F-100D fighter jet that had taken off from Kadena Airbase crashed into Miyamori Elementary School in then-Ishikawa City, Okinawa, killing eleven students and teachers and injuring nearly two hundred others.Okinawa was under the U.S. Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) occupation at the time.The pilot survived without serious injuries after the plane became uncontrollable and exploded; however, the unpiloted aircraft continued over Ishikawa High School, destroying residential areas and killing six additional people along its path before reaching Miyamori Elementary. 1 Upon reaching the school, the jet struck the buildings sequentially̶first the second-grade classrooms, then the fourth and sixth grades̶and also hit children playing nearby on the playground.The accident occurred around 10:40 a.m., coinciding with the U.S. militaryʼs milk ration break at public schools, a break eagerly anticipated by children in the context of postwar scarcity.As the plane struck, it destroyed the fukugi (Common Garcinia) trees, known as happiness trees, that had long shielded the school and surrounding homes from typhoons and served as a natural form of protection against disasters. 2The sight of the treesʼ white sap mingling with spilled milk created a haunting tableau of rupture and loss, further intensified by the cries and grief of those present. 3Nearly fifty years later, in October 2008, Eiko Ginoza, a retired high school English teacher, visited the site of a U.S. militaryʼs Cessna crash in Nago with 1 Miyamori 630 Association Exhibit, June 30, 2025; 「宮森小校にジェット機墜落」 『琉球新報』 1959 年 6 月 30 日 ; 「惨 !宮森校に Z 機墜落」 『沖縄タイムス』1959 年 6 月 30 日. 2 Ibid. 3 宜野座映子「宮森『630 館』設置資金造成公演『フクギの雫』ごあいさつ」2009 年.2 同志社アメリカ研究 第62号her former students, an encounter that reopened memories of the earlier Miyamori tragedy. 4 Even after the official end of the USCAR occupation, over 70% of the US military bases Japan agreed to host under the Status of Forces Agreement remain entrenched in the postcolonial landscape.One student remarked that the following year would mark half a century since the Miyamori incident, yet similar accidents still occurred, insisting that "we have to do something" to keep the memory alive.From this conversation emerged Half Century Miyamori (hafu senturi Miyamori)̶a community collective formed not by direct survivors or bereaved families, but by locally rooted residents who embrace the accident as part of their shared responsibility to actively remember and transmit its significance. 5Drawing on their background in high school theater, peace education, and international performance, they envisioned a play that could materialize this commitment.The result was .Fukugi no Shizuku, "droplets of fukugi trees" (my translation), represent the juxtaposed image of the sap dripping from the scorched fukugi trees and the rationed milk spilled that day, folding ecological injury into human grief.The subtitle distills the ambivalence of memory in militarized Okinawa, juxtaposing the tension between the desire to move forward and the ethical imperative to sustain collective remembrance, thereby framing the playʼs central concern with active, relational, transgenerational memory work.Produced in collaboration with the Miyamori Elementary School community, the performance emerges as a public, participatory act of memory and care.In this paper, drawing on published and unpublished archives generated by and about Half Century Miyamori, scholarly articles, oral histories, and interviews, I analyze through the lens of Indigenous feminisms, examining how womenʼs testimonies, childrenʼs voices, and the more-than-human presence of fukugi trees coalesce into a relational archive of transgenerational memory and witnessing.Rather than treating the Miyamori tragedy as solely a national or militarized event, I situate it within place-based, gendered, and ecological practices of memory and care, drawing on both media 4 Eiko Ginoza, interview by the author, February 28, 2025.
Ayano Ginoza (Fri,) studied this question.