OkinawaMuseumsItoman
Himeyuri Peace Museum
Founded by the surviving students themselves, who gathered the testimony and wrote the wall texts in their own words.
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OkinawaMuseums
OkinawaArt & CraftsItoman
Cornerstone of Peace
Over 240,000 names cut into folding stone walls - carved without dividing by nationality, uniform, or side.
OkinawaArchitectureNago
Nago City Hall
Built to work by wind rather than air-conditioning, with 56 shisa on its walls - each named by a citizen.
OkinawaArchitectureTonaki
Tonaki Island Village
House plots are dug a metre below the lane to duck the typhoons - the whole village sunk into the ground.
Miyakojima
Miyako Jofu Ramie Cloth
Ramie split by fingernail into thread finer than hair, woven and then beaten with mallets to a sheen; over a year for one bolt.
Kumejima
Kumejima Tsumugi
One person carries the whole process from silkworm to finished cloth, dyeing with island plants and fixing in mud.
OkinawaArt & CraftsIshigaki
Yaeyama Minsa
Five dots and four, read as a pun meaning 'for ever and ever' - the pattern a woman wove into a sash for the man she chose.
OkinawaMuseumsIshigaki
Yaeyama Museum
Yaeyama's everyday objects, including a sabani boat - built not with nails but sewn together.
OkinawaArt & Crafts
OkinawaArchitectureNaha
Turtleback Tombs
Said to be shaped as a womb - the idea of returning to where one came from, built directly as architecture.
Naha
Red Tile Roofs
Plaster packed between the tiles to stop the typhoons lifting them - and that necessity produced the island's red-and-white roofs.
OkinawaArchitectureNaha
Markets of Naha
Markets and alleys descended from the postwar black market - unplanned, endlessly extended, and still trading.
OkinawaArchitectureNanjo
Utaki Sacred Groves
No buildings: a grove or a rock is the sacred place, marked by nothing but a stone incense holder - hundreds of them across the islands.
OkinawaArt & CraftsNaha
Arayachi and Jouyachi
Storage jars are left unglazed and tableware glazed - the use deciding the firing, with nothing in between.
OkinawaArt & CraftsNaha
Ryukyu Dance Costume
Dance the court developed to entertain Chinese envoys; its bingata costumes are coloured to carry from a stage.
OkinawaArt & CraftsOkinawa
Koza and the American Era
A shopping district built under US administration; its English signage and American forms remain as a visible layer.
OkinawaArt & CraftsItoman
Sabani Boats
Planks sewn together with cord and bamboo pegs; because it can be re-sewn when it splits, it went far out to sea.
Nakijin
Villages of Nakijin
A screen wall stands just inside each gate to block sight and wind - a Chinese device that took its own form here.
OkinawaContemporary ArtMiyakojima
Farmland of Miyakojima
With no rivers, the island built walls underground to hold water - invisible engineering that made its farming possible.
OkinawaContemporary ArtTaketomi
Iriomote Island
Nine-tenths forest, its rivers lined with mangrove, and people confined to a thin strip along the shore.
OkinawaContemporary ArtYonaguni
Yonaguni Island
Stepped rock formations underwater whose artificial or natural origin is still argued - and the argument has become their character.
OkinawaMuseumsNaha
Trade and Craft of the Ryukyu Kingdom
A palace bell declares the kingdom a bridge between all nations by ship - and its crafts arrived along those same routes.
Naha
Postwar Art of Okinawa
Under occupation, painters formed their own village, living by selling pictures to American servicemen while making their own work.