2025 Volume 114 Pages 119-137
This study examines the “Cornerstone of Peace” located on Okinawa’s Mabuni Hill, which is inscribed with the names of those who perished in the Battle of Okinawa and is a central motif in Katsuya Okuma’s 2024 film Close to the Bone. The paper explores the film’s final long shot and its meaning compared to existing discourse on the Cornerstone, the memory transmission of the Battle of Okinawa, and Okuma’s earlier works. Okuma’s project follows Takamatsu Gushiken, who collects remains, and the director’s search for his grandmother’s sister Masako, who died during the war. The film, a private documentary, depicts Okuma’s attempt to relearn the battle while grappling with the (im)possibility of representing war experiences. This study uses footage from Clinton’s 2000 Cornerstone speech and 1995 photo documentary. Cornerstone imposes ethical demands on filmmakers, addressing the ethical challenge of representing the names engraved and the war dead, introducing Okuma’s bodily presence through “tremors”——shared across his past and current long shots. Through these approaches, Okuma captures vocal tonalities portraying intercorporeal collaboration between the living——who address the Cornerstone——and the dead. The study concludes that this approach effectively inherits and transmits experiences that resist representation.
