(Photo credit: Akihiko Okamura, Milk bottles on a doorstep, Ireland, 1970s. Photo Museum Ireland.)
Rory Rowan
Introduction
The Memories of Others is a stunning photography exhibition documenting the early years of the conflict in the north of Ireland by the Japanese photographer Akihiko Okamura. Originally organised and staged by Photo Museum Ireland in Dublin last summer, it is now on show in Belfast’s Ulster Museum. This remarkable body of workoffers a unique perspective on the conflict in the north and a powerful record of everyday life lived amidst the turmoil of war and occupation.
Okamura was born in Tokyo in 1929 and first came to Ireland in January 1968. During this visit, he travelled to the north and began to document the struggles taking shape in Derry and Belfast. A year later, he moved to Dublin and eventually settled in Wicklow. Okamura spent several years travelling back and forth by train to Belfast, documenting the conflict as it developed from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s.
Although Okamura captured some of the key events of the early ‘Troubles,’ such as the Battle of the Bogside and the loyalist pogrom of Catholics families living on Belfast’s Bombay Street (both August 1969), but his images have remained largely unseen until now.
‘The Troubles’ in Technicolor
Okamura’s photographs are immediately striking for thrusting a period usually depicted in bleak black and white into a bold palette of saturated pastels. The dark red bricks, the dank pitted tarmac, the gentle hills “grey-blue above Belfast,” are all present in my own sense memory of home, but the sunny blue skies, the lurid period packaging, and the vivid fabrics seem to come from a different, unexpectedly vibrant world. Through Okamura’s eye, a monochrome history suddenly becomes a ‘Technicolor’ dreamworld, simultaneously alien and more intimate. One photograph (1969) shows a smartly suited man leaning against a lamppost at the corner of Derry’s Fountain Street, at ease, quietly reading the paper, a blood red ‘no entry’ sign blazing in the morning sun above his head. Another image (1970) shows British troops in riot gear stalled in Derry’s Creggan estate, the ground ahead of them littered with masonry missiles. What is jarring is the context: lush green lawns, sunny laurels, and lace curtains hanging sleepily in windows – a typical scene of 60s suburban tranquillity, bar the presence of an occupying army.
Okamura eschewed the heroic posture of photojournalists like Don McCullin and Gilles Peress, whose ‘heat of the action’ shots populate the collective imaginary of the early ‘Troubles.’ It is a standard trope of ‘Troubles’ photography to show military occupation and guerrilla warfare embedded in the everyday – British soldiers crouched at the corners of terraced streets, camouflaged for some other warzone; masked militants crouching at other corners, camouflaged against their own streets. What sets Okamura’s work apart is the contemplative perspective he brings to this perverse cohabitation of war and mundane life, and his focus on the moments of stillness ignored by those chasing the next conflagration. His photographs attend less to action than its aftermath, revealing an acute sensitivity to the quiet moments that come after combustible commotion. It’s the gaze of someone who stayed on after the crowds had dispersed and the fires gone out. His lens gave the place time.
Aftermaths
One of the most arresting images in the exhibition (1970), depicts six full milk bottles sitting on a doorstep in the morning sun awaiting collection. This peaceful image, with its nurturing promise of morning industry, silently implies another in the exhibition – a collection of empty milk bottles ready for petrol bomb production, defences for the Rossville Flats in Derry’s Bogside (1969). There is humour but also pathos in Okamura’s depiction of the double life these vessels led amidst a war that many still only half acknowledge via euphemism: ‘The Troubles.’
Okamura’s intimacy with republican communities is evident in some of the photographs, including an incredible image (1970) of IRA volunteers conducting shooting practice in fern-covered hills. This image is commanding for how inconspicuous its subjects are at first glance, the camouflage-clad figures dissolving into the landscape despite the proximity of the shot. These armed figures are not framed as a menace lurking amidst Arcadia but almost as an autochthonous element of the land itself.
Yet Okamura’s images don’t glamourise violence, anti-colonial or otherwise. Some of the exhibition’s most arresting images show the bloody aftermath of state violence and the communities living in its shadow. Heavy with finality, one photograph (1971) shows blood splattered across the corner of a Derry housing estate, a black flag flying from a stick and two bundles of flowers marking the spot where Seamus Cusack was shot dead by British soldiers. In another image two young girls dressed in their Sunday best regard a make-shift shrine erected on Derry’s Lecky Road. It marks the spot where Desmond Beattie was shot dead by British troops just 12 hours before Seamus Cusack. Cusack was 28 and Beattie just 19. They were the first people shot in Derry by the British army during the conflict. The shrine, constructed with tender dedication out of scaffolding, is a moving example of popular memorialisation and a vernacular architecture of insurrection – a lesser-seen counterpoint to Free Derry’s barricades.
An earlier image from 1969 captures Catholic women burned out of their homes on Belfast’s Bombay Street in a loyalist attack, standing stunned. They hold cups and crockery salvaged from the wreckage, as if preparing tea for a funeral wake. Another photograph shows a British soldier carrying the spotless, intact door of a woman’s destroyed house as she walks alongside him, head down. Okamura’s camera was already sensitive to the absurdity of occupying forces providing aid to the displaced. Yet he captured this moment of confusion and compassion in full colour, roles not yet sedimented into black and white.
Festival of Reaction
Okamura’s images of Belfast Catholics burned out of their homes in loyalist pogroms in 1969 have a grim resonance with summer 2025 when the homes of migrant families were set alight in loyalist rioting in Ballymena. Bombay Street then, Ballymena now. Burning those seen to be ‘other’ out of their homes is sadly a loyalist tradition, although not one included in official attempts to reframe the 12th of July (an annual celebration marking the victory of the Protestant William of Orange over Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne with marches and bonfires), as “Orangefest” – an inclusive, family-friendly celebration of “culture and community.” Celebrating the 12th of July under the banner of diversity and inclusion whilst it vents and fosters sectarian division and open racism points to one of the challenges faced in creating a truly pluralist society on this island.
Yet one of the most fascinating aspects of Okamura’s Irish work is his many sympathetic images of life in loyalist communities. His photographs of communities preparing for the 12th of July are joyful images of working-class leisure that seem a world away from sectarian hatred. One of the most compelling images in the exhibition, dating from the early 1970s, shows laughing children stuffing a life-size human dummy, their attention and joy focused on communal creation. However, the product of their happy efforts is an effigy of Lt Col Robert Lundy, a symbol of Catholic treachery for loyalists, that is burnt as the finale of the annual Apprentice Boys’ parade in Derry. Okamura’s photograph sustains empathy for children finding collective joy in community celebrations, even as their elders’ traditions are reactionary. Whilst Okamura’s political sympathies lay elsewhere (see below), his gaze was not reductive, nor his lens shuttered to perspectives not his own.
Global Revolt
When The Memories of Others opened in June this year in the Ulster Museum it took its place in the galleries next to The Troubles and Beyond and the Belfast Archive Project, an exhibition focused on the work of local photographers. The Museum noted that these three exhibits being shown together highlighted the “importance of museums in post-conflict Northern Ireland.” William Blair, the Museum’s Director of Collections, argued that, shown side-by-side, the exhibitions marked a “significant moment for … how we reflect on the conflict commonly referred to as ‘the Troubles’,” and would offer visitors a “broader, more nuanced understanding of our shared yet conflicted past.”
The long-standing The Troubles and Beyond exhibit engages with “politics and conflict, and the impact of both on everyday life, people and communities” and tries to locate the conflict, and the post-conflict era, in a wider international context. In recent years this international contextualisation has involved engaging with scholarly debate about “Northern Ireland’s 1968.” Historians such as Simon Prince and Chris Reynolds have helped to locate the civil rights movement in the north and the early years of the conflict in what is increasingly considered a long ‘global 1968.’ Although dominant accounts of the conflict’s early days rarely recount events in Belfast and Derry in the same breath as London, Paris, Mexico, and Prague, Prince and Reynolds have argued that this is the product of an unfortunate tendency for historians, commentators, and governments to adopt an insular view of the conflict that isolates it from the wider geopolitical and cultural contexts.
Reynolds developed his 2015 book Sous les paves… the Troubles into an oral history project in collaboration with the Ulster Museum, interviewing activists who had been involved in “Northern Ireland’s 1968.” The resulting exhibition, Voices of ’68, opened at the Museum in September 2018 as part of The Troubles and Beyond before travelling to twenty destinations across Ireland and Britain, with a digital version archived on YouTube as an educational tool for an optional module in the GCSE history syllabus.
There is a compelling case for locating Okamura’s photographs of the conflict in the context of the global revolts of 1968, not least because his interest in Ireland, and the conflict in the north in particular, were shaped by his left-wing and anti-colonial political commitments. In the photobook published alongside last year’s Photo Museum exhibition, the photographic historian Pauline Vermane notes that “anti-colonialist, socialist or even anarchist, Okamura instinctively identified with the nationalist and republican cause, believing fundamentally in a unified Ireland.”
Indeed, Okamura came to photograph the conflict in the north after several years reporting on the Vietnam War. During his time there he produced important stories for Life magazine, documenting the use of torture by US forces and their allies. He eventually earned a 5-year ban on entering South Vietnam by publishing a photo essay in Life (July 1965) on the South Vietnamese Liberation Front (NLF), which included an interview with Huỳnh Tấn Phát, the second ranking officer in the NLF and the group’s chief strategist (later Vice President of Vietnam).
Although Okamura’s anti-colonial and socialist views were shaped by his experiences in Vietnam, they long pre-dated that period. In the book photographic historian Masako Toda notes that before becoming a photojournalist in 1964, Okamura edited the weekly left-wing magazine Shinshūkan (New Weekly) published by Japan’s General Council of Trade Unions. Prior to this he had been expelled from the prestigious Tokyo Medical College for leading a student protest about tuition fees, joined the militant faction of Japan’s Communist Party, and took part in the Buraku Liberation Movement, which struggled for the rights of the Burakumin, a minority group historically subject to discrimination in Japan.
“Post-Conflict Storytelling”
Locating Okamura’s work in relation to the ‘global revolt’ of 1968 sits in some tension with the project of “post-conflict storytelling” in which the Ulster Museum positions The Memories of Others. Contextualising his Irish work in relation to a ‘global 1968’ draws out the anti-colonial sympathies that animated his lens, which in turn makes his photographs less those of a neutral, empathetic ‘outsider’ than a troublingly partisan ‘insider-outsider.’ This tension appears to have prompted some subtle but significant differences in how the exhibition was mounted and framed in the Ulster Museum compared to Photo Museum Ireland.
The initial Dublin iteration of the exhibition included a short documentary film discussing Okamura’s life and work in Ireland which stressed his anti-colonial politics. In the film, Okamura’s daughter, Kusi, who was raised in County Wicklow, notes that her father was a lifelong socialist and emphasizes his sympathies with Irish republicanism. Indeed, the documentary contains a short but critical clip of an interview Okamura gave on Japanese TV in the early 1980s. When asked why he moved his family to Ireland he replies that it is better not to raise children in an imperial country, a category in which he pointedly includes Japan, and to instead live in a small country whose values are determinedly anti-imperialist.
The documentary was not included as part of the Ulster Museum’s installation. It is unclear if this curatorial decision was influenced by the passages noted above, but the film’s absence colours how the photographs might be interpreted. Although the film was screened once in the Museum’s lecture theatre as part of Docs Ireland film festival in June its omission from the exhibition space subtly reframes the viewing experience. The documentary provided those visiting the exhibition in Dublin with much more explanatory context, but it also left them with little doubt as to the nature of Okamura’s politics. His anti-colonial commitments clearly sit less easily with the ‘post-conflict’ paradigm of public history promoted by the Ulster Museum than with museum curation in the south, where anti-colonial histories can be discussed with relative freedom in institutional spaces.
The Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen famously wrote “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. The staging of The Memories of Others in the Ulster Museum offers one instance of how that war is being quietly waged within the walls of the north’s cultural institutions.
‘Country of Love’
Okamura died in Japan in 1985 after having become ill travelling from Ireland. Beginning in the mid 1970s he dedicated his life to health activism in Japan, travelling the country lecturing on nursing education, psychiatric reform, the hospice movement, and bioethics. Yet in the exhibition book Okamura’s daughter Kusi says of her father that Ireland was “where his heart lay.” Pauline Vermare notes that Okamura marked his Irish slides with “Ai” meaning “love,” referencing the first syllable of Ireland in Kanji, “Aikoku” meaning “country of love.” This was a testament to what Kusi referred to as “his love of Ireland and the Irish people.” Okamura found personal peace in an Ireland wracked by war: a peace grounded in anti-colonial solidarity.
The Memories of Others is on show at the Ulster Museum until 4th January 2026.
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