Introduction
From June 7th to 9th 2024, the Docu Athan team of Kubota Tо̄ru, Kitazumi Yūki, and Iharada Haruka organized three film screening workshops in Itoman and Naha, facilitating connections between residents who have been working towards democracy, peace, and justice in various forms. From my participating observation, I found this event series to be a particularly meaningful component of overlapping advocacy/protest movements, as evidenced by the Docu Athan methods and engagement by participants. Interactivity and grassroots elements of the spaces facilitates deeper engagement, and the curated video selection and framing centered creators’ voices from Burma/Myanmar, positioning the Docu Athan platform as an intermediary node in a solidarity network. The events marked the further possibilities to communicate transnationally in ways that resonate with locally relevant issues—like anti-militarisms or civil disobedience or decolonization—or amplify salient frames about desires to survive the intensifying junta-orchestrated violence since the 2021 coup.
One of my main considerations is that of self-representation and self-determination, particularly for people being dehumanized to a high degree as they labor to disempower regimes in order to empower precarious communities’ future wellbeing. My writing’s perspective is a work in progress, as I learn and unlearn about problems and responsibilities as an academic activist. When I entered Naha through the airport for the first time in June, I wondered how hosting film screenings about injustice in Burma/Myanmar in this space might highlight social and political relationships to the injustice escalating in Ryūkyū/Okinawa as well (largely driven by the USA, in which I am implicated by holding citizenship). I recognize here the politics of representing power in naming countries, and the contention by residents against the governance regimes supposed to represent them. In this article I refer to Burma/Myanmar to mediate limitations of translation into English and Japanese for international awareness, colonial and ethnonationalist signifiers of Bamar authority, and potential reclaiming of names by current generations to redefine the names alongside federalist democracy aspirations. There is similarity with choosing to refer to Ryūkyū/Okinawa in legitimizing or refusing Japanese and USA naming policies that have attempted to overwrite precolonial self-representations and standardize the island chain’s homogeneity. As Fukuchi Riko notes in a prior DA Note, the means for Ryūkyū/Okinawa residents to produce documentary evidence of invasion and occupation were severely constricted by impoverishment and displacement (Fukuchi 2024). Over the three days of Docu Athan Theater Okinawa, around 70 people—in addition to reporters for Okinawa Taimusu and Ryūkyū Shinpо̄ newspapers—participated in viewing and discussing what documentary journalists have risked greatly to share. This engagement is a positive indication for transnational relationships, which seem to have been greatly facilitated at the local level by the Okinawa Myanmar Association.
The Okinawa Myanmar Association (在沖ミャンマー人会, OMA) has been led by Kyawt Kyawt Khine and Thu Ya Soe, recognized in Japan for their work building education and nutrition programs since 2013 by the Social Contributor Award in 2018 and 2019 respectively (Foundation for Social Contribution 2018, 2019). Following protests in the first weeks of the 2021 coup across multiple cities inside Japan’s state borders including Naha, diasporic residents from Burma/Myanmar formed the OMA officially on 2021.05.16. This coincided with a photo exhibit in Asato which received around 300 visitors (Ryūkyū Shinpо̄ 2021). Reviewing the organization’s public announcements and news coverage, I learned that OMA has engaged across multiple issues of advocacy or activism that substantially involve imagery and symbols to form cross-community connections. Inside Okinawa Prefecture, there is a relatively small diasporic size of hundreds within the population of over 86,000 residents across Japan (according to the Ministry of Justice data that rigidly sorts residents by citizenship). However, OMA has been actively building from social foundations laid before the coup, including international students, technical intern visa residents, and the Royal Myanmar restaurant space in Naha’s Sakaemachi. Several different Okinawa Taimusu and Ryūkyū Shinpо̄ newspaper journalists have reported on actions since 2021, notably sign-holding, petitions to municipal representatives, and fundraising calls in city plazas. In addition, OMA has held photo exhibits with a song composition by Kawaguchi Mayumi (崎山正美 2021), a vigil for executed prisoners and calling for the release of Kubota during his imprisonment (稲福政俊 2022), a Thadingyut festival at Naha Asato Saion Square calling for freedom, equality, and fellowship (Shimabukuro Shinsaku 2022), and the spring water festival Dajan, selling food to fundraise and singing with lyrics in a mix of Burmese and Shimakutouba vernacular languages of the island chain (矢野悠希 2023). Along with these events to welcome new interest, demands raised in Naha plazas coordinate with global calls confronting unjust power. As heard at protests in Tokyo almost every month outside the Prime Minister’s residence, this mainly calls for a stop to the Ministry of Foreign Affair’s ongoing funding of Official Development Assistance projects, which the junta uses to fund its arsenal and legitimacy.
Further, OMA’s engagement with grassroots peace and human rights work seems to help draw together issues across geographies while calling for assistance to the diaspora’s priorities. On 2023.06.23, OMA co-sponsored the 40th annual International Anti-War Okinawa Meeting in Itoman at Konpaku Memorial Tower, speaking after a vigil and music with an audience of many peace organizations to link the suffering in Burma/Myanmar with existence under military rule and Ukraine-centric geopolitics (unai 2023). Thu Ya Soe has ntoed the difference in public perception inside Japan over atrocities, where major repression inside a state's borders is seen as less worth confronting than an invasion or occupation across state borders (Nagahama 2022.04.01). Other event speakers included representatives of Gamafuya, We Don’t Need Takae Helipad Resident Organization (高江・ヘリパッドいらない住民の会), Henoko Blue Canoe Comrades, Futenma Base Gate Gospel Singers Organization (普天間基地ゲート前でゴスペルを歌う会), and activists from Korea, all fighting USA bases (unai 2023). OMA has posted in their office a donated placard of “Nuchi Do Takara” 『命どぅ宝』appreciating the treasure of life, which Thu Ya Soe explains "It's the same as in Myanmar" (Nagahama 2022). More recently, OMA joined other organizations and local spokespeople in Urasoe on 2024.05.03 for the 2024 Constitution Lecture Meeting organized by Okinawa Prefecture Constitution Popularization Council (沖縄県憲法普及協議会), Okinawa Human Rights Organization (沖縄人権協会), and Japan Scientists’ Association Okinawa Branch. As part of the program opposing new military base construction and promoting protection of Japan’s anti-militarization Article 9, OMA representatives spoke on the situation inside Burma/Myanmar since the coup, and collected funds to send to Hsa Mu Htaw Learning Centre in Thailand and Myittar Yeik Myeme elementary school (愛の家小学校) in northern Yangon (Okinawa Myanmar Association 2024). As an explanation of how the junta’s military governance has been destroying life in contradiction to values of ideal civil governance, this presentation likely resonated with communities’ traumatic historical memory of military occupation, as well as the sense of danger around the USA-Japan-China base buildups that is being escalated to the same or greater scale of state-led violence (Ogawa Masahiro 2024).
Representational narratives through the screenings and discussions
Thinking about the local social landscape in this way, I have summarized reflections on the Docu Athan workshop as something seeming well-suited to synergize with the space. On each of the workshop’s three days in public spaces, the film screening set opened with the Docu Athan trailer, which states the importance of the platform and a montage of personal statements on journalism by its contributing creators. With the textual phrases "Journalism / Filming / Poetry / Drawing / Singing / Rapping / Telling the truth is not a crime," the platform framing both rejects the criminalization of communication and affirms the continuation of the creative process (Docu Athan 2023). With increasing digital repression from Southeast Asian governments, Manushya Foundation launched its #StopDigitalDictatorship coalition campaign in 2020 to resist "threat & intimidation," "arbitrary arrests," and "prosecution and punishment" that are increasingly "creating an environment of fear and self-censorship"(Manushya Foundation 2024). Inside Burma/Myanmar, junta authorities have consistently tried to expand surveillance over communication hardware, while targeting social media accounts and spreading regime-promoting hate speech to dehumanize specific ethnic communities. For the hundreds of thousands of displaced families, there are challenges to forming and maintaining robust systems to collect and share information about physical dangers and political policies. In refugee camps like those along the Thailand-Burma/Myanmar border, researchers have urged for new "models of community media that might effectively be deployed in a camp environment in order to resolve the unmet need for information" to survive beyond the day-to-day and inform outside policymakers to contribute aid effectively (Jack 2017:140).
Within the broad message framing that legitimizes the agency of press reporters and their media representation, several thematic narratives arise through the curated arrangement of films, which was somewhat different for each day. Broadly grouped, narrative themes include 1) one of loss, escape from the junta’s sphere of influence, and living precariously in Thailand, 2) one of parenthood and child-raising while witnessing and covering distressing experiences, 3) one of searching for paths through political and material constraints to develop generative processes as journalists, and 4) one of violence disrupting daily life and expectations of ‘normal’ behavior (particularly in the second day’s performance art pieces). Some of the event participants’ responses indicated their difficulty before viewing the videos in understanding the overall coup/resistance/survival conditions, and feeling limited in their capabilities to advocate in a way that visualizes the experiences for themselves and their own community audiences. Across these videos, there was a close alignment between the cameras’ medium-scale frames without much wide-panning shots, and the in-person participants’ proximity to each other when watching the films and conversing. Generally, considering how "when a close-up shot signifies intimacy, a medium shot signifies personal relationship, a full shot signifies social relationship and a long shot signifies context, scope and public distance," the filmmakers’ camera viewpoints seem to have contributed to empathetic understanding (Rodriguez and Dimitrova 2011:55).
The first day's Itoman film cluster showed a range of experiences in documenting responses to the junta's violence, producing visual art and music videos, and caring for family members. Particularly emblematic of the difficulty of the work, multiple narrators express their need to convey accurate information about the coup within Burma/Myanmar and globally in digital form, but encounter tension between this necessity and the traumatized depression that this work fosters. Many of the videos were presented in a set, where one filmed by Kubota focuses on a director's life with their narrative explanation, and the subsequent one by the director features their chosen subject. This multiplicity of viewpoints reveals multiple layers of representation to the audience and gives insight to the creative process by contextualizing the directors' positions. In some videos, like the pair about/by Director H, the director's life experience seems to shape their creative direction; Kubota's film of Director H shows her life protecting her children with dedication to LGBTQ+ wellbeing, and Director H's video focuses on another journalist mother's commitment to take on risks while stateless to fight for regime change, as the only perceived path to her family's future (Director H 2024) .
The second day's film cluster focused more on Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) stances, synergizing with Dr. Nang Mya Kay Khaing's presentation. One shared message in these films is the strong will and struggles of parents caring for their children. There is a comparative frame that contrasts the ease of covering living expenses under Aung San Suu Kyi’s governance after 2016, to the impoverishment of hiding from both the junta and Thailand's harsh deportation policies. This sense of comparison drives complementary emotions of hate towards conditions of authoritarian rule, and of motivated intent to challenge it through CDM, military resistance, and shared survival. For me, the most visceral representation of physically violent repression came in the video "The School Between Battles," discussing the fears of airstrikes from the perspectives of teachers and children in a Black Panther PDF Karen village (Han Htoo Zyaw 2023). After the films, Iharada presented videorecorded performance art by 3AM and Sai x x x x, which cannot be performed openly in-person as conventional. Thinking through the frame of the workshop's title of "Seeing" Voices, the performance art pieces have no spoken voice and rely on visual symbolism (and a written artist statement for Sai x x x x's "Absence/Presence"). Other than the anti-fascist music video “Fascist Election” screened on the first and third days that clearly expresses anger at the junta institutions’ propaganda systems, 3AM's "Civil War" video made me feel immersed in the most joltingly disruptive experience of the event series (Novem Htoo and Phyoe Dhana 2023). The 3AM trio disrupts their shared meal with audio klaxon sirens and physical assaults, repeatedly shifting the tone between discord and harmony before resolving into three types of resistance acts, distributed to each's performer’s specialization. "Absence/Presence" portrays more of an internal-facing turmoil and distress, disrupting quotidian household scenes and evoking repression of political party expression. The second day’s presentations closed with Dr. Khaing's presentation on CDM, politically contextualizing the chronology of junta violence across decades of multiple coups and the forms of dissent that share values with those voiced in the videos.
Dr. Khaing expanded on her presentation at the start of the third day’s event in Sakaemachi, elaborating on the principles of CDM, its nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and the WART artistic project. Her timeline emphasizes some photographers’ view of recursion when framing street protests to the 1988 and 2021 coups, and the flow of mass mobilization on the streets led by medical workers and teachers before violent repression escalated and tactics shifted into general strikes. The CDM acts she showcases, including nonattendance for school, not paying utilities, and boycotting goods, are more clandestine than a visual spectacle of a march or guerilla battle, yet this does not mean they are worth less. These are strategic, within many people's willingness for risk, and deeply linked with private lifestyles. Many of the screened Docu Athan videos include footage of directors and their subjects doing such acts under narrative overlays amidst close-up shots speaking to the director's lens. The Nobel nomination of CDM by six Oslo University professors was not awarded, but the nomination recognizes the potency of meaning, as Kristian Stokke frames, in how the "power imbalance between the teenager from Generation Z who demonstrates by peaceful means and the soldier who shoots her is brutal, but shows the whole world who is right and who is committing an injustice," while acknowledging the differentials of position where "It’s not up to me or other academics to tell the Burmese people what to do" (Røst 2021). With the WART platform, which Dr. Khaing previously presented in Itoman with OMA in 2023.08, visual drawings do not just represent the self but also represent artists' viewpoints and political commentary (Abe Takashi 2023; 岩切美穂 2023). This curation platform soliciting visual submissions aims for "socially engaged art" guided by the themes of {Wa (meaning round in Burmese or peace in Japanese), Art, Revolution, Trance}, and expresses principles against war, invasion, and ethnic domination, and stands for freely expressible lives full of physical, mental, social, and economic wellbeing (WART 2021).
Following the presentation, the screening cluster switched out a few of the prior day’s films to focus more on local CDM acts, such as "Women of the Revolution" that shows the process of women making nutritional food together and sharing social strategies to repression as a collective (Nwayoo Nyein 2024). This synergizes with a following video about a displaced community from Chin state watching the intricate work by many hands to maintain fishing nets, while a parent expresses that strategies of fear are being used to harm people and the environment and displace the concept of their home village in their hearts (Aung Nay Myo 2023). Some of the social interaction in the Naha and Itoman event spaces felt like it mirrored, translated, or drew inspiration from the on-screen care practices, like making and sharing food, arranging the chairs and projectors with caption visibility and accessibility in mind, minding the needs of children passing in and out of the space, and moderating with grace for distress that the videos evoked. These could be described as mutual aid practices that synergize with local-centered reporting.
As the DA team screened the videos from the digital realm onto a projector screen, I felt a distinct atmosphere in each of the venues. The multipurpose space Ein (home in Burmese) felt comfortable and fitting its purpose as a support space with the Okinawa Peace-making Network Home (沖縄平和創造ネットワークエイン), and the event advertisement labelled it “Yuntaku” representing the Japanese-Okinawan term for casual conversation vibes. The second venue at Okinawa University was a traditional theater space of rowed seats in a concrete building and aligned with the more academic presentations and panel format, and emotions did not seem to surface to discussion as easily. The third screening moved into a municipal-type neighborhood space with the nightlife dynamics of Sakaemachi and ease of dropping in to watch in shelter from the rain. As I watched outside this venue’s open doors, I was able to explain the event’s meaning to a few people passing by who were curious about the gathering and received the informational flyer before continuing. By presenting at varying venues, the events as a set likely broadened the range of people who felt like attending, and how they felt comfortable in engaging during and after, and ground the videos in their own neighborhood contexts. Dr. Khaing’s presence was crucial for presenting information and bridging/interpreting through Burmese and Japanese, while Dr. Wakabayashi Chiyo provided the university space, and Fukuhara Asahi through Sakaemachi has incorporated anti-coup demands into the election and local council resolutions in Naha, along with Urasaki Akatsuki on the Itoman governance side. These screening formats can be contrasted with what I observed a few months prior, where a Docu Athan screening set up in the underground plaza of Shinjuku Station in Tokyo felt like less of a discussion-feasible venue. With the projector screen set up next to evening commute paths and volunteers handing out flyers and collecting funds in donation boxes, this event had more of an effect of raising awareness about the platform and its messages to people who might not readily join a longer film screening panel event.
Docu Athan representation of struggle in relation to mainstream framings
To appreciate the approach of the Docu Athan team network and platform, it helps to consider some of the problems in effectiveness within popular image representation of atrocities and aid-recruiting strategies. In the genre of human rights advocacy reports, the volume of testimony collected from survivors of violence has often been emphasized at the expense of contextual depth and personalization. In strategic appeals to Global North government authorities, many organizations since the 1980s have pursued quantitative representation of large-scale violence, where "the exercise in statistical stockpiling is a characteristic and persuasive technique” (Moon 2012:881). This stance of showing objective truth as investigators and spokespeople can push forward legal action and deflect perpetrators' denials, but also “frequently obscures the ‘knowing’ of the geographic scope, historical depth, and intersectional nature of the structural forms of inequality and injustice that perpetuate violations at different scales and degrees of severity" (MacLean 2022:186). A narrow framing of injustice through rising numbers of martyrs, extrajudicial imprisonment, and other types of atrocities can thus prompt a backlash from represented groups arguing they are not simply numbers, and requesting to humanize their lives in coverage and quote the fullness of their lives outside of testimonies.
This abstracted population-level format exists alongside an intensely qualitative framing of individuals or communities in media, often asking for humanitarian aid donations from general audiences, that can be sensational, graphically shocking, or center physical marks of pain and distress. Mainly addressing when the media creators stand outside of the affected communities, there is a robust conversation about the exploitative aspects to photojournalism and documentaries in a lineage of colonial anthropologist and religious missions, war correspondence, and refugee camp scenes that reinforce patriarchal power relations. For example, as Toomey writes from experiences at the Thailand-Burma/Myanmar border, "humanitarian groups… have nurtured a culture in which people feel both a voyeuristic titillation masking as closeness to the other’s body, along with a form of distance that protects them from actual pain. Campaigns promising that publics can help makes them into potential alleviators of pain–superior to and distinct from the other. Enraptured by images of the body of the other and their own affective reaction, the consumer of pain stories and depictions do not hear what those others actually have to say. Distracted by the immediate needs of relieving pain, audiences avoid deeper analysis into structural causes of the suffering" (Toomey 2023:113–14). Olesen in 2018 argues that photographs (and by extension video) of injustices shown to publics do not have a guaranteed effect of mobilizing people for activist calls to action, and less likely to “when citizens have crystallised opinions” or strong sympathy/antipathy to the pictured people (Olesen 2018:42). This cautions against the assumed "knowing-acting nexus" concept in advocacy, as Moon claims "that the frequent absence of context in these forms of representation has important consequences for the ways in which human rights violations are perceived, amongst which are unpredictable and contradictory effects on the consumers of humanitarian communication (who are potential actors in the field of human rights), at once galvanizing and inhibiting action" if people feel guilt-tripped (Moon 2012:878). Even while choosing how to share the truth of the violence, experiences of pain, and desires for change are the rights of each individual in their specific position, there are massive power dynamics in media and education institutions that deflect well-intentioned approaches from revealing root causes. For audiences that are desensitized or do not understand their political relations to the subjects, screening a video composed mostly of footage of junta airstrikes on schools might not by itself effectively draw people into a stance of acting against the business providing the junta’s weaponry, the ideology facilitating its regime, and the broader structure of international hierarchy providing impunity.
Besides apathy from the Japanese authorities and some of the public, representation of dissent or confrontation can also be targeted by hostility and denial of material conditions. Diaspora activists from Burma/Myanmar, alongside their relatives inside, have expressed disappointment and disillusionment with democratic states’ weak response to the coup as a marker of selective apathy. A news article on an OMA rally on 2023.02.01 logged a participation of 80 with mixed backgrounds at a Naha culture plaza suitable for it (文化てんぶす館前広場), calling for more Japanese engagement, cutting relations with the junta, and legitimizing the National Unity Government (東江郁香 2023), but one reporter also logged passerby calling for them to go back to their country and protest there (Nakamura Mariko 2023). Street advocacy and CDM methods are not unanimously accepted inside Ryūkyū/Okinawa or in online forums linked to the issues. Yasuda in 2023 chronicles the large amount of hate speech targeting anti-base sit-in activists in Okinawa, presenting the harm of conservative/ethnonationalist/sexist media creators, academics, and general public, who find a wide range of ways to discredit and mock protesters in a way that ignores and silences their values and demands (Yasuda 2023:45–47). A major part of Yasuda's journalist strategy is to present the voices and faces of the activists and outline the synergies in violence targeting multiple position/identities to cling to US-Japan militarism. Before internet platforms overtook television imagery, Moeller argues for discarding media focus on personalities and instead moving the lenses as close as possible to witness the people directly facing political violence, as “in the apportionment of blame for the existence of compassion fatigue, the media’s value system and our value system are in question. The media decide what in the world is worth covering. They introduce us to our global neighbors. And the manner in which they do so influences our concern for those “others”” (Moeller 1999:320).
I think some remedies to these issues of representational effectiveness exist in a diversity of approaches, including a bottom-up stance that expands holistic appreciation for the diverse lives of people behind and in front of camera frames. In Fathir and Tualman's analysis of visuals in the Malaysian BERSIH (Coalition for Clean and Fair Election) activist clusters in the late 2000s-early 2010s, they model a map of "underlying visual frames" to Facebook posts that depicted crowds, injustice, or "significant individuals" in the movement's mass street protests (Fathir and Sualman 2023:34). In the Docu Athan videos, crowds of CDM protesters appear in historical contextualizing segments, but the main focuses are on individuals in relation to their families and immediate communities. The positioning of the narrators through each video elevates them as significant in the perspective of the viewer, regardless of not having fame of political or cultural status. While this Malaysian model frames individuals in terms of "sense of leadership," "validation of support," and "inciting people's anger" (Fathir and Sualman 2023:34), the documentarians in the DA screened videos are not self-describing themselves as leaders or taking up political appointments. The expressions of their painful experiences and transparency of their journalistic practice aims to grant them legitimacy in contrast to the military junta's values. Direct footage of injustice by physical violence is sparse, leaving space for dignity of the videos’ participants while conveying less viscerally the precarity of conditions and the resolve of the journalists. In the cases Pain that studies in Uttar Pradesh, India from 2015-16 where local residents used video to convey information in a goal-oriented strategy, “the stories are not about individual issues or rights violations but always in the context of how the community is affected as a whole... The non-use of martyr narratives ensures that issues and not individuals are the unifying point of stories” (Pain 2018:813).
In calls for engagement after each hour-long video compilation, the Docu Athan organizers explained the pathway to view videos online which link to donate funds to each director as a method of supporting their economic capacities. Docu Athan has continued the lineage of journalist Nagai Kenji (killed by the junta at the 2007 Saffron Revolution) by connecting current producers with equipment donated by the public during a memorial campaign for Nagai. As another possible action, viewers could also engage by writing messages to directors on the paper Athan Cards distributed to the audience as a motivational and communicative pathway. Particularly after witnessing scenes through the videos' representations, viewers were more likely to recognize the emotional, mental, and/or spiritual strain of living under regime conditions as well as doing the journalist work. It seemed they took care and consideration in writing messages while each post-screening Q&A opened the space for discussion. Thu Ya Soe explained in a 2022 interview the significance of interaction at a 2022.03.21 anti-war event in Naha that OMA joined, how communicating feelings of closeness even by just saying “ganbare” or “chibaryо̄” becomes people’s power to change Burma/Myanmar (Nagahama 2022). At this point a direct two-way path for communication is difficult to establish, but through entrusting the Athan Cards to Docu Athan’s members inside Japan and/or donating funds, viewers help empower the creators, and new videos they upload to the platform can signal to audiences that the work is continuing.
There is also significance in the role of Kubota and Kitazumi in bridging to audiences and being present in to engage in dialogue. Before or after the screenings, Kitazumi and Kubota explained the context for launching the Docu Athan platform by noting their relations to Burmese journalists and the regime's criminalization process, showing a drawn portrait of a Burmese journalist in prison alongside Kitazumi. Many of the audience questions inquired into their prison experiences, which resolved optimistically in release and return to Japan, as evidence that the carceral system can be fought. One viewer inquired about what precautions the Docu Athan team takes in navigating their positionalities that originate in Japan’s international privilege. The team responded by recognizing the effects of doing narration certain frames, their attempts to pull video imagery from expressions directly, and consideration on the core voices that testify to harms amidst the complexities of local conflict within the broad anti-junta resistance movement. Also notable is the centering of the creators’ and their subjects’ desires for the future in their political landscapes, and the diversity of the videos’ viewpoints outside of Bamar, urban, and masculine stances. Kamal and Fujimatsu present a model of role distribution for effective aid in the resistance movement, ideally situating “local humanitarians in Myanmar at the core and front” of power dynamics where the role of journalist media, amongst others, must be reflexive and humble in coordinating resources through existing horizontal networks (Kamal and Fujimatsu 2024:32–33). DA’s empowerment of non-Japanese directors directly can have an effect of reparations-type redistribution of power. Besides the fundraising portal, the action of giving camera technology as tools and offering training in the production process counteracts some of the accumulation of power inside Japan’s corporate media and government discourse that overshadows narrative framing from the people pointing out the contradictions between its stated values and its policies’ impacts.
Empowering through transnational spaces
My first visit in Itoman made an impression on me with the scale of ecological scars of airstrikes on the terrain, fracturing and scattering cliffs and reefs, as the area has both been made the southern endpoint of the invasion and a sustaining space for growth in peace-conscious education programs. Relating between spaces, Dr. Khaing drew links between CDM values of peace, democracy, and self-determination to Ryūkyū/Okinawa values of resistance, citing Ahagon Shо̄kо̄’s expressions of the cruelty of war, the nobleness of striving for peace, and the folly of humans. On the second day, I felt recognition of a relation when viewing "The School Between Battles" when the featured group of children explained how they had to run from airstrikes to hide in caves (Han Htoo Zyaw 2023). The prior day I had visited the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum where I encountered a special exhibit “Learning about the Battles of Okinawa through Caves” (ガマから学ぶ沖縄戦) portraying through testimony and visuals how residents fled the USA invasion into caves (gama), including haunting artistic representations of faces in the cave walls after combined Japanese and USA massacres on these communities. Outside the university theatre space, there was also a flyer advertising this special exhibit, and I wondered how much the words of the children in Burma/Myanmar resonated with audience members, although recognition of a shared history of this type of violence and dehumanization was unvoiced in the discussion space. Han Htoo Zaw's commentary to this video emphasizes the impossibility of criminality in children, which fights against the junta’s racist discourse that portrays non-Bamar children as inhuman and inevitably future terrorists—a trope also being deployed against Palestinian children, which I and other activists in the screening space have been dissenting. This day’s screening was part of the workshop series by Dr. Wakabayashi’s transnational research titled ‘Humanities Discussion – Okinawa and the Modern World’ (人文学対話・沖縄と現代世界), which had previously hosted a talk in 2024.02.28 on literary thought between Palestine and Japan (Project Watan 2024). Many of the videos also portrayed children expressing a normalized sense of caution and responsivity to repression, which contrasted with the levity of children participating in the screening spaces. The focus on children in the screened Docu Athan videos as members of families and households can be further considered in relation to the intentional decimation of non-regime schools and safe environments for children to grow. Their voices are critically important, especially as UN Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews’ report titled “Losing a generation” argues that children are the most vulnerable to the junta’s strategies and are being targeted and deprived with long-term compounded effects (Andrews 2022). But this needs caution as well, because external calls to prioritize aid towards youth tend to mobilize images that detach them from their own and their families’ agency, so “children, as signifiers of developmental need, turn aid from a just distribution of resources into the alleviation of a western-defined deficit” with an apolitical veneer (Baughan 2021; Burman 1994:51).
Further care into considering the particular parts of these overlapping relations, and organizing spaces for discussion and further action, can support engaged liberatory stances. For example, Gandhi offers keen insight into negotiating narrative positions generated by forces displacing communities through Guåhan/Guam, Vietnam, and Palestine (Gandhi 2022). Writing on the resonating methods of Zapatista communication to resistance worldwide, Khasnabish defines the transnational as a "reference to a political space… on the one hand, governed by the interests of capital, the transnational becomes a way to take the logic of enclosure and exploitation to new heights. On the other hand, shaped and animated by radical struggles for sociopolitical and economic justice, the transnational is potentially a plane that traverses, transgresses, and offers paths beyond the dominating logic of the state, the nation, and the current world disorder" (Khasnabish 2013:71).This may also be part of what McFarlane describes as a “translocal assemblage,” formed of 1) a “composite” network of groups that establish flows of exchange through spaces, 2) an entity that can transcend the labor put into connecting local sites, and 3) a manifestation that must “signify doing, performance and events” (McFarlane 2009:6). Alongside Docu Athan’s method, grassroots diaspora organizations fundraise weekly at train stations in Tokyo and other cities, dedicating a massive amount of labor, asking in Japanese for resources to send to displaced communities across Burma/Myanmar and resist the regime’s atrocities. For these standing sessions, the groups create many photo placards that combine slogans and captions in Japanese with images of communities sheltering in forests, villages being bombed, and the results of successful aid projects like new elementary schools. While much of these photo images as symbols communicate with Japanese audiences, film screenings by Burmese producers engage the large audience of diaspora residents and link them with Q&A discussion panels after screenings over video calls. A major element of these gatherings has been the gathering, motivation, and memorializing vigil to resistance. These require more resources to produce and set up at a larger scale, so coexist alongside smaller community organizing spaces, where easily-circulatable short documentaries by Docu Athan directors can facilitate intimate conversation and prompt individual curiosity and empathy. I look forward to further working with communities to create more approaches and representation that might link people across distances to organize for more just interdependent futures.
Bibliography
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Andrews, Tom. 2022. Losing a Generation: How the Military Junta Is Devastating Myanmar’s Children and Undermining Myanmar’s Future. United Nations Human Rights Special Procedures.
Aung Nay Myo, dir. 2023. “Refugee Fishermen” -A Man Fled from Chin State and Fishes to Feed His Family-. Docu Athan.
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Jason M Alexander
Jason is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and is currently working on their dissertation in Tokyo as a Visiting Research Fellow at Waseda University GSAPS. Their dissertation focuses on historically accumulated power relations between Japan and Burma/Myanmar across military, civil society, and media sectors; pathways for decolonial activism; and cross-movement resistance to genocidal ideologies.