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Ben Applegate
12/09/03

Tyranny of the Mainland:
The Relationship Between Central and Local Governments in Okinawa Prefecture

The history of Okinawa over the past century and a half is so traumatic and charged that the island is one of the most difficult subjects to comment on in contemporary Japan. Since Meiji Japan announced the annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1872, the Okinawan region has known cultural, spiritual and physical devastation on an unimaginable scale. On May 15, 1972, in what many hoped would mark the beginning of a new era, the islands “reverted” to Japan as Okinawa Prefecture, with de jure status the same as any prefecture on the main four islands. However, due to national and international pressures, the real relationship between the Japanese government and Okinawa has been anything but business-as-usual in terms of national-local relations. In fact, the relationship between the local and central governments is summed up nicely by Kozy Amemiya, who, in explaining why she had never before taken an academic interest in Okinawa, describes it as “too exotic for me to consider as a part of domestic Japanese issues and not exotic enough to attract my attention as part of larger Asian issues” (54).  Indeed, one gets the distinct impression that mainland Japanese don’t quite know what to make of Okinawa. The central government treats the Ryukyus alternatively as a colony or a prefecture whenever it suits their goals, and their actions, when not illegal outright, expose and take advantage of key structural flaws in the Japanese system that allow this exploitation to continue.

Before its annexation by Japan, the Ryukyu archipelago had enjoyed a relatively peaceful existence. Geographical and historical accidents allowed the islands’ societies to develop autonomously, beginning with a system of villages, in which the main family ruled from a hilltop and branched out in all directions (*Taira, 147). As territory was taken up, villages began to subordinate one another, until, by the twelfth century, three kingdoms had formed on the main island of Okinawa. In 1372, Chinese emissaries arrived and established a tributary relationship with the kingdom of Chuzan, which would eventually unite the islands under a single Ryukyu Kingdom in the 1420s. This was the beginning of a long period of cultural exchange and trade with China, which led to Ryukyuan students going annually to China starting in the fourteenth century and the import of Chinese laws and dietary customs. A Chinese district called Kume even sprung up in the Okinawan city of Naha (Rabson, 134-5). The kingdom also adopted its ban on firearms during this period, which would be noted by scholar-governor Masahide Ota in his address to the Japanese Supreme Court in 1996 in support of Okinawans’ peace-loving nature (Ota, 206). During the so-called Golden Age of the Ryukyu Kingdom, from 1400-1550, Ryukyuan traders used their kingdom’s reputation as a pacifist nation to profit considerable from trade between China, Korea and Japan and Southeast Asia and Indonesia (Rabson, 135).

Japan, in sharp contrast, was experiencing a tumultuous period of civil war and military rule at this time, and in 1415 Japan’s Ashikaga Shogunate declared the Ryukyus a tributary of Japan, evidence of their declining relations with China. In 1590 Toyotomi Hideyoshi demanded troops from the Ryukyuan king to aid in his failed invasion of Korea, and in 1609 the daimyo of Satsuma Province on Kyushu, who had been “granted” dominion of Okinawa by Tokugawa Ieyasu, invaded the Ryukyu Kingdom and, though allowing the kingdom to remain independent in name, restricted the king’s actions and taxed the kingdom’s trade (Rabson, 136). This was only the beginning of Japan’s aggression against the Ryukyus.

The question of identity is key to the confrontations between mainland Japan and Okinawa. Some say that Okinawans are 30,000 years genetically distinct from Yamato Japanese (*Taira, 145), while others dismiss any physiological differences as negligible (Rabson, 80). At the same time, Ryukyuan culture is most often understood as a confrontation between indigenous and imported Chinese and Japanese cultures, with writers often emphasizing one or the other. The most commonly cited cultural influence on the Ryukyus during their early history is the Chinese, while Japan is usually credited first for its political interference and only then for cultural exchange. In reality, however, Japanese cultural exports to Okinawa began much earlier, in the three kingdoms period. The Japanese kana alphabet was imported into Okinawa in 1187, and Buddhism first arrived in Okinawa via a Japanese priest, Zenkan, in 1267. These two developments, some scholars believe, had a cultural impact on Okinawa at least as significant as the later Chinese contacts (Sakihara, 8-10). Cultural imports from Japan after the Satsuma invasion and before the Meiji annexation included no and kabuki theatre (Rabson, 136).

The pre-Meiji history and cultural background of Okinawa is thus a complex web of influences that remain important today though many of them are now unrecognizable. These influences now form part of contemporary themes established with the Meiji annexation and, though the actual islands have changed significantly, these issues have changed little since. In 1879, on the occasion of Ryukyuan King Sho Tai’s exile, the Japanese central government insisted on a number of reforms to Ryukyuan society, with an eye to “Japanization.” The only one the Ryukyuans rejected was the reform calling for the stationing in Okinawa of the Sixth Division of Kumamoto of the Japanese Armed Forces. The central government ignored local protests and, as a part of the operation, requisitioned 61,600 square meters of Okinawa for military installations. The locations were prime farmland and local Okinawans asked that the base be built in another location. They offered an alternative free of charge, but the Meiji government again ignored them (Ota, 209). Where the Satsuma regime had forbidden the adoption of Japanese styles of dress or Japanese names for Okinawans, insisting that their nature was “foreign and barbarian” (Hein and Selden, 9), the Meiji state set out on strict plan of assimilation that has been described as progressing from a “top-down” model before 1895 and a “bottom-up” model motivated by Okinawan popular admiration for Japan after that year saw the victory of Japanese forces over China. Okinawans started actively adopting Japanese names (Rabson, 139-141). These attempts coupled with research on the mainland ostensibly showing that Okinawan culture was simply an archaic, more “genuine” form of Japanese culture led Okinawans to consider themselves as simply Japanese from Okinawa, a testament to the policy’s growing success (Rabson, 143).

However, the attempts to assimilate Okinawans, like so many other things, were interrupted, as the Japanese army grew more and more desperate in the latter years of World War II. Though initially committing to a strategy coordinated with Tokyo’s promise of air support, Imperial Headquarters eventually decided to sacrifice Okinawa in favor of protecting the “Imperial homeland,” transferring a significant number of the island’s defenders to Taiwan in the days before the battle (Ota, 23-24). Thus, in contradiction to everything the assimilation policy had taught them, the Okinawans were regarded as peripheral people outside the homeland, no better than other colonized peoples in the Empire of Japan. They were also treated as such by the Japanese army, who forced residents out of their homes and then burned them to the ground, raped local women, conscripted slave labor for the building of military infrastructure, and even impressed local schoolchildren into service to make up for lost numbers. As one official described it, “[They are] behaving as if Okinawa were their occupied land” (Ota, 19-24). Once the battle started, Japanese soldiers frequently forced civilians out of the caves where they were taking shelter into heavy enemy fire. According to a 1960 study by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, 10,101 civilians lost their lives in this way (Ota, 33). By far the most horrifying of civilian deaths in the Battle of Okinawa, however, were the forced suicides, in which families huddled around hand grenades to maximize their destructive capability and, when these were exhausted, set about killing each other with whatever was at hand, including “strings, kitchen knives, razor blades, sticks, rat poison, rocks, [and] stones” (*Taira, 42). When the dust settled thousands of local residents were dead. Illustrative of the political nature this issue has possessed since the beginning, the official government report issued after the war placed the number of dead at only eleven thousand (Ota, 33), while two hundred thousand (Rabson, 144) is closer to the usually cited number.

After the battle, the American occupation of Okinawa began. Though the Americans treated the Okinawans much better than they had been led to expect, the behavior of the armed forces was not exemplary and was certainly harsher than that of Japanese on the mainland. The first action of the occupation was to relocate the majority of surviving civilians into camps, where many of them remained for more than two years. Even after their release, some had little to which to return. Residents of Yomitan village, where the American forces first landed, started returning a year and a half after being interned in the camps, only to find that their village had been burned to the ground and covered in crushed coral to construct an American airstrip. It would be impossible to return to their previous farming lifestyle. In the Kadena, Chatan, and Ginowan areas alone twenty-five villages and hamlets were completely or partially forced to move because of American military construction (Asato, 230-231).

U.S. military forces set up an administrative office to facilitate long-term occupation in 1950, the U.S. Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands, or USCAR. USCAR paid lump sums to landowners at levels far below market value. Later, in 1952, USCAR issued twenty-year leases on appropriated land to fifty-seven thousand different landowners, paying them six percent of the assessed value of their property (Hein and Selden, 6). While USCAR did employ significant numbers of Okinawans in construction and service, they were at the bottom of the pay ladder. Americans earned twelve times more than them, Filipinos earned five times more, and mainland Japanese, whom they had been taught were their compatriots, earned eight times their salaries for the same work. Accidents involving ordinance and wayward aircraft were common, and the occupying troops utilized their extraterritorial rights to commit various crimes against Okinawans with impunity (Hein and Selden, 20). Occupation forces, in order to prolong their stay, tried to remove whatever vestiges of Japanese assimilation remained in Okinawans, promoting Ryukyuan history and culture (Hein and Selden, 21) and even sponsoring a radio station meant to broadcast exclusively in the local Okinawan dialect (Rabson, 145-146).

These efforts backfired. As the local population came to associate the negative experiences of the occupation with attempts to disassimilate them from Japanese society, they responded by demanding “reversion” to Japan. Their reading of the Japanese “peace constitution,” they were sure, would require the removal of the U.S. bases. However, when reversion finally came in 1972, nothing changed. On the very day of the reversion, in fact, one longtime pro-reversion group staged a massive protest against the Japanese government and the terms it had imposed on Okinawa (†Taira, 163). In retrospect, many believe that Ryukyuans missed a valuable chance for independence, a chance that might not come again (*Taira, 172-3), although surveys showed little support for the idea at the time (MacDougall).

The actions of the central government in response to reversion set a pattern for the next quarter century, legally consolidating the bases’ existence and then using money to silence protests instead of actually addressing local residents’ concerns. Tokyo’s actions in 1972 were to pass the Special Measures Law for Land Used by U.S. Forces, which would permit the Japanese government to hand over to the Americans land forcibly leased under the Land Acquisition Law for the “public interest” (Johnson, 111). However, in order to circumvent Article 95 of the Constitution, which prohibits any law meant specifically to apply only to a certain region of the country, the Diet passed the law immediately prior to the reversion. Okinawa could not be said to be part of Japan at the time of the passage of the law, they argued, and therefore Article 95 did not apply (*Taira, 174-5). Then, faced with protests, Tokyo increased the lease payments to silence the landowners and instituted the first in many programs to infuse Okinawa with government capital – bribes – designed to close the “economic gap” between Okinawa and mainland Japan. Five trillion yen had been spent of these efforts as of 1999 (Sasaki, 249).

Moreover, the development plans, while they did increase quality of life on the island and bring the average income up to 70% of the mainland, were unsustainable public works projects that built an Okinawan economy based on government-funded construction. The mayor of Nago City said, in response to the first development program in 1973, “Human beings have become slaves to productionism, which results in the destruction of the basis of our existence…We have learned nothing from this development law designed only to close the economic gap with Japan” (Asato, 234). Masayuki Sasaki of Kanazawa University characterizes the gap-closing measures in harsh terms as well. “Combining the old base-dependent economy with the subsidy-dependent economy after reversion have tended to crush all distinctive elements within Okinawa and deprived it of the energies that come from self-government” (Sasaki, 249).

Private developers, too, began causing as much harm as good almost immediately. In 1973, in response to the Okinawa Marine Exposition, real estate speculators began a massive buy-up of land in the prefecture, much of which was left undeveloped after the boom ended but, having been rezoned, could not be returned to farmers. Thus tracts of prime farmland throughout the islands lay idle (Asato, 237). Developers also widely ignored the Okinawan law prohibiting private beaches, fencing off and developing beaches that had previously been used by local residents (Sasaki, 256).

A full profile of the central government’s arguments for Tokyo-directed “autonomous development” can be found in the literature of the “Okinawa Initiative,” which has received a very helpful once-over by Julia Yonetani of the University of New South Wales. The Initiative consists of two papers, one presented by three Ryukyu University professors at the Asia Pacific Agenda Project in March, 2000, the second some time later by a journalist, an Okinawan planning official, and two professors. The head of the workshop that produced the second paper was Shimada Haruo of Keio University. Takara Kurayoshi of Ryukyu University was the only presenter of the first paper to participate in the writing of the second.

Central to their plan for “autonomously developing” the Okinawan economy is a group called the Informal Council on Okinawa Municipalities Hosting U.S. Bases, of which Professor Shimada is the head. The group consists of five Okinawan members and six from the central government and it accepts proposals for economic project proposals from Okinawan municipalities and decides which to recommend for funding from the central government. Over a seven-year period, these projects had a complete budget of one hundred billion yen (Yonetani, 247-249). Yonetani remarks that Shimada himself characterized the group as the central government’s response to the rape incident of 1995 “on the local front…[The Council] was the government’s attempt to ‘ease’ the sentiment of residents at the most local level” (249). Ease their sentiments, that is, through more public works projects. However, the papers spent more time on ideology than on policy recommendations. The Initiative strives to separate Okinawa from its history, arguing that “Okinawans’ concern for their own history was a ‘problem’ that must be ‘overcome’” in order for development to continue (Yonetani, 255).

When the Initiative does refer to the realities of the bases, it is in a way that denies reality on the same scale as the Education Ministry’s attempts to represent the forced suicides of the Battle of Okinawa as shudan jiketsu, honorable self-sacrifice to be admired (*Taira, 43). “The OI praised Okinawa for making the ‘greatest contribution’ to Japan’s security of any region in Japan” (Yonetani, 255), glossing over that this takes place at great cost to themselves and against their wills in order to house a force that many scholars now agree is strategically unnecessary (Johnson, 120-124). Yonetani ultimately concludes, based on the work of Professor Takara himself, that the ideological goal of the initiative vis-à-vis Okinawa is to “‘incorporate’ and ‘absorb’ Okinawan local sentiment within national policymaking processes [in order to maintain] ‘stability’” (251). The Initiative spells out the philosophy behind Tokyo’s “money for bases” philosophy, which simply perpetuates the twin problems of the bases and unsustainable development in Okinawa.

All this is not to say that autonomous development in Okinawa is impossible, even under the current climate. Professor Sasaki presents an ideal example in the case of Yomitan village’s recent development projects. Yomitan has followed a model of promotion of local specialty products used all over Japan, developing the growing, processing, and marketing of their native beni-imo sweet potato as well as traditional weaving, while keeping their activities in the local economy. In addition, Yomitan has managed tourist development on their own terms, co-developing resort sites with outside capital while insisting upon environmentally-conscious development, public beaches, local employment, and contribution to local industries, notably through the “Yomitan morning market,” which sells local products at the hotels daily. One key element of this plan is that Yomitan never sells resort land, maintaining a lease on the land so that they can stop a development as a last resort (Sasaki, 255-256).

Ultimately, centrally implemented development projects did not succeeded in silencing protests again the bases either, and the issues exploded with the September, 1995 abduction and rape of a local schoolgirl by three American servicemen. A delegation of Okinawan women returning from a successful presentation at the Fourth U.N. World Conference on Women immediately issued a statement demanding the removal of the U.S. forces and, with other local citizens’ groups, began large-scale protests against the substandard treatment of women and children on Okinawa. However, it was not just a citizens’ movement. The Okinawa Prefectural Assembly itself organized an October rally of 85,000 people at which Governor Ota apologized for not having been able to protect the girl. These protests launched a new international effort to increase awareness about the base issue in mainland Japan and the United States (Francis, 190-191). The Okinawan population made use of every new political tool that citizens had; nearly 90% of the responses to a prefecture-wide referendum were in favor of reducing them, while a local plebiscite in the town of Nago rejected the building of a new heliport off the coast that would damage one of Okinawa’s last living coral reefs and possibly destroy the feeding grounds for what may be the last Japanese population of the marine mammals called dugong (Johnson, 220).

In addition, participation of the local government did not end in organizing protests. The Land Acquisition Law, at that time, required that the leases on requisitioned land be renewed every five years. This required the signatures of the landowners, or, if they refused, the mayor of the local municipality or a designated substitute. If the mayor refused, the responsibility passed to the prefectural governor. This system worked to smoothly maintain the base land in Okinawa until 1995, when the leases reached Governor Ota’s desk without a signature and he too refused to sign them, leaving the prime minister’s office, then occupied by Socialist Murayama at the head of a still-shaky LDP-Socialist coalition, no choice but to sue the governor to force him to sign the leases. The High Court found in the prime minister’s favor, but Governor Ota appealed to the Supreme Court, making a passionate argument under the Constitution and Article 95. Though the reaction seemed to be positive, he lost the lawsuit (Ota, 205).

Then Tokyo decided to prevent a similar event from happening again by first patching up the Land Acquisition Law and then by removing Ota from his office as governor. In another almost-unanimous violation of Article 95, the Diet removed the requirement for the governor’s signature from the law and then cut off all subsidy funds to Okinawa Prefecture in anticipation of the upcoming 1998 gubernatorial election. Ota’s LDP-endorsed challenger, Keiichi Inamine, ran his campaign explicitly on the platform that he could return public funds to Okinawa. With 52.1% of the vote to Ota’s 46.9%, Inamine won.

A letter sent in 1879 from the Meiji government to the Ryukyuan government rejecting their protests against Japanese military deployment there read: “Since the government has the duty to protect the safety and stability of the territory and population, where to station the armed forces is a matter for the [central] government to decide; no one has the right to oppose” (Ota, 209). Two World Wars and a new Constitution later, only Tokyo’s willingness to say this openly has changed. The actual attitude of the central government in connection with Okinawa has changed little. Every citizen group and local official, every referendum and plebiscite has been rebuffed. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that these calls indicated to the central government that it was time to pump more public works money into Okinawa. The relationship between Tokyo and Okinawa is one as unsustainable as the development projects along the island’s coast. The exploitation of structural problems in the Japanese national-local relationship allows the central government to maintain order in Okinawa by alternately pouring money in or withholding money. When they cannot buy compliance, implicitly violating Okinawans’ democratic rights, they explicitly violate the Constitution in order to maintain the base regime. Eventually the issue will flare up again as it did in September, 1995, and at that time the Japanese central government may not be able to buy off the Okinawan population.

Works Cited

Amemiya, Kozy. “The Bolivian Connection: U.S. Bases and Okinawan Emigration.” Okinawa: Cold War Island. Ed. Chalmers Johnson. Cardiff, CA: Japan Policy Research Institute, 1999. 53-70.

Asato, Eiko. “Okinawan Identity and Resistance to Militarization and Maldevelopment.” Islands of Discontent: Okinawan responses to Japanese and American power. Ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden. New York City: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003. 228-242.

Francis, Carolyn Bowen. “Women and Military Violence.” Okinawa: Cold War Island. 189-204.

Hein, Laura and Mark Selden. “Culture, Power, and Identity in Contemporary Okinawa.” Islands of Discontent. 1-38.

Johnson, Chalmers. “The 1995 Rape Incident and the Rekindling of Okinawan Protest Against the American Bases” and “The Heliport, Nago, and the End of the Ota Era.” Okinawa: Cold War Island. 109-132 and 215-234.

MacDougall, Terry. Personal correspondence. January 2004.

Ota, Masahide. “Re-examining the History of the Battle of Okinawa” and “Governor Ota at the Supreme Court of Japan.” Ibid. 13-38 and 205-215.

Rabson, Steve. “Life on the Mainland: As Portrayed in Modern Okinawan Literature” and “Assimilation Policy in Okinawa: Promotion, Resistance, and ‘Reconstruction.’” Ibid. 71-92 and 133-148.

Sakihara, Mitsugu. A Brief History of Early Okinawa Based on the Omoro Soshi. Tokyo, Japan: Honpo Shoseki Press, 1987.

Sasaki, Masayuki. “Sustainable Development in Okinawa for the 21st Century.” Okinawa: Cold War Island. 247-261.

*Taira, Koji. “The Battle of Okinawa in Japanese History Books” and “Okinawa’s Choice: Independence or Subordination.” Ibid. 39-52 and 171-188.

†Taira, Koji. “Troubled national identity: The Ryukyuans/Okinawans.” Japan’s Minorities. Ed. Michael Weiner. London: Routledge, 1997. 140-177.

Yonetani, Julia. “Future ‘Assets,’ but at What Price? The Okinawa Initiative Debate.” Islands of Discontent. 243-272.