tarpolin.

[00:10:05]The completion target is 2026.

[00:10:09]They have rebuilt this building every time it is burned.

[00:10:22]Beside the castle, the stone walls of Tamoan, built in 151, hold the kings the castle's fire could not reach. The moselum was constructed for the second Sho dynasty. King Sho Shin had it built for his father who is interred inside.

[00:10:43]The carved limestone was quarried from a cliff on the eastern coast. The grave chamber is sealed. The walls are open to the wind.

[00:11:02]The carving above the gate has not changed shape in 500 years.

[00:11:08]A few kilome south on a wooded ridge above the Pacific, the most sacred site in Ryukyu sits among limestone outcrops and centuries old broadleaf trees.

[00:11:21]Sepha Utaki is the place where the kingdom's high priestess, the Kiko A oimi, always a woman, always related to the king by blood, was invested with her office.

[00:11:35]She was the spiritual counterpart to the king.

[00:11:48]The last priestess held the title until 1879, the year the kingdom ended.

[00:11:56]The site is open to visitors now, but the inner altar is fenced off.

[00:12:02]There are no ceremonies left to interrupt.

[00:12:05]The forest holds the silence the rituals used to fill.

[00:12:18]And on the southern edge of Naha, the garden the kings used as their second house, Shiki Nayan, built in 1799, is still kept the way it was kept then.

[00:12:31]The pond is in the shape of a heart. The pavilion sits on a small island in the center of it connected to the bank by a stone bridge with a single arch.

[00:12:43]Carp move under the bridge. The path around the pond takes 20 minutes to walk.

[00:12:59]In Yumatan on the central western coast, the kils of the Yachiman district have been firing pottery the same way for 400 years.

[00:13:10]A potter at a wheel today is shaping a teacup the size of a small fist.

[00:13:17]The clay is dug from a hillside 10 km away.

[00:13:22]He centers it on the wheel with three pulls, then opens it with his thumbs, then begins to draw the wall up between the inside of one hand and the outside of two fingers.

[00:13:35]The wall climbs slowly.

[00:13:47]The cup will be glazed in ironrich white tomorrow. It will be fired the day after that. The wheel makes the only sound in the room.

[00:13:59]Across the road in the workshop of a stencil dyer working in the Ryukuan court tradition, a brush is moving across indigo.

[00:14:10]The pattern is hibiscus and waves.

[00:14:22]Down the hill, Naha, a city of 320,000, the prefectural capital, has filled with the day.

[00:14:32]Kokusai Dori is full. The Mono Rail, Okinawa's only railway, runs above the traffic. It opened in 2003, and the announcements at every station are made in Japanese first and Ucha Guuchi second.

[00:14:58]The Okinawan language classified by UNESCO as endangered.

[00:15:04]Most people under 40 cannot speak it fluently. Most people over 70 can.

[00:15:12]The conversations on the morning train are mostly in Japanese.

[00:15:17]Here and there an older voice breaks into the older language and the younger person beside them understands.

[00:15:34]>> The shops on Hiwa Dhi sell coral keychains and tropical fruit chocolates and t-shirts that say Okinawa.

[00:15:44]The shops on the back streets sell things only Okinowans buy.

[00:15:50]The capital is a city in two languages and one country.

[00:16:04]The smell coming from the distillery on the corner of Naha's central market is part of what the centinarians grew up on. Awami is the rice spirit Okinawans have been distilling for around 600 years. It is made from imported indica rice fermented with black cooji.

[00:16:30]The Okinawan native mold and aged in clay urns.

[00:16:36]The oldest urns in private collections, Okinowans like to say, are older than the building they sit in. The Zuisen Distillery in Naha was founded in 1887.

[00:16:48]Some of the urns inside it have been in use longer than that.

[00:17:01]In Makishi Market in central Naha, by half 8, the morning produce has been laid out. The vegetables on the front stalls are mostly what the people who built this market ate as children.

[00:17:14]Bitter melon, Goya, sliced or whole.

[00:17:17]Purple sweet potato boerdo.

[00:17:28]Sea grapes um budo green caviar that pops in the mouth and mo dripping fresh from the reef at B arrived this morning weighed by hand on the counter by 10.

[00:17:42]>> The vendors know which produce came from where the customers ask.

[00:17:55]In the kitchen of an ogimi house, the woman from the morning has begun to cut.

[00:18:00]The bitter melon on the wooden board is the color of new grass. She slices it lengthwise, scrapes out the seeds, then cuts it into thin half moons. She has done this 18,000 times.

[00:18:24]She is 92. The knife is 40 years old and as thin as a leaf. The dish she is making is Goya Champuru, the bitter melon stirfried with tofu and pork. And it has been Okinawan home food for as long as there has been Okinawa.

[00:18:52]By the time the pan is hot, the small radio on the dresser is playing music.

[00:18:57]In the village of 3,000 people that surrounds her, Ogimi, on the northern hills, more residents have lived past 100 than in any village of comparable size in Japan.

[00:19:18]The man who first measured this was not a foreign researcher. Dr. Makoto Suzuki, an Okinawan cardiologist, began the Okinawa centinarian study in 1975.

[00:19:30]By the early 2000s, he had documented the diet, the rest, the family structure, and a particular community arrangement called MOI.

[00:19:49]Small circles of around five lifelong friends who agree formally to take care of one another for the rest of their lives.

[00:19:58]Dan Bututner came later. The blue zone framing came later. The science was Suzuki's. The people were here all along.

[00:20:18]By midday, the soup pot has been on for an hour. The mozzuku is rinsed, dressed in vinegar and a little soy, and put into a small bowl. The bitter melon has gone into the pan. The pork is in. The tofu is in. The cooking smells the way it has always smelled.

[00:20:48]The community center down the road where the stone marker sits is where her MOAI meets on Tuesdays. There are seven of them now. There were nine, but not everyone in Okinawa 8 to 98. There is a chapter of this island's history the survey does not count.

[00:21:17]On the southernmost cliff of the main island at Mabuni Hill in Ittoman, where the battle ended in 1945, there is a wall. The wall is made of black granite slabs. The slabs are arranged in a wide arc that opens toward the Pacific. The names of 240,000 people are carved on these slabs in small Japanese characters, Okanawan civilians, Japanese soldiers, American soldiers, Korean laborers.

[00:21:59]The carving does not separate them. It does not list them by side. They are alphabetized.

[00:22:06]The memorial, the cornerstone of peace, was opened on the 23rd of June, 1995.

[00:22:23]50 years after the surrender, new names are added every year. A hand on the wall in the morning is reading a name. The fingers do not move quickly.

[00:22:42]They are not looking for a name they know. They are reading the names that come before and after it. The Battle of Okinawa lasted 82 days. It began on the 1st of April 1945 when American forces landed on the western coast.

[00:23:09]It ended on the 22nd of June when General Mitsuru Ushiima committed suicide in a cave on this hill. An estimated 150,000 Okinawan civilians died. Roughly 1 in4 of the prefecture before the battle.

[00:23:27]A few kilometers west of Mabuni, the cave at Ihara is open to visitors.

[00:23:42]It is 15 m deep at its longest point.

[00:23:45]The roof is limestone.

[00:23:48]There are wooden steps now where there used to be only stone.

[00:23:52]In 1945, in the last weeks of the battle, the cave was used as a field hospital.

[00:24:07]About 200 high school girls and their teachers, the Himmauri Student Corps, had been mobilized as nursing aids in March of that year. Most of them were 16. On the 18th of June, the Japanese army issued an order dissolving the core and telling the students to leave.

[00:24:34]The fighting outside was at its worst.

[00:24:37]Most of the deaths happened in the 4 days that followed.

[00:24:41]The museum at Ihara opened in 1989 keeps the photograph each girl took before she was sent. They are in school uniform.

[00:24:51]They are 16 or 15 or 17.

[00:25:03]In land near Udasawer, a limestone cliff rises about 50 m above the surrounding plane. The cliff is the Miada escarment.

[00:25:14]American troops in 1945 had to climb it on cargo nets thrown over the lip from the south side. A week of fighting in late April killed about 3,000 Allied and 2,000 Japanese soldiers on this single position.

[00:25:38]The escarment is now in a public park.

[00:25:41]There is a memorial plaque at the base.

[00:25:44]There is an observation platform at the top. The view from the platform is of agricultural fields and a school.

[00:26:00]60 km further north on the eastern coast of the main island. A different kind of construction is going on. Henoko is the site of a planned Marine Corps air base.

[00:26:12]The base will replace the existing one at Futenma in central Okinawa, which sits in the middle of a residential area.

[00:26:29]The planned move has been under negotiation since the 1990s.

[00:26:35]Construction began on a landfill of Ura Bay in 2014.

[00:26:40]Concrete blocks the size of small houses are being lowered into the bay. The Okinawa Prefectural Government has voted against the project three times.

[00:26:51]Construction has continued.

[00:27:02]A few hundred meters from the construction gate, a small group of Okanowens sits in tents on a public sidewalk. They have been there for as long as the construction has been happening. The tents are taken down by typhoons. They are put back up.

[00:27:27]Late afternoon at Henoko, the tents catch the south wind and from across the bay, a drum begins.

[00:27:45]At first, it is just one drum.

[00:27:49]In a community hall on the eastern edge of Naha, 20 minutes after sunset on the first Tuesday of August, a young man tightens the leather of a small hand drum until the skin makes the sound he wants.

[00:28:15]He has been adjusting the same drum for three nights. The instrument is older than he is. So is the song he is about to play.

[00:28:26]Asa is the dance Okinawan villages perform during Ouborn.

[00:28:41]the 3-day festival in mid August when the dead are believed to return to the houses where they grew up. Each village has its own version. Each version has been refined for at least 400 years.

[00:28:57]During the post-war American occupation, in some districts, ASA was banned.

[00:29:13]It came back in the 1970s. The drums it came back with were the same shape they had always been.

[00:29:20]By 8:00, 20 drummers have arrived. They line up in the courtyard. The first beat falls. The second drum joins the third.

[00:29:41]Within a minute, the courtyard is full of sound. The dance begins.

[00:29:48]The sound that carries above the drums is from a sansshin.

[00:29:53]Three lacquered strings on a slim neck.

[00:29:56]A snakeskin body. A plerum the size of a thumbnail held between the fingers.

[00:30:12]The instrument came to Ryuku from China in the 14th century. The mainland Japanese shamisen, three lacquered strings on a slim neck with a cat-skinned body, descended from it about two centuries later. The man playing it tonight is in his 60s.

[00:30:40]He learned from his grandfather. his grandfather learned in the 1930s.

[00:30:46]The notes are not loud. They do not need to be. The drums do the carrying.

[00:30:54]On the wall above the stage, two stone lions face the courtyard.

[00:31:08]One has its mouth open. The other has its mouth closed. They are called shisa.

[00:31:16]The open one keeps bad spirits from entering. The closed one keeps good spirits from leaving.

[00:31:24]Shisa descend from Chinese guardian lion symbolism brought to Ryukyu through six centuries of trade.

[00:31:42]Most are stone, some are clay. The pair above the courtyard tonight have been there since 1978.

[00:31:51]They were installed by the man whose grandfather built the hall. The mouths are weathered now. The eyes still face the road.

[00:32:11]The lanterns at the family altar in a house across town were lit at 6 this evening. The names of the dead are written on small wooden plaques inside it. The grandmother of the household has placed a small bowl of rice in front of each one.

[00:32:38]Tomorrow she will replace the rice. The day after she will replace it again. On the third night when the festival ends, she will walk to the gate with a paper lantern and burn a few sticks of incense and the names will be sent back to wherever they came from.

[00:33:08]The drums in the courtyard tonight are walking them out. The drums do not stop.

[00:33:15]The night holds them.

[00:33:27]The drumming carries across the islands.

[00:33:30]It carries over Kabira and Iramote and the southern peninsulas until the drummers run out of breath.

[00:33:38]By 2:00 in the morning, the night is quiet again. By 5, the first light reaches the eastern ridge.

[00:33:56]Outside the community center in Agimi, the same woman is walking. Her steps are slower today than yesterday's were. She walks the same 100 m she walked yesterday morning. The stone marker she passes was set down by the village in 1993.

[00:34:24]The carving has not weathered yet. She is on her way to the Moai meeting. The drums are still playing somewhere. The next country is already waking behind her. The bay is still