The follow-up to Ishikawa's Kimura Ihei Award-winning okinawan portraits 2010-2012 picks up exactly where the first book left off. Some 268 images lead the viewer on a winding journey through a world unique to the islands, whose inhabitants shine in photographs where a steady gaze is as much celebration as truth. Okinawa and Okinawans are neither sentimentalised nor sanitised, and whatever struggles these people have faced, their dignity stays intact. The people and places are the product of a society that has inherited a historical legacy: more than seventy years of Americanisation shows in designs painted on sun-baked walls, in glowing fast-food signs, in the fashions and even the faces of the citizens, and yet the society keeps a fiercely independent spirit. The portraits draw on methods woven into the history of photography, from August Sander to Alec Soth, and reach forward to online street-fashion blogs and Instagram; they are not a gallery of characters but people who are alive, whose flaws and beauty the photographer devotes himself to. The book opens with a poem-like statement by the photographer, a run of questions of who we are.