Feels Like Power argues that practices of looking shape what it is possible to see. More particularly, the ways we look at war’s artifacts—its memorials, its museum exhibits, its altered, rebuilt landscapes—shape what we take war to be. By “we,” I mean everyone from military historians to museum visitors to children playing on battleship-shaped play structures in public parks. More narrowly, I mean you, reader. I hope you will accept my invitation to look in some unusual ways.

Here’s a simple margin note.I don’t have much to say here but I hope I will, soon. The aside appears in the margin on desktop and inline on mobile.

Playgrounds like this one Click to view
Battleship playground, Sembawang Park, Singapore, 2023. in Singapore.

The war central to this book is the Pacific War, though the book reaches back to the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese Wars and forward to the War on Terror and our present moment. The terrain includes places whose sovereignty was contested during the Pacific War by the imperialist powers of Japan and the United States: Guam, the Philippines, Okinawa, and South Korea. All of these places have in common long and complex histories of colonial power struggles before, during, and after the Pacific War, and all of them still have anti-base resistance movements where their lands are occupied by U.S. military installations.

Playgrounds like this one Click to view
For this one and the one above, I added a ‘_sm’ to the image_small value in the spreadsheet in Singapore.

I grew up on one of those installations, Kadena Air Base, in Okinawa, Japan. My own early practices of looking were narrow, shaped by living inside a fence that separated my suburban American life visually, materially, and legally from the lives that Okinawans led just meters away off-base. In my early twenties, my mother retired from teaching for the Department of Defense schools overseas and I was no longer able to enter the base gates. By then I had begun to look again, to wonder why we had ever passed through those gates in the first place: why were there nine (thirteen, now) American elementary and high schools on a Japanese island eight thousand miles from the continental U.S.? Why did Kadena Air Base, home to nuclear warheads and the 8th Air Force, seem to my newly-single mother like a good home for us, too?

Playgrounds like this one Click to view
Road Station Kadena, Okinawa, 2023. in Singapore.

Answering those questions led me to the decade-plus of research that has now produced more than one book. The first was a book of interactive poems. This book is, too, but it is also a new experiment in joining language and visual media. This book’s experiment is both an attempt to bring you with me to many discrete places and an exploration of how looking together in those places produces, too easily, the feeling of knowing what we are looking at. Let me explain.

In essence, this book is a tour of sites where significant events happened and are still happening to make and maintain the complex, contested matrix of U.S. military power, both soft and hard, as it manifests in the Pacific region, in relation to many other matrices of geopolitical, economic, and local community powers. This book begins from the premise that wherever a person encounters a war memorial, or a base fence, or a museum reconstruction of a wartime living room, or a military building repurposed for civilian use, they encounter a story about power. These stories are connected, and those connections can be read, though they are often obscured by geographical and temporal distance, or by narrative framing, or by the sheer multitude of connective threads joining a single site or event to larger currents of local and national histories, over centuries of capital and cultural and population flows across oceans and borders, amid thousands of decisions made by as many diplomats and soldiers and civilians in as many places.

No one can read it all. But standing in front of a memorial monument, especially one on the same ground where something happened, can give one the feeling of being present not just to the cenotaph or plaque but to the happenings themselves, to the individual and infinite lived experiences of the human and more-than-human participants of those happenings, to a kind of awe at the substance that the memorial opens out to. This is the gravity and purpose of a memorial. A similiar feeling of presence comes from observing a museum display of objects owned or touched by people who died in or lived through remarkable events; this is why we keep and display them.

Artifacts and sites like this aren’t always marked. They may instead be reused or redeveloped, or abandoned to decompose and be taken over by other living things. Sometimes their former lives can be traced in archival maps or pieced together through talking to unofficial, self-appointed custodians; sometimes people work together to mark them officially years later. In all of these cases, for each of these focal points designed and installed by memorial committees and state institutions and community historians, proximity brings, for me, a thrumming sense of presence that fans out to touch other corpora, other assemblages of experience and history emanating from other memorials and artifacts and sites. The ways that they touch each other, refract, open out into each other’s histories, is always compelling. Visiting any single site sends me down multiple rabbit holes, learning how it is connected to others, learning what nodes it forms in what warp and weft, how different patterns show in different lights.

One conclusion I have come to is that wars always “spill over,” as Viet Nguyen has put it, both temporally and geographically. They don’t end just because someone with a flag pinned to their collar says they do, or because several someones signed the same sheet of paper. Nor do war’s violences stay contained in one place. They travel, over distances and generations. For some people in particular, the conditions of a given war or wars continue to structure their lives far beyond textbook dates and geographic boundaries: former comfort women, families separated at militarized borders, children of deployed soldiers who left them behind. This is also true of people who lean into the structures war has offered them: retired US veterans making their homes near their former duty stations, for example. [something about tourism: Teiawa could go here. It is no coincidence that places where military bases exist are often tropical paradises; militourism. Bring in de-tours and critical militourism, or counter-tourism. Use that to situate the next paragraph as a foray into what critical militourism might look like. Say about Espiritu’s critical juxtaposition.]

This book is born of two impulses. First, I would like to bring you with me to look. I accomplish this by way of taking 360˚ panoramic images of sites across these geographies, and then connecting them according to the echoes they sound for me, and writing about those echoes in the images themselves. The poems in this book exist as text inside photographic environments. Their text appears in front of or above or behind you, and you can navigate through them by clicking on a phone or laptop or tablet, or by looking directly at a line of text in a VR headset. The lines of text are a way of annotating these photographic environments according to a poetic, rather than strictly academic, logic.

The second impulse is to acknowledge and critique a problem in this way of approaching a place, and an image of the place, and all the things and people important to that place. A panoramic image looks a lot like the real thing; that’s the point. But of course it is only, actually, a photograph documenting a moment that is already past the instant the shutter snaps. Nothing is alive in a photograph the way it is in the place the photograph documents. Further, a panoramic photo is an especially bald lie—it is a flat collection of pixels wrapped around the horizons of your vision to mimic three-dimensional space. In this way, the panoramic form reminds us that there are edges to our perception even if we don’t perceive them as edges. I have more to say about the history of panoramas, about technology and photography, about touristic modes of looking; the longer introductory essay of this book takes up those subjects. But for now it is important to mark the false promise of any of these images. I cannot take you with me anywhere, and certainly not anywhere beyond the limits of my own vision.

I hope that this book, though, can serve as a navigational aid, offering some surprising confluences and provocative juxtapositions as points of departure. I have gathered resources produced by many people with expertise and experience greater than mine, and perspectives more intimate, in hopes of offering you, reader, opportune means of entering these stories of power at many points and following their warps and wefts as far as you would like to go.

The easiest way to begin is to enter the first scene of one of the book’s five panoramic poems. Each panorama contains one or more lines of poetic text, joining it sequentially to other panoramas, so that you proceed through a poem as you proceed through the series of images. Each individual panorama is also accompanied by an essay. The essays offer context exploring the image, the events that happened there, public and scholarly and literary responses to those events, connections to other places, other events. The book can be read in multiple ways: a reader can choose to navigate through each unfolding poem first, or can read all the essays before visiting the panoramic poems. It is also possible to exit a panoramic poem at any moment to read the accompanying essay, then re-enter the poem.

The interactive nature of this book allows you also to choose to navigate through its texts thematically, entering one of four streams of history: sovereign, environmental, economic, or, if you would like to get personal, my own lived history in and around these sites. Or you may navigate by geographical region, by clicking a glowing dot on the map. If you are curious about what might have happened in the last hundred-and-fifty years or so on this day, you can scroll through the calendar at the bottom of this page and enter by selecting today’s date. Perhaps it is early spring, green things just beginning to emerge, or perhaps it is very cold where you are, and you are curious to know what else has happened when the world felt like this outside, to other people, elsewhere.

Kadena Town background; since we are beginning the whole book here I need some real detail about the history of Okinawa and American occupation. • 82% (find that stat) of Kadena Town is the base. In 1945 the American forces came ashore at Kadena and the township just north of it, at Sunabe and Toguchi beaches. Japanese military workers had cleared an airfield that the Americans rapidly took over and kept improving, which became today’s Kadena Air Base. Today the US military occupies most of the town of Kadena; almost all of the Kadena Air Base flight line on one side of a slim strip of businesses and neighborhoods and then a long stretch of the ammunition storage base. Most of Kadena Town’s coastline belongs to the base. • For years Roadside Station Kadena’s museum featured a topographical diorama of the area, detailed down to the orange striped pylons marking the flightline’s landing approach; it was removed in the 2022 renovations and replaced with more modern exhibits. The museum is organized and maintained by Kadena’s Town government.

• The Roadside Station opened in X. Originally the observation platform was just the roof of the building but in 2022 the museum expanded over the parking lot to the edge of Highway 58. Now the observation platform goes to the very edge of the property before the highway. I have visited Kadena Roadside Station a few times over the last ten years, and I have not seen anyone use these coin-operated binoculars. Perhaps people do. What I have seen is many hobbyist photographers who bring their own equipment and take photographs of departing and landing planes with foot-long zoom lenses. • Beneath the platform is an atrium with food stalls and tables. The result is a peculiar sort of attraction: an anti-military museum and observation platform over a food court visited by many military servicemembers. There’s also a tourist shop selling the kinds of local delicacies and souvenirs common to Roadside Stations all over Japan. Reflections on this contradictory marriage of purposes: links to reviews of the food stalls, my images of servicemembers there. Say something about how military base tourism is a thing in Okinawa though not one really promoted by the national tourism promotion institutions. Share the bike ride tour. Okinawa is home to most of the WWII memorials that attract international visitors. Alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki. • The decibel meter. Share the youtube link. Noise pollution, quote from a couple of sources. How the sounds are familiar to me. If you have been to an airshow or heard a flyover, if you were in New York in the days after 9/11, you will recognize this sound. • What is it that we’re looking at? A parade of aircraft, assiduously documented by whom, staff, hobbyists at the observation platform? I remember reading that this has partially to do with a kind of surveillance and mapping; someone thinks it’s important to keep track, partly because of the crashes in the past. And something else, can’t remember what, need to find that ancient source. It is a municipal duty, was the suggestion. • Photograph postcards available for all the planes you might see there. You can take them home with you. • A notable view from the platform before the flight line begins: the garden. • link to Histreet, another municipal museum.

This set of coin-operated binoculars is nearly identical to the set at Roadside Station Kadena, but the view is not over a fence but rather over a river. This is the Imjin River, and the observation platform is at Imjingak Resort, also known as Pyeonghwa Nuri Park. That the park’s official name in English includes the word “Resort” points to a odd layered quality of the attractions here, similar to how the museum and observation platform at Kadena are a familiar Japanese and usually much more anodyne convention familiar to travelers. You can travel to Imjingak Resort in a private car but most people come on organized tours, in buses. Many of the attractions require separate tickets, and tour companies offer packages with variations.

Imjingak has a facilities building with food court and bathrooms, but little in the way of museum exhibits beyond a turtle boat in the entry hall. Most of the things people come to look at are outside. They are other memorial, like the Mangbaedan. Artifacts like the train bridge destroyed in the war whose bullet scars the signs tell you to look for, the Freedom Bridge the POWs walked over in the exchange. Newer additions like the Korean comfort woman statue. Little ribbons tied to the fence. A gondola goes over the river to another attraction: the former US Army Camp Greaves, whose bowling alley is now a museum accessible with a gondola ticket.

Access to this observation platform is free, or was when I visited in May 2024, though I’ve seen travel bloggers post about it since then saying a ticket was required. We are not looking at another sovereignty as we were at Kadena, but rather at a zone of a different kind of compromised sovereignty. Just across the river is the civilian control zone, the X meter wide strip of land that extends on either side of the demilitarized zone. The CCZ is not demilitarized; South Korean troops train there. Villagers live and farm there. Standing here, we are still looking at South Korea, but over the river that marked a historic border.

Greaves was an Army base; the AF stayed far away from the DMZ. This was a base for ground troops. What did they do? How long were their tours of duty? Unaccompanied I assume. Would anyone have done a tour in both places? Greaves was very front-line. And existed only after the Korean War. Kadena was there before and played a key role in fighting that war.

. Describe the tour groups I saw. The train, the korean comfort women statue (the same as in Seoul across from the Japanese embassy which moved, finally, is the statue still there 2 years later? Maybe ask YQ to see). The gondola and how it goes to Greaves, discussed later in this poem. Link the history of Kadena to the history of the DMZ, a sketch:

This set of coin-operated binoculars is nearly identical to the set at Roadside Station Kadena, but the view is not over a fence but rather over a river. This is the Imjin River, and the observation platform is at Imjingak Resort, also known as Pyeonghwa Nuri Park. That the park’s official name in English includes the word “Resort” points to a odd layered quality of the attractions here, similar to how the museum and observation platform at Kadena are a familiar Japanese and usually much more anodyne convention familiar to travelers. You can travel to Imjingak Resort in a private car but most people come on organized tours, in buses. Many of the attractions require separate tickets, and tour companies offer packages with variations.

Imjingak has a facilities building with food court and bathrooms, but little in the way of museum exhibits beyond a turtle boat in the entry hall. Most of the things people come to look at are outside. They are other memorial, like the Mangbaedan. Artifacts like the train bridge destroyed in the war whose bullet scars the signs tell you to look for, the Freedom Bridge the POWs walked over in the exchange. Newer additions like the Korean comfort woman statue. Little ribbons tied to the fence. A gondola goes over the river to another attraction: the former US Army Camp Greaves, whose bowling alley is now a museum accessible with a gondola ticket.

Access to this observation platform is free, or was when I visited in May 2024, though I’ve seen travel bloggers post about it since then saying a ticket was required. We are not looking at another sovereignty as we were at Kadena, but rather at a zone of a different kind of compromised sovereignty. Just across the river is the civilian control zone, the X meter wide strip of land that extends on either side of the demilitarized zone. The CCZ is not demilitarized; South Korean troops train there. Villagers live and farm there. Standing here, we are still looking at South Korea, but over the river that marked a historic border.

Greaves was an Army base; the AF stayed far away from the DMZ. This was a base for ground troops. What did they do? How long were their tours of duty? Unaccompanied I assume. Would anyone have done a tour in both places? Greaves was very front-line. And existed only after the Korean War. Kadena was there before and played a key role in fighting that war.

. Describe the tour groups I saw. The train, the korean comfort women statue (the same as in Seoul across from the Japanese embassy which moved, finally, is the statue still there 2 years later? Maybe ask YQ to see). The gondola and how it goes to Greaves, discussed later in this poem. Link the history of Kadena to the history of the DMZ, a sketch:

CB-Essay’s power comes from integrating collection items with your narrative. This essay shows you how to add your first collection item to an essay using a simple aside (margin note).

The Dual-Collection Model

CB-Essay manages two collections that work together:

1. Essay Collection (_essay/ folder) - Your Markdown essay files with sequential navigation
2. Object Collection (CSV in _data/) - Digital items (images, PDFs, audio, video) you reference in essays

Reference any collection item in your essays using its objectid.

Your First Collection Item

Collection items are stored in a CSV file in _data/. Each item needs at minimum:

• objectid - Unique identifier (lowercase, no spaces)
• title - Item name
• format - File type (image/jpeg, application/pdf, etc.)

For complete metadata requirements, see Collection Integration docs.

Asides with Collection Items

The most common way to add collection items to essays is through asides (margin notes). Let’s look at two examples:

Text-Only Aside

Here’s a simple margin note.This aside contains only text - useful for brief explanations or commentary. The aside appears in the margin on desktop and inline on mobile.

Copy this:

{% include essay/feature/aside.html
   text="Your margin note text here" %}

Aside with Collection Item

Moscow’s Administration Building Click to view
Administration Building, University of Idaho, No. 30 was one of the first permanent structures on campus.

Copy this:

{% include essay/feature/aside.html
   objectid="demo_001"
   text="Context about this item" %}

The aside automatically shows the item’s thumbnail and links to its full page.

Note: The objectid must exist in your metadata CSV file in _data/.

More Aside Options

You can also use asides with:

• PDFs - Display document thumbnails
• Audio/Video - Show media icons with playback
• Custom captions - Override item titles
• Height control - Adjust image display size

See the Essay Features docs for complete aside options and other CollectionBuilder features like item cards, image galleries, timelines, maps, and subject clouds.

Example: Compound Objects

Some items have multiple parts (like a photo album with many images). These are called compound objects.

When you reference a parent objectid, CB automatically knows about its children:

</span>This lookout tower has multiple associated media files </span></span>

{% include essay/feature/aside.html
   objectid="demo_008"
   text="This lookout tower has multiple associated media files" %}

The item page will show all child items together. See the Compound Objects docs for details.

Collection Pages

Your CSV metadata automatically creates these pages:

• Browse - Grid view of all items
• Map - Items with lat/long displayed geographically
• Timeline - Items with dates shown chronologically
• Subjects - Subject keyword cloud
• Locations - Location keyword cloud
• Data - Download metadata as CSV/JSON

No additional configuration needed - they work automatically!

Quick Start Workflow

To add collection items to your essays:

1. Add items to your CSV: Create or edit _data/your-metadata.csv with objectids, titles, and formats
2. Reference in essays: Use objectids in asides or other includes
3. Preview: Check that objectids resolve correctly

For detailed metadata setup, see the Get Started guide and Collection Integration docs.

Best Practices

• Use descriptive objectids (admin_building_1909 not img001)
• Don’t overwhelm your text - 3-5 asides per essay maximum
• Use asides for supplementary items, not primary content
• Optimize images - 1200px max width recommended
• Provide alt text in your metadata for accessibility

Print Considerations

Collection items work beautifully in print PDFs. Asides with images display as margin notes (if using aside-style: margin) or inline callouts.

See the Print Guide for full details on print output.

Next Steps

You now understand the basics of integrating collection items with CB-Essay!

Keep Learning

• CB-Essay Documentation - Complete reference including advanced collection features
• CB-CSV Documentation - CollectionBuilder reference for metadata and visualizations
• Metadata Guide - Detailed field specifications

Get Help

• CB Discussion Forum - Community support
• Open an issue - Report bugs or request features

Remember: Start simple with one or two collection items in asides, then explore advanced features as you need them. Copy the examples above and adapt them for your own work!