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When the Bones Speak

The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa

Cover of When the Bones Speak features the artwork Red Mask by Kinoshita Tomio. The piece depicts a crowd of stylized human faces in a reddish-brown hue. The faces, or masks, are characterized by intricate line art. Read the Introduction

Book

Pages: 312

Illustrations: 24 illustrations

Published: July 2025

Author: Christopher T. Nelson

Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are caught up in a web of people and practices—living and dead, visible and immaterial—that exert powerful forces often beyond their control. In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines the myriad ways contemporary Okinawans experience, remember, and contest sacrifice. He attends to the voices of those who find their vocation in service to others, from shamans, fortune tellers, laborers, and artists to dead soldiers, war survivors, antiwar activists, and Christian missionaries. Nelson shows how the memories of past sacrifices, atrocities, and exploitation as well as residual trauma shape modern life in Okinawa and the possibility and hope for creative action grounded in the everyday. Offering new understandings of colonial transformation, wartime violence, and military occupation, Nelson writes from the intersection of temporalities and possibilities, where the hard finality of the past may be broken open to reveal a “not yet” that has always remained just beyond reach.

Praise

“With luminous prose, unflinching frankness, and conceptual lucidity, Christopher T. Nelson carefully recounts tales of Okinawa that shatter our smooth platitudes about trauma and memory, about perpetrators and victims, to reveal their blind spot: the immanence of war to everyday life. As devastating in its insights as it is generous in its engagement, When the Bones Speak not only admits ghosts to walk the earth; it lets them protest: why must the living continue to haunt us?” - Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media

“With acute attention to textures of everyday life and experience, Christopher T. Nelson writes himself in and through Okinawa’s landscapes of loss, mourning, and sacrifice, activating a deep knowledge of Okinawan (and Japanese) history, anthropology, folklore studies, theater, architecture, and film. This book is a tour de force of sustained ethnographic description, ethical reflection, and theoretical verve, beautifully written.” - Marilyn Ivy, author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan

"Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." - C. Brienza, Choice

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Funding information for the OA format is found at the bottom of the page.

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information Funding Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Christopher T. Nelson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa, also published by Duke University Press.

Table Of Contents

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Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Opening a Rift in the Everyday  13
2. Iphigenia in the China Sea: Confronting the Memory of Sacrifice  53
3. Unburying the Future: Okamoto Tarō and the Dialectics of Sacrifice 102
4. From Among the Dead: The Transformation of Sacrifice  157
Conclusion  231
Notes  237
Bibliography  263
Index  281

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Related Links Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3196-3 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2872-7 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6097-0 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478060970

Funding Information

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The University Libraries and the Institute for Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill provided funds to publish this book with an open license.