Zawawa began on April 21, 2011 when acoustic scientist Kozo Hiramatsu, anthropologist Rupert Cox and artist Angus Carlyle met in Okinawa. A previous collaboration – Air Pressure – had explored the environmental stresses on a family of organic farmers living in the midst of Narita airport. This new project centred on the Pacific island which was devastated by the last battle of World War II, was subsequently occupied by the United States for 27 years and is where a considerable presence of military personnel, infrastructure and overflying aircraft persist today. Over the next seven years, Hiramatsu, Cox and Carlyle’s fieldwork was devoted to learning from the islanders’ listening experiences and using these to direct their sound recording, filming and subsequent interviews, taking them to the edges of airbases and jungle warfare training camps, to bars and music venues, markets and lagoons, to sacred groves and ceremonies with priestesses and villagers at the edge of the sea. The film was premiered in ten civic centres on Okinawa before touring festivals worldwide and being short-listed for the Jean Rouch Award in 2019.

This illustrated, bi-lingual book begins with extended interviews with two survivors of World War II’s Typhoon of Steel. These are followed by ten further testimonies of auditory life on the islands and by verbatim audience reactions recorded during discussions at the film’s premieres. The book includes essays by Hiramatsu, Cox and Carlyle recounting their own sound-orientated perspectives which are in turn contextualized by Okinawa-based responses from musicologist Junko Konichi and biodiversity researcher Nicholas Friedman.