Shima Uta

Kazufumi Miyazawa, singer of The Boom, went to Okinawa for a photo shoot and came back with a song. As he told fRoots in 2003, he visited the Himeyuri Peace Museum and learned about the schoolgirls who nursed wounded soldiers during the 1945 invasion, moving from cave to cave until most of them died there. He heard the story from a woman who had been one of those girls and survived. Walking out of the dark museum, he saw sugar cane waving in the wind, and the contrast inspired him to write a song he wanted to dedicate to her. He described it as being about a man and a woman separated against their will. Miyazawa and his bandmates were from Yamanashi, not Okinawa, and he wove two kinds of melody into the song, one Okinawan and one mainland Japanese. He said he wanted to tell the truth that Okinawa had been sacrificed for the rest of Japan, but doubted whether a mainlander had the right to sing about it. The Okinawan rock musician and peace activist Shokichi Kina told him he should. Released in December 1992 partly in Okinawan, then in 1993 in a Japanese version that reached number four, it became the band's best-selling song. It took an unexpected second life in Argentina, where Alfredo Casero's Japanese-language cover topped the charts for six months, won three Gardel awards and was chosen as the national team's theme for the 2002 World Cup. A song born from one survivor's memory became the sound most people associate with Okinawa.