Light and shadow in the Ryūkyūan-Okinawan identity

This paper begins by pointing out the complexity of dealing with the issue of identity, especially in the Ryukyuan-Okinawan context, which is characterized by dramatic historical changes. Actually, after the Ryūkyū kingdom was formally annexed to Japan by the Meiji government in 1879, the inhabitants of this region, situated on the periphery of a rapidly modernizing nation state, were subjected to the assimilation policies and discriminatory attitudes of the Japanese central government. Great sacrifices were demanded throughout the Okinawan islands during World War II, and in the succeeding years the Okinawan people suffered the indignity of occupation by American forces.The question of how to establish and maintain an independent identity albeit these dramatic changes is one that they struggled with throughout this period. This struggle is examined through the activities of the “father of Okinawan studies,” IHA Fuyū (1876–1947), and his contemporaries (such as JAHANA Noboru, 1865–1908); the activity of the reversion movement (Fukkikyō) during the American administration; and the significance of the Cornerstone of Peace (heiwa no ishiji) in the Mabuni Peace Memorial Park, which was erected to remember those who were killed in the wartime period.The final part analyses the relationship between memory and identity, where the identity of a community is considered as a result of memory that requires a substantial temporal duration to function. This memory is selective. It is biased, yet at the same time dynamic. In this regard, the French scholar Maurice HALBWACHS (1877–1945), who is considered the ‘father’ of the social history of memory, wrote a few years before his death in Buchenwald concentration camp that the past is not conserved but is reconstructed, and that collective memory is not a simple resurrection or a revival of the past, but is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the function of the present. This means that, behind public memory and collective identity, there is always a project to accomplish, and that the selection of which past is to be brought into the present changes with the change of this project. What is crucial when considering the Ryūkyūan-Okinawan identity is how well the communal memory functions in establishing basic grounds for continued communal relations. The academic elucidation of the Ryūkyūan-Okinawan identity, however, remains a problem both old and new