‘From Okinawa with Love’: A revealing documentary about a true original

Hiroshi Sunairi’s documentary “From Okinawa with Love” follows the unwavering Okinawan photographer Mao Ishikawa, who made her name documenting the relationships between Japanese bar girls and African American servicemen.

by MARK SCHILLING
August 30, 2024

The standard procedure for making a documentary about a living person is to interview those who know the subject as a friend, enemy or somewhere in between to get a multifaceted and objective portrait. And if the film is critical rather than adulatory, the subject may never sit down for a Q&A.

United States-based filmmaker Hiroshi Sunairi tosses this formula in “From Okinawa with Love,” his revealing documentary about the early career and present-day life of Okinawan photographer Mao Ishikawa.

Taking a fly-on-the-wall approach, he follows Ishikawa as she walks around rundown neighborhoods searching for places where she worked as a bar girl in the mid-1970s, all of which catered to African American servicemen. Later, we see her as she showers and talks about her bouts with cancer and their lingering effects, a very visible colostomy bag among them.