Representing the Ogasawara Islanders in Between Tides (2018): From Pacific Archipelagos to Oceanic Film Festivals

The Ogasawara or Bonin Islands are located at the geographic extremes of Japan and are home to island residents who lived through the islands’ tumultuous history. Descendants of the original island settlers are an ethnically mixed population who have found themselves and the islands in general at the margins of the Japanese nation over time, which has included the Navy generation of islanders who experience the changing of US to Japanese administrative rule in the postwar period. This generation of islanders is the subject of the 2018 film Between Tides by director Masa Fox. The film retells the history of the islands according to islanders’ personal stories reinscribing islander agency against the backdrop of official documents, archival footage, and other materials. This paper highlights this angle as archipelagic, noting the film’s articulation of islander voice and representation in the context of Pacific islanders on screen. The foregrounding of these islander stories according to the archipelago also suggests the history of the islands in the militarized Pacific region of the time. Finally, this research looks to the film’s presentation at film festivals as a means of positioning the islands in spheres of Pacific peoples, or Oceania, which in turn suggest the possibilities afforded to regional connections that go beyond geopolitical borders and instead are rooted in island-to-island relations, histories, and cultures.