Our column this month in the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan’s Number 1 Shimbun is about the government purposely neglecting to report two sexual crimes allegedly perpetrated by U.S. military personnel stationed on Okinawa to the Okinawa prefectural government. The point of the piece is to discuss Okinawan women’s inferior status in the eyes of both the U.S. military, which considers the island “spoils of war,” and the Japanese government, which thinks of Okinawan women as something it can sacrifice for the sake of national security. Both views indicate the colonialist mindsets of the two countries. 

Now we want to add a third country that shares this outlook, even if China’s claim on Okinawa is, ostensibly, at least, purely cultural. In her occasional column for the Asahi Shimbun, University of the Ryukyus associate professor of international political history, Akiko Yamamoto, writes about a video by the Okinawan rapper Awich that has become very popular on the Chinese website Bilibili, which is fashioned after the Japanese video site Niconico Douga. On both platforms, viewers can submit comments on the video they’re watching in real time and have those comments appear in the video in a fleeting manner. The music video in question presents the song “Longiness Remix,” a reggae-inflected hip-hop tune in which Awich and three other Okinawan rappers express pride in their Okinawan identity using language and references specific to Okinawan culture. 

Yamamoto explains that the song adheres to classic hip-hop protocols as set out by the original Black crews who launched rap in the late 70s: pride in one’s roots and community, loyalty to friends and family, and a drive to make life better for oneself and one’s children. (Of course, these aren’t the only themes that hip-hop pioneers covered back in the day, but they’re the ones that Yamamoto is using to advance her thesis) However, the message that has gotten through to Chinese fans of the video and Awich’s music is a bit different. Many of the positive comments floating by on the Bilibili screen as the song plays cheer for Okinawan independence, an issue that Awich is certainly cognizant of but doesn’t address at all. Of course, viewers might interpret some of the lyrics as advocating for Okinawan independence. Awich encourages the “passing down” of Okinawan mores from generation to generation and embracing Okinawan culture to withstand outside pressure for change, entreaties that could be inferred as supporting independence from Japan, but the song doesn’t seem to carry any overt political message. 

According to Yamamoto, the seed of this idea was planted by a Chinese student who attended the University of the Ryukyus for one year and then promoted the video on Mandarin-language social media as a means of bringing Chinese people and Okinawan people closer together. The student pointed to images in the video—a big feast feting the 97-year-old matriarch of a family, tropical trees swaying in the wind, attire and hairstyles associated with the Ryukyu Kingdom—that Chinese will be familiar with, since they resemble customs and artifacts also found in Taiwan and China’s Fujian Province. The student even claims that traditional Okinawan attire came directly from Fujian, whose own traditional clothing is now quite hip among China’s youth. The student also insisted that Awich’s facial features “look as if they could have come from Fujian.”

These and other suppositions, says Yamamoto, have “inspired” young Chinese people to believe that “Okinawa is part of China” and Okinawans want to “return to China,” even though all the video really shows is people celebrating their ethnic identity with no mention of China whatsoever. At the same time, the Japanese authorities, meaning those from Yamato (the name Okinawans use to refer to the rest of Japan), warns the southwestern-most prefecture not to be pulled into China’s orbit of influence, a kind of tacit reference to Okinawa’s history of being controlled by outside forces, including Japan. Naturally, such admonishments are ignored by Okinawans—not so much because they don’t consider themselves susceptible to any kind of Chinese control, but rather in order to be defiant toward their actual overlords in Tokyo.

The Ryukyu archipelago’s independence ended early in the 17th century when the Satsuma clan that ruled what is now Kagoshima Prefecture invaded the kingdom and declared it part of their dominion, even though the islands had some ongoing relationship with China, mostly in the area of trade. Following the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century, the new government retaliated for the killing of 54 Ryukyu people who drifted ashore on Taiwan in 1871 and used the incident to apply pressure on the Qing dynasty to accept that the Ryukyus now belonged to Japan. 

The U.S. entered the picture in 1944, when it published a booklet about the Ryukyus one year before it invaded Okinawa. The booklet said that the rest of Japan considered Okinawans to be ethnically inferior, and that the archipelago enjoyed a cultural connection to China, which at the time was an American ally. Such matters should be exploited by the U.S. politically, said the booklet, and after Japan’s surrender, the U.S. military controlled Okinawa until 1972, effectively severing it from Japan. 

Consequently, the U.S. influence over Okinawa isn’t so much lingering as entrenched. Yamamoto mentions that U.S. annual troop rotations for Okinawa normally happen in the summer, and during July and August she often encounters U.S. officers in Kakazu Takadai Park in Ginowan giving guided tours to new arrivals, since the park is the site of a particularly fierce battle. Once she heard an officer say, “We acquired this land with our blood, so that’s why we remain.”

As has often been said, 70 percent of all U.S. military facilities in Japan are on Okinawa, which essentially means that Okinawa is still part of the U.S. in the minds of the American military. Yamamoto says U.S. servicemen bring their problems from their home country to Okinawa. In addition to sexual assault, many are caught for other crimes, including drunk driving and drug smuggling. In fact, they’re connected. By the Pentagon’s own count, 60 percent of U.S. soldiers who commit sexual crimes were under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time. This year alone the U.S. military has counted 4 sexual assaults by U.S. personnel on local women in Okinawa, but, as we pointed out in our Number 1 Shimbun article, the U.S. has consistently failed to come up with any measures to address the problem on anything more than a temporary basis. According to Yamamoto, Okinawa is still not free from these three countries that have staked their claims on it.