"FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE "
The 48th Asian American International Film Festival

Date: Thursday, August 07, 2025
Time: 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Place: the Regal Union Square
Auditorium 14, 850 Broadway, New York, NY 10003

Directed by Hiroshi Sunairi @hiroshisunairi
Interview by James Maher
Featuring the life and work of Mao Ishikawa

James: Let's start off by talking about the film. Congratulations on releasing it. Do you mind giving us an introduction about what the film is, what it's about, and who Mao is?

Hiroshi: Yes, Mao Ishikawa is a legendary Okinawan photographer. She's very, very well known in Japan. She's getting a lot of attention now, thanks to the book from Session Press, which jumped-started her international career. I had only known her latest work, and I was just blown away by the intimate distance between these Okinawan women and these African American soldiers. In Japan, this personal diary, which was sort of termed with the work of Araki—even before this term was invented—she was doing this on her own without anyone's guidance. She deals with issues of Okinawa, expanding issues of Okinawa, and the Okinawan people.

She's been doing political and social work, and very intimate, very impactful pictures. It is quite intuitive. She has had a very impressive career, all kinds of photo experimentation, sometimes staging, sometimes quite conceptual and political—an immense variety of work. Lately, as her age is advancing, the Japanese photography world, who has been trying to ignore her for a long time, finally are starting to be like, ‘Oh my God, we have to recognize this person.’

In the seventies, she worked at a bar that served African Americans. She wanted to explore Americans in her photography. This was her first photography project; she just basically jumped into this situation, started working. I found this quite incredible. And then she fell in love with them. She lived with them. Through it all, almost like a diary, she took pictures of everyday stuff, of things that are very significantly insignificant: daily affairs, people gathering, drinking, having fun. It captured the historical moment of the still segregated community.

With the exchange rate, the soldiers were kind of rich, so they had lots to give as well. So that is completely lost now. During the time of the Vietnam War, things were very exciting. And there was the mental landscape of having to go to Vietnam, coming back from Vietnam. The result is a beautiful photography book. In this film, she explores what happened by looking at her own photographs. She talks about her boyfriend. She talks about issues of women. She talks about the complex history of her work, and her current cancer, which is a big scene in this film. She becomes completely naked for the camera, to see. And she's not an exhibitionist. She did this out of giving back what she has taken as a photographer. Because she's always taken something from people, you know, by taking pictures of people. She really wanted to give back. So somehow, the documentary was right at the time when she felt, maybe she's going to die because of the cancer, which was stage four at the time. She thought, ‘Oh, I better hurry, do what I wanted to do.’ And with this, she gave this wonderful, wonderful, very important historical moment of this aging.

James: It must feel nice to help her get more known. I have two follow-up questions. Can you give us a little insight into Mao's personality? And what was it like becoming closer to her, in relation to how you work with artists and people?

Hiroshi: She is quite articulate, and she speaks really well about her work. And with her work, she's very intuitive. She says she doesn't think she just jumps in. She finds a connection by just forcing herself, her body, into the situations and the people that she surrounds herself with, and then she just starts taking pictures. Through this process, she discovers issues; she discovers what she likes out of that; she creates a trajectory in that way.

She hung out with some leftist political activists when she was a teenager. And that's how she got involved in protests, massive protests when the US base was attached. In some ways, she's very, very aware of the politics that she talks about. In this film, she talks a lot, in a way that is very accessible, very experience-based. It's not conceptual in any way, it's not abstract—it's like a very down-to-earth way of dealing with politics. It's very real in some ways.

James: You grew up in Hiroshima. I'm curious about your background, learning about the nuclear devastation as a child, then personally witnessing 9/11 and the Iraq War. Do you think you were attracted to her story because of your connection to war and the relationship between Japan and America?

Hiroshi: Yeah, in my past I've dealt with my hometown of Hiroshima, known for that atomic bombing in 1945. Then on 9/11, I was there because I had an immigration appointment at the INS. My appointment was 9:30, so as I got out of the subway, it stopped, and then it wouldn't let people go out. We had to wait for a couple of minutes. When we came out, I was on Church Street, so I saw the World Trade Center maybe like three to five blocks away. I took pictures.
The situation was quite hasty. Police were screaming, ‘Get outta here!’ People are stopping, crying, freaking out, all kinds of scenes. Then there was an African American man who came out of the World Trade Center covered in this white dust. Everyone was gathering around him, listening. We witnessed one of the towers as it crumbled. I took pictures, and everyone was in shock. The smoke started coming towards us, so everyone started running. And maybe a week later, I went to the bookstore and I found myself in a picture by the journalist photographer Susan Meiselas.

I started teaching at the time at NYU and I used to question students, ‘The war's gonna happen, what do you think?’ So I decided to teach about Hiroshima and atomic bombing as a possible consequence of the war that was about to happen at that time. I curated an exhibition of the student work at some gallery in New York, then presented it to the City Museum of Hiroshima, where I made an artwork based on the anniversary of the atomic bombing by creating elephants in the shape of a cage, stuffed with the trees that survived the atomic bombing. I befriended a tree doctor who's been taking care of the trees that survived, and since then, I've been working on that project. In my past, I have dealt with the issues of Hiroshima, living as a person in New York, knowing what the Americans think about the atomic bombing and how the representation of the atomic bombing may be different in Hiroshima. I'm very aware of that perspective, this international perspective, something that's both local and global.

In that mindset, when I saw Mao's work—and I mean, I find her pictures incredibly beautiful, so personal, steamy, raw, you can smell the air. The way she talked about her work was so universal and so powerful that I wanted to combine her words and her pictures in my film. Her words can withstand on their own, amuse and convince people on their own, but if you combine them with her photographs, it becomes even more powerful. Students, they have a forced conviction that art has to be like this, it has to be like that. But she's so free, so beyond anything. The movie is a history of Okinawa and a history of colonization, the military bases with entertainment districts. I really wanted to share this, not just with the Japanese, but also the people of the United States.

The other thing that struck me was the way she talked about African Americans, in such a fresh way. In the midst of Black Lives Matter, and our whole society was kind of frozen. For instance, when you speak about Black Lives Matter or the racism against African Americans, you get canceled. Or if you use some words that upset people. But here comes this local Okinawan woman talking about African Americans. And sometimes with stereotypes that nowadays Americans are forbidden to use. But then she comes to a conclusion where she starts falling in love, going through relationships. She had three relationships with African Americans and learning them as people. Instead of African Americans, instead of soldiers, instead of Americans, she learned them as a person. She has a very down-to-earth humanitarian way of talking about this. This impressed me so much. There were all these power relationships that were so complex. She was also working at a bar that served African Americans and American soldiers. It was still in the seventies. Civil rights had come to Okinawa, but hadn't yet permeated amongst the regular citizens. So her context of stereotypes were okay, in some ways. And then she saw African Americans as humans, a person, a guy. This was so powerful to me. And because Americans cannot talk like this, I think Americans would appreciate it. So, I mean, this really was the point. I decided to make a film about her.

James: What is the status of the film? How can we watch it? What's happening with it?

Hiroshi: On August 7th, it's going to screen at the 48th Asian American International Film Festival. I’m working on finding a good distribution for online release. We just had a LA screening as well. I'm looking for more film festivals within the United States as well as maybe starting to do academia, screenings with universities. And then Aperture just published a book on a history of Japanese photography by women. They're going to have an exhibition and screening event next year, so my film is invited to that. If you'd like to follow up, you can find me on Facebook and Instagram, and there I'm always posting news about this film.

James: I'm curious about you. You've worked in many different mediums, and I'm curious about how you grew up as an artist.

Hiroshi: My parents owned a sign company, and the factory was very close to my life. I used to often paint for them, paint signs and things like that, and facilitated putting them up. So making things was a big part of my life. However, I was only in Japan until high school, and then I immediately came to the United States. Hiroshima, it's quite a bit conservative, more conservative than Tokyo. When you say you are an artist, people are like, ‘What? How do you make money?’ You know, this kind of thing; that’s kind of the mood in the local city.

In college, I started to explore performance, even though my major was in painting. I love painting, the colors and oils. I was so puzzled, because this was in the nineties, and identity politics and postmodernism were so prevalent in the university and art world education. Matthew Barney had this piece called March of the Anal Sadistic Warrior. He was naked and rock climbing in a gallery. I was like, ‘Wow!’ This was happening in the center of the art world, and I'm still doing paintings. I was so troubled by what I was doing, even though I loved painting.

But I decided one day that I was going to force myself to come out of this comfortable circle, and I started doing performance.

Often performance deals with your own image, your body. Representation of the Asian man became a core issue for me. Rather than deciding, okay, this is the medium that I want to do—it was more like my issues guided me. And so I began as a performance artist in New York. I used to do gallery performances at openings, and slowly I started to do photography work, where I continued my self, my image, exploration. I was doing sort of like a seventies soft-core pornography of myself, sort of like infantilizing my image. This was the time of Calvin Klein, with Steven Meisel taking pictures for CK One. This kind of seventies pornography was really exciting for me, because of the essence in its representation of a variety of people, variety of hair, variety of races, the kinds of issues that I was very attracted to in the seventies, like freedom and free love. I started to make photography work, and I would splice it up by making it into collages. Since I was also an abstract painter, I'm quite aware of forms and shapes and lines, and how you create space with those. So I interjected all those. I would make quite complex collages, that are pictorial but at the same time, kind of abstract.

Then I couldn't stay satisfied by the flat work, because collage is always flat. I wanted to make work that was physically three-dimensional. I started incorporating thicker mounts. Or sometimes I mounted pictures on wood and cut the wood and puzzled them together. It started to expand, to get bigger and bigger. I fell in love with making big work, because with large work you can spend six months, like one month in planning, two months in cutting, and then sanding, putting it together, coloring, all kinds of things. It was very physical; I would sweat. Instead of doing something with your hand, you use your whole body. When I really fell in love, the turning point was when I made the elephant work for the Hiroshima Museum. I traveled to India to see elephants. When I made the elephant piece and the exhibition, you couldn't see all the traces of my research journey in India. That’s why I moved onto filmmaking, documentary form.

James: Can you tell us about the city in the ‘90s? I feel like the art scene of the time had almost a cultural ADHD, where so many artists and creative people worked in a variety of mediums. The message was what was most precious. It’s interesting to see how that resonated with you and your background.

Hiroshi: I think so. In some ways, my performance time in the nineties was filled with all kinds of collaboration. I used to hang out with the fashion crowds, the music scenes, and we used to just collide all the time. I think the last very creative, interesting scene in New York was in the 90s. Since 2000, it's completely changed because it got expensive, and then the market of the art world has become really strong. In some ways, things became so corporate, and the nineties wasn't like that. In the East Village, if you lived on Avenue C your rent could be like $300 still, and you could eat cheaply. When you have a bunch of people who have a lot of time without a lot of money, they get creative, and it was really exciting. Things are in the air, not perfect, not concrete, but like things are kind of rough and raw. That was the scene in the nineties. It was a beautiful time.

James: Have you always been interested in people? With your interviews and your film and documentary work, that's a tangent from the art you were doing. Can you tell us about that?

Hiroshi: What happened was, because in my early career I focused on myself, basically, when I used to do performance. Every single piece was original, self, autobiography. In some ways, I explored everything about myself and I felt like there was no more stuff to show. Then, when I started focusing on Hiroshima, it became about expanding my narcissism or narcissistic analysis of myself into the world. But when you are representing others, there are ethics that I have to think about, worrying about representing people in a way that is taking away from them or representing something that they don't want. That became my preoccupation, thinking about what it means to represent someone in a tougher situation. I would think about what needs to be represented.

When I interview people, they can say all kinds of things, but there is a voice of self- representation somewhere. Here and there, in between cracks of words, there's a need for self- representation. That's the cue I find, in talking to people, listening to people, and then watching their footage over-and-over again until I start to connect things. In some ways, my film is really about people, but it's also about words. It’s about the philosophy of everyday people, because you don't have to use difficult language, but you can be quite articulate in your own way, you know? So that's what I find interesting. That's what I look for in my work.

James: I'm curious. The amount of time you must put into your work and this movie seems immense. Do you work on one project and forget about everything else? Or do you kind of hop back and forth? And is there anything you're working on right now that you want to talk about?

Hiroshi: Yeah, From Okinawa with Love is the second part of the Okinawa trilogy. Okinawa three is called Okinawa Philadelphia, in which Mao goes to Philadelphia to see her friend, an African American soldier. She took pictures in Philadelphia called Life in Philly. I interviewed his son because he passed away from disease. By interviewing these people, I saw there was a trauma that the soldier went through, by falling in love with an Okinawan woman and failing at that marriage. There was this torment and suffering that I discovered through the interview and connecting with Mao, who's actually kind of funny on this. Of course, she's very concerned with the way he was hurt by this Okinawan woman, but he also was kind of in love with Mao as well. So there was this kind of funny, revealing moment. And I'm still making Okinawa 1 (temporary title), more of a historical Okinawa, and the current political situation, this big context that's very important for From Okinawa with Love, with the American military presence. And also the sexual crimes that happened from 1945 to 1971, which really made Mao want to deal with Americans. In the beginning, she came out of anger. And then, through it all, she saw something else; she saw people. This context I think is very important. I also want to bring the son of the soldier to Okinawa for him to see Mao before she gets too old.
And then, I met the tree doctor in Hiroshima in 2004 and started doing this thing called Tree Project. Hibaku is an atomic surviving tree, and I sent a bunch of seeds to people around the world, and some were able to grow them into trees. I've been documenting many interviews with the tree doctor, whose life is very interesting. His devotion to nature is quite amazing, and also quite radical. I've also interviewed the survivors of Hiroshima. And I'm making a series called Hiroshima Notes, focusing on a person in each film, but in a series of all kinds of different people. And I’m also working on an experimental documentary on the recitation of the poems by this Bengali poet named Jibanananda Das. Alan Ginsburg called him the first modern poet of India. This guy was quite interesting, living during the time of the partition. His poems are loved. Even now, people can recite them from their heart. I started to document all these people's poetry reading, in all kinds of locations in Bangladesh. The people who are in it keep asking me, 'When is it going to come out?' So, I owe them. I need to work on that. So I'm always working on a bunch of things, all at the same time.