About the Center
At Koza X MiXtopia Research Center, the objective is to develop a set of postwar archives of the Koza Crossroads which includes five municipalities of Koza cities: Shiromae, Yoshihara, Yaejima, Miyazato, and Teruya. Impacted by the war and occupation, these districts became an epicenter of Okinawa's economy serving as bustling and hustling places of trade, business, and market. The Crossroads also became a place of mixed racial/ethnic/cultural/linguistic/national geographies.
The center employs a pedagogy of MiXtory (history, story, mystery) and yuntakuview, an informal interview style that brings together an element of Okinawa's everyday chatting (yuntaku) and the academic method of interview. Both pedagogies emerged as a method/technique akin to performance art/life, during Ariko Ikehara's dissertation fieldwork in Koza.
Performance art/life as a method requires a process of exploration that leads to the discovery of new information and directs us to see things that we would not see otherwise if we follow only what we already see/know, The center considers important both the scientific and humanistic approaches to research, however, the role of the process - chance, word of mouth, connections, and relationships in everyday life in gathering information - is imperative. Through the process, we find boundless creativity, imagination, and freedom and the value of the lived experiences that are co-produced in collaboration and partnerships with others.
We learn from this history how people lived in a mixed community in which race, ethnicity, class, gender, language became secondary to people's will to live under the extreme conditions of the aftermath of war and the occupation. In the process, the center functions as a third space to bridge people and their histories and stories that are otherwise forgotten: that we are intricately connected by the events and the aftermath of American wars in Asia. As such, the center serves as a space of return for those who left the Crossroads to reclaim their place in history and to tell their stories that may fill in the blanks of mystery. Here, possibilities abound.
