He stood among the Japanese soldiers wearing a weather-beaten visored cap over his short, dark hair and a rough hewn jacket covering his broad soldiers, a cigarette angling away from his square jaw and a camera dangling from his gloved hand. As they studied documents, the Japanese troops contrasted with Jack London in their box hats and high collared uniforms. A photographer present immortalized London looking like the adventurer and writer that he was, one drawn to the battle like a missionary to his calling, who skillfully recorded the machinations of great powers while sympathizing with the underdogs who struggled to survive.

Out migration has long been a key component of the modern Okinawan experience. As the poorest prefecture in the country with an extremely limited land supply, there were plenty of economic incentives for Okinawans to seek employment outside the prefecture, and large numbers traveled to such places as the sugar and pineapple fields of Hawaii, the coffee plantations of Brazil, newly established colonies in Bolivia (see the Augustine chapter) and many other places in North and South America, Asia and the Pacific Islands region. As a consequence prewar Okinawa came to have the highest ratio of emigrants to total population in pre-World War II Japan and it is virtually de riguer for families in Okinawa to have relatives who live overseas. Although not as closely documented because of the absence of border control procedures (except for the period of U.S. occupation), even greater numbers of Okinawans migrated to the cities of mainland Japan. Large numbers of Okinawans still travel from job-scarce Okinawa to the mainland in search of economic opportunities.

During the 1930s, a dramatic increase in Japanese exports to Africa and Japan's growing influence in Ethiopia led many Europeans and South African whites to evoke the specter of the ‘Yellow Peril’ and to call for measures to halt Japan's ‘penetration’ of Africa. Japan's close ties with Ethiopia and her growing exports to South Africa were of particular concern. Japan and Italy were able to reach an agreement with regard to their conflict of interest in Ethiopia, but Japan's relations with the British Empire suffered as a result of anti-Japanese sentiment in South Africa.

One element contributing to Okinawa's “difference” from the Japanese mainland is the existence in Okinawa of languages that are unintelligible to mainland Japanese. Paul Heinrich takes up the topic of language in Okinawa and, as he makes amply clear, the situation is complicated and, from the standpoint of language preservation, dire. In Heinrich's assessment, the Ryukyu Islands are home to five different, mutually unintelligible language groups. However, since the Ryukyu Kingdom's 1879 absorption into the Japanese Empire, as a consequence of strong official and unofficial pressure to adopt standard Japanese, which Heinrich details, these languages are disappearing rapidly. Notwithstanding the efforts of groups today to revitalize local Ryukyuan languages, Heinrich ultimately ends his piece on a pessimistic note. He claims that saving the endangered languages of the Ryukyus would require strong official support that is not currently forthcoming.

For the last twenty years the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma—or more precisely, its relocation—has been at the epicenter of severely strained relations between local residents of Okinawa and both the national government of Japan and the government of the United States. As Shimoji Yoshio points out in the following article, like other U.S. bases located on the main island of Okinawa, Futenma was originally constructed on largely agricultural land that was seized by the U.S. military during the Battle of Okinawa and not returned to its owners. In the subsequent decades, the surrounding area urbanized to the point where the Futenma facility is now located in the center of a densely populated city. This has generated problems for residents of neighboring areas ranging from noise and environmental pollution to crimes committed by US personnel along with frustrating constraints on land use. Tensions were brought to a boil in 1995 when three servicemen from another U.S. Marine base abducted and raped a 12 year-old girl and in 2004 when a helicopter from Futenma crashed into neighboring Okinawa International University. Both incidents ignited massive protest demonstrations against the U.S. military presence. In 1996, an agreement was reached between the U.S. and Japanese governments to relocate the Futenma base to a proposed off-shore facility to be constructed off the coast of a less densely populated northeast area of the island. However, the relocation has been stalled ever since over concerns about the environmental damage that the proposed facility would do and resistance on the part of Okinawans, almost all of whom would prefer to see the facility moved out of the prefecture entirely.

Former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro seems an unlikely champion of a multicultural Japan. His brief term of office is, after all, perhaps best remembered for the furore he evoked by a speech in which he described Japan as a “Divine Nation headed by the Emperor”. This echo of prewar nationalism stirred fears at home and abroad that senior Japanese politicians still subscribed to Shinto myths of a unique and racially superior Japan. Yet Mori today is an active participant in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's “Diet Members’ League for Promoting Exchanges of Foreign Human Resources” (Gaikoku Jinzai Koryu Suishin Giin Renmei), an awkwardly-named body whose mission is to promote mass immigration by making Japan a magnet for skilled workers from around the world. (Akashi and Ogawa 2008, 69)

At the Chicago Liberty Meeting in April 1899, organized to protest U.S. imperialist advances in the Philippines, Jane Addams was the only woman of eight plenary speakers. There she stated, “To ‘protect the weak’ has always been the excuse of the ruler and tax-gatherer, the chief, the king, the baron; and now, at last, of ‘the white man’” (Addams 1899). A few months earlier, in late 1898, the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain in the Treaty of Paris despite a preexisting revolutionary movement for independence. Subsequently, the Philippine-American War broke out, with Filipinos continuing to seek an end to colonial rule, be it the rule of Spain or the United States. President Roosevelt officially announced the war to be over on July 4, 1902, although fighting continued in some provinces through 1913.

This essay develops McCormack and Norimatsu's point that memories of the past impact contemporary Okinawa and shape the identities of Okinawans. Roberson shows how memories of the Battle of Okinawa are a powerful presence in contemporary Okinawan popular music. In Roberson's words: “Early songs reflect the dynamics and contradictions of assimilationist pressures and desires that led Okinawans to participate … in Japan's wars and empire building. Later songs give witness to personal and cultural ambivalences and to the profound injuries suffered by Okinawans during the battle. As a result of their experiences in war, Okinawans have since that time sung of peace, first in terms of desiring to return to what they think of as a long-ago peaceful homeland, and later imagined in response to American military control and to the promise offered by Japan's ‘Peace Constitution.’” Popular songs in Okinawa, in short, can serve as a fascinating lens through which to observe the way in which Okinawans’ historical experiences have shaped contemporary Okinawan culture and politics.

As in Roberson's analysis of popular songs, Christopher T. Nelson shows how memories of war shape popular culture in Okinawa today—in Nelson's case in the context of community-based dance performances known as eisā. Today eisā is the most widespread and widely recognized community activity practiced in contemporary Okinawa. The Koza Riot that Nelson refers to occurred during the evening of December 20-21, 1970, in what was then a red light district caering primarily to American military personnel outside Kadena Air Force Base. The rioting was precipitated by an incident in which a car driven by an intoxicated American soldier struck an Okinawan man. Efforts by U.S. Military Police to extricate the soldier in question sparked eight hours of street fighting between hundreds of MPs and thousands of local Okinawan residents, resulting in dozens of injuries and large-scale property damage. Most observers interpreted the Koza Riot as an expression of widespread simmering resentment among the local population against the U.S. military presence.

Speaking on May 4, 1902 at the newly-opened Arlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Day address there by a U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt placed colonial violence at the heart of American nation-building. In a speech before an estimated thirty thousand people, brimming with “indignation in every word and every gesture,” Roosevelt inaugurated the Cemetery as a landscape of national sacrifice by justifying an ongoing colonial war in the Philippines, where brutalities by U.S. troops had led to widespread debate in the United States. He did so by casting the conflict as a race war. Upon this “small but peculiarly trying and difficult war” turned “not only the honor of the flag” but “the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.” Roosevelt acknowledged and expressed regret for U.S. abuses but claimed that for every American atrocity, “a very cruel and very treacherous enemy” had committed “a hundred acts of far greater atrocity.” Furthermore, while such means had been the Filipinos’ “only method of carrying on the war,” they had been “wholly exceptional on our part.” The noble, universal ends of a war for civilization justified its often unsavory means. “The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity,” he asserted, but “from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses.

Gavan McCormack closes this course reader with an article that highlights the geostrategic centrality of Okinawa by providing an overview of the currently raging dispute between China and Japan over overlapping claims to a peripheral set of uninhabited islands in “peripheral” Okinawa. The dispute has become so heated that it has generated fears that it could precipitate war between the two countries. As McCormack's insightful analysis makes clear, the issues involved grow out of the historical processes associated with the decline of the Ryukyu Kingdom and Okinawa's incorporation into the modern Japanese state. His discussion covers the actions of the national governments of Japan, China, Taiwan and the United States, and brings clarity to the dispute by detailing how differently the Senkaku issue is framed and conceived in the countries involved. It serves as an excellent illustration of how, thanks to its location, Okinawa's fate in the twenty-first century remains subject to the interplay of the larger powers active in the region, against which it remains relatively powerless.