The relationship between environmental sounds and civil values in Okinawa is mostly conceived of in terms of resistance, being about the capacity of communities to endure and contest the effects on health and habitus of the noise of aircraft from US military bases. The issue of noise as it is measured, mapped out and then contested in legal cases reflects a certain evaluation of Okinawan identities - in neighborhoods and between generations - and also perceptions of the environment and of the past. We wish to address the issue of environmental sound in a new and positive way by building on our prior interdisciplinary and collaborative work and our respective expertise on sound through acoustics, anthropology and landscape art. We intend to provide means for listening to sound as a natural and native historical resource that is productive of civil values in Okinawa; preserving a disappearing indigenous past and providing a collective, youthful vision of the future. We will do this through a methodology of recording and presenting sounds via three representative sites: (Ino) lagoon, (Yanbaru) forest and (hatake) field. This will result in a public resource that links generations with symbolically and ecologically important features of the environment.

This project addressed the long standing problems of social dysfunction and ill health caused by exposure to the noise pollution of US military jets on Okinawa by considering the other sounds that are heard by resident communities as part of a lived, historical relationship to their environment. The objectives of this research were to use sound recording methods and interviews with local people so as to identify and document sounds that mattered to them and which are part of their sense of a particular place over time, existing alongside and in relation to, but sometimes regardless of the presence of aircraft noise. Sounds were recorded and combined with images, through filming in the locations which local people had identified and through the use of archive film, so as to show the ways that sounds existing and heard today related to the war time events that had occurred and were remembered in these places. These sounds and images were composed together in the form of a film to show a major result of the project which is that sounds are not heard exclusively in the places where they occur but are ‘heard’ in the imagination of local people who have strong sound-memories from other places, based on their life experiences. In the film, we used the text from the interviews with local people, alongside images from the present and the historical past, displayed as subtitles, to show how sounds were tied to individual experiences of events in a particular place but which could migrate to another place. The main examples of this were the sounds of natural features of the environment, especially the forest environment of the Yanbaru in the northern part of Okinawa, but also specific features of waves and the wind rustling in sugar cane fields from various places in Okinawa, which were remembered and recalled as being significant by elderly residents of urban areas around Kadena air base, even though these sounds could not actually be heard by them in these areas today. Behind these results was an idea of listening involved making and finding images that could show how sounds were heard in places where they existed as a memory of other places and playing these back to Okinawan audiences. The success of this ‘playback’ method was evidenced in the news feature which NHK television made about our showing of this film in Okinawa in September 2017.