Okinawa. The name conjures up different images depending on one’s interests. If you’re into modern history, one thinks of the protracted battle for that tiny island near the end of World War Two. If you’re into politics, Okinawa is an incredibly complex web of military base-related issues wherein it can be hard to separate causes from effects. If the study of ethnicity and culture is your thing, Okinawa provides insight into a once-rich culture that is now all but extinct, its current inhabitants Japanese by almost any measure.
But if you’re into more distant history like I am—with more than a passing interest in how events from those times affect us still today—Okinawa is a magical place. The island chain is considered as strategic a location today as it was 500 years ago, though for very different reasons. Today, Okinawa Prefecture, legally a part of Japan since 1879, hosts the largest U.S. airbase outside the Contiguous United States as well as a complete Marine Expeditionary Force, Army logistics and Special Forces bases, and Navy support facilities. And yet once upon a time, the kings enthroned on this tiny island were the linchpins of the East Asian economy, making them and their people enormously rich in the process.
How exactly did such a prosperous people come to such ruin? How did what was likely the richest, per capita, nation in the region become the poorest prefecture in all of Japan? How did a kingdom with a population of at least 50,000 people, which could have easily afforded strong defenses, lose its independence to a laughably small number of armed men from Southern Japan?
Many of you, if you ever thought about it at all, probably just assumed that Okinawa was always part of Japan. I was first introduced to the island through reports from the battle in 1945, but couldn’t really picture the place as a modern location and the people there real until the second Karate Kid movie. The ubiquitous U.S. military presence there, and the manner in which U.S. military personnel interact quite normally with the local inhabitants today, is captured clearly in the background of that film (sorry, yet another 80’s movie reference!).
Arriving on Okinawa for the first time in 2004, I found the people friendly, the island beautiful, and the food and drink delicious yet noticeably different from what I’d found in Japan. More to the point, perhaps, I found castles. LOTS of castles!! (Castles of Okinawa) Way more than I thought could have ever existed on an island 70 miles long (north to south) and averaging about 7 miles wide. How could so many fortifications be built in such a small space? More importantly—to my mind at least—is the question of why someone felt they were necessary.
The answer is complicated, but over time I came to see that Okinawa’s distant past has a direct and enduring effect upon its current situation: the poorest prefecture in Japan, it’s people looked down upon as “different” by their countrymen, and hosting a larger number of U.S. Forces than any other prefecture. All of this has led to Okinawa repeatedly playing the U.S. Military against the Government of Japan to secure additional subsidies, making up for their otherwise lagging economy. The political situation on the island is complex, but is deeply rooted in the island’s history.
Called the Kingdom of Ryukyu at the time it was incorporated into Japan in 1879, Okinawa had only unified under centralized rule 450 years prior. Before that time the population was divided into three smaller kingdoms, or principalities, controlling Northern, Central, and Southern Okinawa. These three political entities and the armies they raised fought one another off and on from 1314 to 1429, when the central principality, Chuzen, brought its competitors to heel. This period of competition and warfare led, as is often the case where terrain is favorable, to the construction of many fortifications, today termed Gusuku sites. The castle ruins one visits today, while impressive, are all that remains from that period.
Ryukyu was, at the time of its inception as a unified polity, a militarily strong kingdom. Several Ryukyu military expeditions to the islands that lie between Okinawa and Southern Kyushu emphasize that point, at times giving the Japanese Shimazu clan, which ruled the area around modern Kagoshima, real cause for concern. Enough so that in 1609, following the failed Japanese invasions of Korea from 1590 to 1594, and the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 which solidified the reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Shimazu successfully invaded Ryukyu with a paltry 3,000 troops. So then, how does the Kingdom of Ryukyu, strong and expanding in 1429, get rolled by an almost insignificant force just 180 years later?
The answer is instructive and one that should echo into eternity for any people enchanted by their own financial successes, or naïve enough to think that humankind has evolved beyond the need to secure resources by force of arms. You see, once the Kingdom of Ryukyu no longer needed to fight internal battles, and external campaigns became wars of choice vice necessity, royal energy turned to economic matters. Why? Because the island of Okinawa sat astride nearly every major trade route in East Asia. Traders could risk the long voyage from India to Japan, rolling the dice against the ruinous typhoons that still plague those seas. Alternatively, they could sell their goods on Okinawa, cutting the length of their voyages significantly and greatly reducing risk of shipwreck, with both developments increasing their profits. The same was true of traders moving the other direction, to such a degree that the people of Ryukyu grew very prosperous. Archaeological digs in the modern era continue to find luxury items in lower class dwellings that would have been unimaginable almost anywhere else in the world.
As the rulers of Ryukyu put more and more trust in their position as valued trading partners, they neglected defense. Don’t get me wrong, they built strong fortifications to defend their cash cow, the harbor at Naha, but neither trained nor maintained a military strong enough to defend their newly acquired wealth from any other direction. Ryukyu was fast becoming a rich, weak kingdom that others were bound to covet.
And so, despite Ming Chinese recognition of the kingdom as a tributary state, in 1609, 3,000 troops under the Shimazu Clan invaded Okinawa, stormed the northern fortification of Nakijin, and marched on Shuri Castle. The fight there to protect the King was desperate, but lost nonetheless, and King Sho Nei was taken back to Japan as a trophy.
The rest of Okinawa’s story reads like a bad drama, with China and Japan pretending for years that Ryukyu still maintained its independence in order to continue the valuable trade. Yet the proceeds no longer stayed on island, and the once proud, once affluent people of Ryukyu began their long slide into obscurity and relative poverty.
In the 20th Century, Imperial Japan recognized Okinawa’s strategic position, guarding the southern coast of Kyushu, and expended scarce resources and manpower to turn it into a killing ground for U.S. Forces advancing toward the home islands. As with the just-fought battle of Iwo Jima, defenses on Okinawa were designed to force the Allies to consider a negotiated end to the war rather than carry out an invasion of Japan proper. Instead, facing horrific casualty estimates informed by the experience of those two battles, the U.S. ended the war in 1945 with a pair of atomic weapons. On Okinawa, however, the long-term effect of the battle was to reduce the population of the island by about 33%.
There is a lesson in all this, one that’s been relearned several times throughout history. There simply is no prosperity without security. The kings of Ryukyu forgot this, to the great detriment of their languishing people and fast-disappearing culture. The Korean kingdom of Choseon would make the same mistake, exalting education and bureaucratic academia at the expense of national security. The ultimate result was invasion and colonization by Imperial Japan, and the eventual split of that ancient country into the North and South we see today.
Governments face hard choices, and in democratic countries, these are by definition passed on to the people. Yet neither government officials nor private citizens can ever allow national security to be bartered away for any reason. The history of mankind is full of examples like that of the Okinawans. The consequences of their decisions were never what was intended, and yet, in the end result, they freely gave up their independence all the same. Historical judgment, it seems, weighs heavily in favor of results—no matter how noble or enviable the intent.
M. G. Haynes