Location

Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryukyu retto (archipelago): a chain of more than 160 islands stretching the approximately 1300 kilometres between the southernmost tip of Kyushu (Japan) and Taiwan (Republic of China).[1] Okinawa Island has a total land area of 1,199 square kilometres. Okinawa is also the name given to the fourth smallest administrative unit, or prefecture (ken), of the 47 that constitute the modern Japanese State.[2] Okinawa Prefecture was formally established in 1879, and consists of some 70 of the Ryukyu Islands furthest from Kyushu. The remaining islands in the chain became part of Kagoshima Prefecture in the same year. Okinawa Prefecture may further be broken down into the three geographically dispersed island groups of Yaeyama, Miyako and Okinawa. The Yaeyama Island group, which includes Ishigaki, Yonaguni, Iriomote, and the Daioyu or Senkaku Islands,[3] lies furthest from Japan. Yonaguni Island is 510 km from Naha City. The Miyako Island group, which includes Shimoji, Tarama and Irabu, is located between the Yaeyama and Okinawa Island groups. Miyako Island is just less than 300 km from Naha City. The Okinawa Island group is itself geographically dispersed. Whilst the islands of Ie, Kume, Tokashiki and Iheya fall within 100 km of Naha, the southernmost of the Daito Islands is more than 350 km from the prefecture’s capital city. With a land area of less than 2,250 square kilometres,[4] Okinawa Prefecture comprises just 0.6% of Japan’s total land area. As of 2002, the total population of Okinawa Prefecture, spread over 12 cities, 14 towns, and 27 villages, was 1.32 million. Of this figure, more than 85% is concentrated on the main island (honto) of Okinawa.

The capital of Okinawa and seat of the prefectural government is Naha City. It is distant from large neighbouring cities, except for Fukuoka (861 km), Taipei (630 km), and Shanghai (820 km). Naha is closer to Manila (1,480 km), Hong Kong (1,440 km), and Seoul (1,260 km), than it is to the capital of Japan, Tokyo (1,554 km). Geographically, Okinawa is located at a kind of crossroads between Japan, Taiwan (ROC), and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). While this proximity has afforded Okinawa opportunities for trade, commerce and cultural exchange with its Asian neighbours throughout periods of its earlier history, since the end of W.W.II Okinawa has come to occupy a key geostrategic position in the region. Okinawa falls within the Temperate Zone but the climate, influenced by the ocean, monsoons, typhoons, and Kuroshio, or 'Black Current,' is subtropical and humid.[5] Although located at roughly the same latitude as Libya and the Bahamas, Okinawa is climatically closer to Hong Kong. Warm temperatures and frequent rainfall combine to keep the islands green throughout the year. Okinawa's annual precipitation is higher than in the main Japanese islands but it still has to carefully manage its water resources.[6] Average longevity for men and women has long been higher than other parts of Japan. The climate, unscientific elements like the mellow disposition of the local people, and a traditionally healthy diet are cited as contributing factors, though as eating patterns change so the longevity gap between Okinawa and the mainland gradually narrows. Except in rare instances, typhoons visit Okinawa regularly during the mid- to late-summer and into autumn. While they seem less ferocious these days than some remember they can still disable internal and external transport networks. Postwar advances in construction methods, particularly in the use of concrete, has limited the amount of typhoon damage. Major crops grown throughout Okinawa include sugar cane, pineapple, sweet potato, vegetables, and flowers.

1-1. History, Identity, and Political Community Formation

Although research continues to bring forth new, important information, there remains no doubt that the people of Okinawa and Japan proper (naichi), including the Ainu,[7] share a common ethnological origin. Not identical in terms of racial stock[8] but sharing far too many commonalties to be considered other than part of the same cultural organisation that may be defined as Japanese civilisation.[9] Simply put, the common objective elements binding them together[10] are more numerous than those differentiating one from the other. That said, of course, civilisations are not culturally homogeneous entities. They are different in size and characterised by varying degrees of internal diversity. One need only consider the popularly-held view that there exists a Western civilisation,[11] and at the huge array of nations and states supposedly contained within it, to realise how heterogeneous, and often disharmonious, a civilisation can be. Japan may be unique in that its civilisational and state territorial boundary are one and the same, making it one of the smaller and least diverse civilisational entities, but it is nonetheless heterogeneous.[12] Aside from an overall majority within the Japanese population, there are several minorities.[13] One may visualize these civilisational sub-groupings as moons in orbit around a mother planet.[14]

As most are aware, however, the issue of cultural diversity in modern Japan is not straightforward. This has been a result of the friction between an actual, and a perceived or constructed reality. While the objective reality is that Japan is and has been heterogeneous, there has simultaneously been in operation a central government policy of rejecting the notion of diversity and asserting instead that the Japanese state is one single homogenous cultural entity from Hokkaido down to the furthest tip of Okinawa. This policy was instituted with the birth of Japan as a modern nation state with the Meiji Restoration (Meiji Ishin) of 1868. It was one tool, of many, designed to discourage the average citizen’s primary affinity with his or her region, and instil instead a strong sense of loyalty to the central state under the Imperial Family and a Constitution.[15] Attitudes are changing as internationalisation (kokusaika) takes root and Japan becomes de facto more culturally diverse and open - because of the sheer number of foreigners coming to live within its shores and with trends in international economic activity - but there remains a strong sense of resistance to any dilution of the artificial construct known as Japan, from abroad or within.[16] Only in the last decades of the 20^th century was there any meaningful investigation by domestic scholars into the nature of Japanese-ness (Nihonron) and the construction of Japanese identity.[17] This academic re-evaluation has had little practical impact, of course, on the lives of those who identify themselves as among Japan’s minorities.

Okinawans could be hammered into the role of a disenfranchised minority by those championing nationalistic movements and the liberation of the underdog, yet this would constitute too simplistic a description of the situation by far. The Okinawan condition, if I may put it rather crudely, is complex in the extreme. There are several dynamics in effect simultaneously. Okinawans are quick to assert differences between themselves and mainland Japanese on occasion. Usually when they have received, or at least perceived themselves as having received, negative discrimination. Assertions have ranged in manifestation from mild nationalistic murmurings and language of division[18] to calls for total independence from Japan. At the same time, however, Okinawans are as quick to identify as fully-fledged Japanese citizens and, on occasions, to give extreme demonstrations of patriotism. One need only look at the sacrifices in the name of the Emperor during W.W.II, and at unified calls for reversion to the fatherland (sokoku) in subsequent decades. Obviously, the examples are imperfect. One can never attach only one meaning to a given action. It is necessary to look at denotation and connotation of meaning. While Okinawans rallied vigorously behind the cause of reversion to Japan throughout the 1960’s, for example, was this a clear-cut case of assertion of Japanese identity? Might reversion not also have been pursued as a way of ending an extended period of military occupation and to attain the same democratic and human rights enjoyed by citizens of Japan and enshrined in the postwar Constitution? Furthermore, to what extent did Okinawa’s desire for economic empowerment and a reduction in the extent of US military bases in the prefecture come into the equation? Finally, may Okinawans not have been pursuing reversion to in part induce feelings of guilt within a GOJ that sacrificed its southernmost prefecture to US military rule? In truth, all of the above factors, along with many others, were and are applicable. There is no one, single answer.

Archaeological evidence suggests that human habitation first occurred in Okinawa 30,000 years ago, but less is known about the nature of these settlers. It is feasible that early arrivals came from the land we now know as Japan, since the migration route downwards was more convenient than any other, but it is impossible to conclude that migration was exclusively from the north. While the unpredictable weather and geographically-dispersed condition of the islands leading up to Okinawa would provide a stern navigational challenge we have evidence that cultural development in the Miyako and Yaeyama Island groups was affected by influences from Southeast Asia and beyond. Future research may shed more light on the precise timing of these forays into the Ryukyu Islands. What archaeological findings can corroborate, however, is the theory that there were two waves of migration from Japan proper down into the Ryukyu Islands during a later historical period, but that the second wave had less of an effect on cultural development in Okinawa than the first. While excavations show evidence of the Late Jomon culture of Japan (10,000 to 300 B.C.) permeating down into the islands as far as Okinawa, the later Yayoi culture (300 B.C. to 300 A.D.) extends only to the Amami Islands. It is clear that at some very imprecise point in time migration from Kyushu into the Ryukyus began to decline to a trickle, much as did that from the Korean Peninsula into Kyushu, and that the populations scattered throughout the Ryukyus and Japan entered an era of settled evolution. During this period organised and self-conscious political communities began to emerge. Not that the process occurred simultaneously in both areas, of course. Japan was several centuries ahead of the Ryukyus.

Although the birth of Japan is celebrated domestically as taking place in 660 B.C., there is no evidence to back the assertion. The date is drawn from mythical accounts of Japan’s history compiled 1,400 years after the event is supposed to have happened.[19] Even if one does accept that the legendary Emperor Jimmu did descend from the Gods having chosen the land of Yamato (Japan) to rule over, on or around that date, there is no indication that the disparate population groups inhabiting the area possessed any sense of being part of a larger unified cultural entity, let alone any knowledge of his arrival. These conditions persisted for centuries. Later Chinese chronicles of the Wei Dynasty in the 3^rd century A.D. mention the existence of a people inhabiting the land of Wa (Japan) and a primitive Yamatai state, but the location of this political entity was unknown. A more realistic assessment would be that the proper birth of Japan occurred concurrently with the ethnogenesis of the Yamato (Japanese) people between the 6^th and 8^th centuries.[20] This culminated in the establishment of an organized Yamato state with its capital in Nara.[21] Obayashi Taryo asserts that all the major components of the Japanese people had come together by the end of the 6^th century. Buddhism and the kanji writing system had been two notable cultural imports from China during this period, the former constituting the principal factor in the increased centralisation and development of Japan’s bureaucracy. Such advances were consolidated after the establishment of the Ritsuryo legal system in the mid-7^th century and the so-called ‘direct rule’ of Emperor Temmu from 673-686.

If the late-7^th century saw the genesis of an organised state, facilitated by the gradual extension of government controls outwards, it also witnessed the development of a sense of national identification as Yamato[22] among that section of the population which fell within the influence of the state. This consciousness was created and strengthened, as Obayashi further states “through military confrontations with Silla and Chinese forces on Korean battlefields in the 7^th century,”[23] and by attempts of the Yamato state to subjugate frontier tribes within the main Japanese islands: such as the Emishi, Kumaso and Hayato, in subsequent years.[24] The development of an initial identity consciousness was enforced, since one was obliged to identify oneself as being inside or outside of the state if only to avoid violence, but was thereafter cultivated in subtler ways. Emperor Temmu used force to consolidate his power base and to extend the sphere of state influence, founded on his philosophy that “the essence of politics is military,” but he also turned his attention to the manufacture of history. Temmu ordered the establishment of the committee producing the Nihongi in 697. Furthermore, Temmu was the first Emperor to give the Sun Goddess shrine at Ise Imperial status, thereby linking church (the Shinto religion) and state (the Imperial Family). Over a millennium later, at the time of the nation state-forming Meiji Restoration (Meiji Ishin), Japan would arguably resurrect Temmu’s policies.

Yamato state expansion continued through the 8^th and 9^th centuries until, as Kerr states, “natural water barriers north of Honshu and south of Kyushu had been reached.”[25] This is not to say that there was no awareness of the existence of habitation in areas beyond those shores. Intelligence-gathering expeditions ventured to the islands stringing southwards during the late-7^th century, if not before. Furthermore, a Dazaifu, or Civil Administration of Kyushu had been established by the Yamato court to “supervise trade and intercourse with the Korea…and control administrative outposts in the unconquered mountains of Kyushu.”[26] It is logical to assume that people from the Ryukyus had been received at the Dazaifu. Either way, the names of more islands south of Kyushu began appearing in official Japanese documents from the 7^th century on. The most controversial issue, of course, revolves around the degree of control the then Yamato State may or may not have had over Ryukyu. It is one thing to claim sovereignty over the islands since early times, as Japan has done in the construction of its national histories, but another to prove it was manifest.[27] If one accepts that Fumi no Imiko, a court official dispatched to claim the Nanto (Southern Islands), brought all islands as far as Tokunoshima under control by the end of the 7^th century, one must also recognise that he had no success in extending the tentacles of the state to Okinawa. The name Okinawa does not appear in Japanese records until the late-8^th century.

Although there was a flow and counter flow of peoples between Japan and the Ryukyus before and after the formal establishment of a Yamato state with its capital in Nara at the beginning of the 8^th century, which in turn is traditionally regarded as the time the Japanese nation came into being, there is little in the way of compelling evidence that the people of Ryukyu were an integral part of this political entity. Indeed, at this point in time the Yamato state was just starting the process of extending its territorial boundaries outwards. It had yet to subjugate the frontier communities in Kyushu and northern Honshu, and had not organised sufficiently to be able to tackle either the Ryukyus or Hokkaido. Furthermore, the high degree of centralisation which had characterised the Yamato State at the time of its formation began to disintegrate in subsequent centuries. Power was initially usurped from the Imperial Family by Court nobles during the first half of the Heian Era (794-1192), but was then wrested from the nobles by an emerging warrior class, or bushi, by the end of it. The culmination of these shifts was an effective loss of a central administration and the empowerment of regional political entities ruled over by daimyo, or warlords, and their armies. In a sense, Japanese history came full-circle. What is interesting to consider in this regard, is the extent to which the Ryukyus could have been administered by Japan during this more turbulent period. To whom would the people have been subservient? Clearly, it would not have been a central authority.

A tendency toward the creative reinvention of history is typical of powerful political entities the world over, and Japan is no less prone to it than any other state. The assertion that the Ryukyu Islands are historically, ethnically, and culturally an integral part of the Japanese nation - a claim made when the islands were annexed in 1879, and again upon ratification of the Multilateral Treaty of Peace with Japan in 1952 (after which Okinawa’s reversion was demanded) - looks increasingly ragged when subjected to sober examination, regardless of the obvious success the GOJ has had in perpetuating it.