Eras Edition 9, November 2007 – http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/eras The rhetoric of the assimilation ideology in the remote islands of Okinawa: becoming Japanese or Okinawan? Stanislaw Meyer (Jagiellonian University) Abstract: Being seen as peripheries of civilisation, the remote islands of Miyako and Yaeyama suffered from political, social and cultural marginalisation in the Ryukyu Kingdom. With the fall of the kingdom and the establishment of the Okinawa prefecture in 1879, these islands, like other regions in the prefecture, were subjected to the policy of assimilation and ‘Japanisation’. Assimilation was promoted in Okinawa in the name of modernisation and the idea of Japanese culture was closely associated with the notion of modernity and civilisation. Pre-war newspapers in Miyako and Yaeyama demonstrate, however, that the advocates of assimilation skilfully exploited the issue of local identities and complex relations between Okinawa and the remote islands. They encouraged local people to combat their inferiority complex by presenting themselves as more ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’ than Okinawans. Japanese culture was appropriated as a device for negotiating one’s status within Okinawan society, and hence assimilation came to concern the matter of ‘becoming Okinawan’. Historians have been long debating on whether the history of modern Okinawa should fall under the study of Japanese colonialism, or should be seen as a process of modernisation and integration with the Japanese nation-state. 1 Undoubtedly, pre-war Okinawa had an ambiguous status: although nominally a Japanese prefecture, for many years it remained under a semi-colonial system of governance. Even if the government had eventually recognised Okinawans as fully-fledged citizens, local people could never fully benefit from the privilege of having Japanese citizenship. Okinawa remained the poorest region in the country, with the lowest rates of income-per-capita, an underdeveloped infrastructure, and the worst access to healthcare, education and other modern institutions. Put simply, Okinawan people were underprivileged in terms of what Thomas Marshall