Victoire Thierrée discovered Okinawa in 2012 through the photographs of Shomei Tomatsu, the first author to document the US military presence on the island in his famous Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa. Returning in 2019, she created a black and white series in the 6x9 format, focusing on the areas surrounding the thirty-two American bases still operational, where nature seems to slowly reclaim the territory, almost as if to oppose a form of resistance to the persistent occupation. This research leads her, in 2023, to the Smithsonian Institution Archives in Washington, in the footsteps of the botanist Egbert H. Walker (1899–1991), who coordinated a post-war collection program of natural specimens in the Ryukyu Islands, supervising, in 1951, the collection of over 8,000 plants from areas marked by the Battle of Okinawa. From this archive Thierrée selects and photographs forty herbarium plates. Okinawa!! brings together these two series, intertwining territory, memory and gaze, and establishing a distant dialogue between man and nature that is only apparently dissonant. The volume includes a bilingual text (French and English) by the French critic Jean-Yves Jouannais.