For Minako Toguchi, every summer would bring on an identity crisis.

As a child growing up in Okinawa, the site of the biggest land battle to take place on Japanese soil during World War II, she was often taken on school trips during the summer to war memorials, including Himeyuri Cenotaph in the south of the island, where the deaths of more than a hundred schoolgirls who worked as war nurses are commemorated.

But every time she listened to war survivors talk about their memories of the fierce fighting against U.S. military forces, she was made conscious of her skin color — slightly darker than her peers — and that she has familial roots on both sides, given that her father, an African American, is a former U.S. soldier.