[9] She eventually landed on the subject of Okinawan tombs and graveyards after her trip to the Aran Islands where she felt the resilience of Celtic language and beliefs and the remains of ancient ruins had equivalents in her homeland.
She attributes the comical and spirited nature of these works as a celebration of Okinawa's “rich outlook on life and death,” and the performances' location of a gravesite specifically chosen because of practices such as maintaining gardens for the deceased and greeting ancestors by sharing a meal at the grave known as seimeisai (siimii in local dialect).
[12] Yamashiro expanded on the geo-political nature that applies to the notion of divided spaces in Okinawa for her video BORDER (2003) in which she walks along the fenced edge between US and Okinawan territory.
Trip to Japan takes place in front of the National Diet Building in Tokyo, where Yamashiro mockingly acts as either a representative of Okinawa or local tour guide while holding up an image of an Okinawan tomb.
[15] In the wake of the September 11th attacks, local and national governments were also active in promoting this beautified image of Okinawa in order to reassure Japanese citizens that the islands were still safe to travel to after growing concern that the area, populated by US bases, was a possible target for counterattacks.
Visual Studies professor Tina Takemoto suggests that the segment I Like Okinawa Sweet takes on a particularly gendered reading of these realities, as the imagery of a young woman (Yamashiro) licking an ice cream within the presence of US soldiers (and a looped soundtrack of an American male voice calling out “Hey there, hey, how ya doin’?”) may conjure up, in local memory, the violence perpetrated by the US forces against Okinawan women and girls.
[17] In her video, Yamashiro speaks to an anonymous older man who tells her about the beach's history including how local Okinawans capitalized on the ambiguity over the area’s regulating party and effectively reappropriating it as their own meeting grounds, even if just momentarily.
[19] These borders, and the latent violence built into them, also informed Yamashiro's work Seaweed Women (2008) which was filmed at several waterside locations, including the “mokunin hama” from Shore Connivance and the highly contested bay of Henoko.
[20] As Yamashiro crosses the invisible border between US and Okinawa waters, the camera finds traces of the military's omnipresence: an army tank resting on the coral seabed and a boat with Japanese coast guards.
[22][23][24] Inheritance series (2008-2010) includes a collection of photographs and the video Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009), which Yamashiro produced while running a workshop at an adult care center in Okinawa.
[26] Over the course of numerous visits workshop participants eventually opened up and shared their memories, including one man who witnessed his immediate family members commit suicide while residing in Saipan.
[30] The photographs from this series also involve the corporeal transference of experience and memory, capturing scenes of ‘performances’ in which the elderly members surround Yamashiro, touching and caressing her.
Yamashiro's engagement with historical memory and war narratives became notably more prevalent after the 2007 controversy over the planned erasure of the forced suicides of Okinawan civilians by the Japanese army from history textbooks in Japan.
[32] Yamashiro's critically acclaimed video work Mud Man (2016), created in cooperation with the Aichi Triennale, follows a non-linear narrative that bridges Okinawa to other parts of Asia through the legacy and trauma of militarism and neo-colonialism in their respective countries.
[34] Juxtaposition of the past and the present is employed throughout the work wherein Yamashiro weaves together contemporary 'war' images, such as protestors demonstrating against base development and shots of underground and underwater passages taken from abandoned US weapon storage facilities in Okinawa.
In filming for Mud Man Yamashiro travelled specifically to Gangjeong village in Korea where the Jeju Naval Base, designed to aid US deployment in Asia, was recently completed.