This three part New Year essay was commissioned by the Okinawan daily Ryukyu shimpo.
For Japanese text, carried here with permission from Ryukyu shimpo, see the headings of each section.
2009 is an especially important date in Okinawan history. It marks the 400th anniversary of the invasion and conquest of the islands in 1609 by 3,000 musket-bearing samurai from the mainland Japanese domain of Satsuma. Till then, as the Ryukyu kingdom, the islands had been an autonomous part of the East Asian “tribute” world centring on Ming China. After the invasion, the appearance of independence continued but henceforth in fact the Ryukyu kings were subject to Satsuma, and to the Edo Japanese state.
270 years later, in 1879, even the residual sovereignty of the Okinawan kings was finally extinguished and the islands were incorporated as Okinawa prefecture within the modern Japanese state (the Meiji state, established in 1868).
The 400th anniversary of Okinawa’s incorporation in the pre-modern Japanese state, which is also the 130th anniversary of its incorporation in the modern state, offers an occasion to reflect on four turbulent centuries, from the perspective of a territory that has uniquely been both “in” and “out” of the Japanese state. Once Japan’s remotest periphery, for long butt of discrimination and exploitation and literally sacrificed to try to stave off attack on the “mainland” in 1945, Okinawa in the 21st century is at the heart of the Northeast Asian region and, as the following essay argues, raises crucial questions over Japan’s identity and role in the world.