11 │ Okinawa During and After the War, and Today — Discrimination, U.S. Bases, and Multiethnic Japan

🏝️Article 11 │ Okinawa During and After the War, and Today
This final article in the series takes up the singular history that Okinawa lived through during the war, under the postwar U.S. administration, and into the present: the Battle of Okinawa, twenty-seven years of American rule, the 1972 reversion to Japan, the problem of the U.S. military bases, and how Okinawans look at the Japanese mainland. At the same time, it confirms — on the basis of data — that Japan is a multiethnic society made up of the Ainu, Okinawans, resident Koreans, and newer immigrants, and that the popular image of a “single-ethnicity nation of Japan” does not match the historical record.

🧭Orientation for readers new to Japanese history

Era names. This article runs from the late Shōwa (1926–1989) period through Heisei (1989–2019) and into Reiwa (2019–). Era names are paired with the Western calendar year.
“Okinawa” and “Ryukyu.” Ryukyu (Ryūkyū) is the older name — of the independent kingdom and of the island chain as a whole; Okinawa is the name of the prefecture created in 1879 and of its main island. The people often call themselves Uchinānchu (Okinawans), as distinct from Yamatunchu (mainland Japanese).
Two figures that recur. Two different totals of roughly 94,000 appear below — one for Japanese military dead (including Okinawan service members) and one for Okinawan civilian dead. These are separate categories that happen to be close in size. Counting Okinawan service members together with civilians, total Okinawan deaths reach about 122,000 — roughly a quarter of the prewar population.
Why this matters for karate. Karate’s mother soil is Ryukyu, not the Japanese mainland. The discrimination and poverty that drove Okinawans to emigrate, the war that devastated the islands, and the postwar U.S. presence that carried karate to the world are all part of this same history. </aside>

A Timeline of Modern Okinawa

Year	Event
1879	Okinawa Prefecture created (the Ryukyu Disposition)
1945 (Mar–Jun)	The Battle of Okinawa
1945–1972	U.S. military administration (27 years)
1951	Treaty of San Francisco (Article 3 separates Okinawa from Japan)
1952	The Government of the Ryukyu Islands is established
1958	Currency switched from B-yen military scrip to the U.S. dollar
1970	The Koza Uprising
1972 (15 May)	Reversion to Japan
1978 (30 Jul)	Switch to left-side driving (“730,” Nana-san-maru)
1995–1996	The 1995 assault case; mass protests; the SACO agreement (1996)
2019	The Ainu Policy Promotion Act recognizes the Ainu as an indigenous people

The Battle of Okinawa (March–June 1945)

How it unfolded

In the final phase of the Pacific War, the U.S. military launched the invasion of Okinawa — Operation Iceberg — as the stage immediately before a planned landing on the Japanese home islands. American forces landed on the Kerama Islands on 26 March 1945 and on the central western coast of Okinawa’s main island on 1 April. On the main island, ground combat continued for some eighty days until late June — about three months counting from the Kerama landing.

The death toll

The figures below follow the estimates of the Okinawa Prefectural welfare and relief authorities.

Japanese military: about 94,000 (roughly 66,000 soldiers from outside Okinawa, plus about 28,000 Okinawan service members and civilian military employees).
U.S. military: about 12,520 killed and about 36,600 wounded.
Okinawan civilians killed: about 94,000.
Counting Okinawan service members together with civilians, total Okinawan deaths reached roughly a quarter of the prefecture’s prewar population of about 490,000.

📝The feature that set this battle apart. In most Pacific battles the dead were overwhelmingly soldiers. On Okinawa, non-combatant residents died in numbers comparable to the soldiers. That is why the Battle of Okinawa is remembered above all as a battle in which the civilian population itself was caught in, and consumed by, the fighting.

What made the Battle of Okinawa distinctive

The Battle of Okinawa was one of the largest ground battles fought on Japanese soil, and one that drew in the civilian population on a massive scale. It carried a tragedy unlike that of other fronts in several respects.

A “sacrifice stone” for the defense of the mainland. The Japanese high command treated Okinawa as a way to buy time for the coming battle of the home islands. The Thirty-Second Army was ordered to wage a war of attrition, and it retreated southward while pulling residents along with it into the fighting.
Compulsory mass “suicide” (forced group death). In the Kerama Islands (Tokashiki, Zamami) and across the southern part of the main island, groups of residents killed themselves and one another. Whether the Japanese military was involved — through distributing hand grenades, issuing orders, or applying coercion — was long disputed after the war, but the prevailing view in present-day historical scholarship is that military involvement existed in many cases (Hayashi 2001; Yakabi 2009).
Killings of residents suspected of spying. Multiple cases are documented of Japanese soldiers murdering Okinawan civilians. There is testimony that speaking the Okinawan language could draw suspicion of being an enemy spy.
Expulsion from natural caves (gama) and seizure of food by Japanese troops.
“The typhoon of steel” (tetsu no bōfū): U.S. naval bombardment and air raids transformed the landscape of the island.

📝On the phrase “group self-determination.” The Japanese term shūdan jiketsu literally means “group self-determination,” but as a description it is misleading: many of these deaths were not freely chosen. Historians increasingly prefer “forced group death” (kyōsei-teki shūdan-shi) to capture the role of military pressure, the climate of indoctrination (surrender was presented as worse than death), and the distribution of grenades. The wording itself is part of the historical debate.

The Himeyuri Student Corps and the Blood-and-Iron Student Corps

About 240 students and teachers of the Women’s Division of the Okinawa Normal School and the First Prefectural Girls’ High School were mobilized to the Okinawa Army Hospital to serve as nursing personnel — the Himeyuri Student Corps. Of them, 136 died; nearly nine in ten of those deaths came after the army’s sudden order to disband the corps on 18 June 1945, which left the girls to fend for themselves inside the American encirclement. Boys of middle-school age were likewise turned into combatants as the Blood-and-Iron Imperial Loyalty Corps (Tekketsu Kinnōtai), and many were killed. These corps show how the Battle of Okinawa mobilized the young in an organized way, through the school system itself.

The Era of U.S. Military Administration (1945–1972)

The occupation structure

With the end of the Battle of Okinawa, the islands were placed under direct U.S. military rule.

U.S. Military Government (1945–50) → the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) (1950–72).
The Government of the Ryukyu Islands (GRI) (1952–72): a body of resident representatives — but a subordinate organ beneath the U.S. administration.
Currency: U.S. military scrip known as the B-yen (1945–58), then the U.S. dollar (1958–72).
Driving: on the right (U.S. style). Okinawa switched back to driving on the left in 1978 (the event known as 730, Nana-san-maru).
Travel documents: visiting the mainland required travel certificates and identity papers issued under the U.S. administration.

The Treaty of San Francisco (1951)

Under Article 3 of the peace treaty, Okinawa was separated from Japan and placed under U.S. administrative authority. Japan was said to retain “residual sovereignty” — a deliberately ambiguous formula.

📝“Residual sovereignty.” This phrase meant that, in principle, Okinawa was still recognized as ultimately belonging to Japan, while in practice the United States exercised full governing power — legislative, judicial, and administrative — over the islands. It let both governments avoid calling the arrangement either outright cession or genuine Japanese rule, and it framed the eventual 1972 reversion as the “return” of authority that had only been suspended.

The concentration of U.S. bases

From the outset of the occupation, the U.S. military designated Okinawa the “Keystone of the Pacific” and seized vast tracts of land to build bases.

“Bayonets and bulldozers” in the 1950s: armed soldiers entered farmland and expropriated it, in many cases without the landowners’ consent.
Large bases clustered on the islands — Kadena, Futenma, Camp Schwab, Camp Hansen, White Beach, and others.
They served as launch points for the Korean War (1950–53) and the Vietnam War (1965–75).

📝“Bayonets and bulldozers” (jūken to burudōzā) is the standard Okinawan phrase for the forced land seizures of the 1950s: armed troops (the bayonets) stood guard while heavy machinery (the bulldozers) cleared homes and fields to expand the bases, often over the owners’ protests.

Crimes by U.S. servicemen and the human-rights problem

Under U.S. rule, crimes by American servicemen were frequent, but they fell under U.S. military jurisdiction, and redress for residents was difficult to obtain. The Koza Uprising of December 1970 was an explosion of that accumulated frustration.

The reversion movement

Okinawans built a movement demanding reversion to Japan. The Okinawa Council for Reversion to the Homeland (the Fukki-kyō, formed in 1960) was its center, and Yara Chōbyō became its leading figure. The 1967 Japan–U.S. summit confirmed continued talks on the return of the islands, and the 1969 Satō–Nixon joint communiqué set the reversion for 1972.

The Reversion to Japan (1972)

On 15 May 1972, administrative authority over Okinawa was returned to Japan. But the reversion left several problems unresolved.

The bases remained. U.S. military bases were retained after reversion, and the privileged status of the U.S. forces continued under the Japan–U.S. Status of Forces Agreement.
A secret nuclear agreement. It later came to light that the return negotiations had included a secret understanding permitting the “reintroduction of nuclear weapons in an emergency.”
Economic disparity. Per-capita income in the prefecture remained at roughly 60 percent of the mainland level for a long period.
A declining weight of base-related income. The share of base-related income in the prefecture’s total income fell from around 15 percent just after reversion to around 5 percent in recent years. The bases are a source of income, but they are also a constraint on land use and on the shaping of cities.

The concentration of U.S. bases in Okinawa

More than fifty years after reversion, about 70 percent of the U.S. military’s exclusive-use facilities in Japan are still concentrated in Okinawa Prefecture. Okinawa accounts for only about 0.6 percent of Japan’s land area, yet it carries some 70 percent of the area of U.S. exclusive-use facilities. This is a structural imbalance.

Kadena Air Base: the largest U.S. Air Force base in the Far East.
Marine Corps Air Station Futenma: sitting in the middle of the built-up area of Ginowan City, its danger long pointed out. The dispute over relocating it to Henoko continues.
The Takae helipads, the Ie-jima auxiliary airfield, and the Northern Training Area.

Crimes by U.S. servicemen (after reversion)

Crimes by U.S. servicemen continued after reversion. The 1995 assault on a schoolgirl (the rape of a twelve-year-old by three American servicemen) provoked mass protests across the prefecture and led to the SACO agreement (1996). But the relocation of Futenma was delayed, and the conflict over building the new base at Henoko continues to this day.

How Okinawans See the Mainland

How Okinawans regard the Japanese mainland and mainlanders (Yamatunchu) is not uniform. From opinion surveys (by NHK, the Ryūkyū Shimpō, and the Okinawa Times) and from the historical record, several tendencies can be identified.

“We are Japanese too” and “we are Okinawan” — held together

Many Okinawans feel themselves to be “Japanese” and at the same time “Okinawan (Uchinānchu).”
Recent surveys of prefectural sentiment show a positive evaluation of the reversion coexisting with a strong emphasis on Okinawan pride and distinctiveness.
This is not a binary of “Japanese versus Okinawan” but an expression of a layered identity.

Complex feelings toward the mainland

A historical burden: the Ryukyu Disposition, discrimination against Okinawa, the Battle of Okinawa, the imposition of U.S. rule, and the base problem.
A sense of structural imbalance: the feeling that Okinawa is sacrificed so that the rest of Japan can be a “peaceful country without bases.”
Dependence and resistance, side by side: fiscal transfers from the mainland (the Okinawa development budget) coexist with cultural pushback against the mainland.
A shift among the young: among younger people who did not experience the war or the occupation, a sense of unity with the mainland has in some ways grown — even as anger at the discrimination of the social-media age (anti-Okinawan rhetoric online) has become more visible.

The reality of “discrimination against Okinawa”

Prewar: “No Ryukyuans” notices aimed at migrant workers; the killing of Okinawans mistaken for Koreans or Chinese amid the massacres that followed the Great Kantō Earthquake (1923).
Postwar: discrimination in employment and in marriage on the mainland, and persistent stereotypes.
Present: hate speech directed at coverage of the base problem, and discriminatory rhetoric on social media. In 2016, during protests against helipad construction at the Northern Training Area, a riot-police officer dispatched from Osaka hurled the slur “dojin” at demonstrators.

These are not “things of the past”; they are problems that Okinawans continue to face in everyday life.

📝The slur “dojin.” Dojin (土人) literally means “natives” or “earth people,” and in modern Japanese it is a derogatory term implying that a people is primitive or uncivilized. It carries the weight of the colonial-era vocabulary once used toward indigenous and colonized peoples — which is why a police officer’s use of it against Okinawan protesters in 2016 caused such outrage.

The Myth of “Single-Ethnicity Japan”

The image of Japan as “a single-ethnicity nation” is a modern myth, born of the union of prewar emperor-centered ideology with the nationalism of the postwar era of economic growth. Measured against the historical and anthropological record, multiple ethnic groups have lived across the Japanese archipelago and the Ryukyu arc.

The main groups

The Yamato people (Yamato minzoku): the majority group centered on Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū, who from medieval times onward carried the political and cultural center.
The Ainu: an indigenous people centered on Hokkaidō, the Kuril Islands, and southern Sakhalin, with their own language, religion, and culture. After the Meiji-era assimilation policy (the Hokkaidō Former Aborigines Protection Act, 1899), their population, language, and culture contracted sharply. In 2019 they were officially recognized as an “indigenous people” under the Ainu Policy Promotion Act.
The Ryukyuan / Okinawan people: the group inhabiting the Ryukyu Islands (from Amami to the Sakishima group). The Ryukyuan languages (Kunigami, Okinawan, Miyako, Yaeyama, Yonaguni, Amami, and others) form a language group distinct from mainland Japanese, and UNESCO classifies them as endangered.
Resident Koreans (Zainichi): people of Korean origin and their descendants, originating in colonial-era migration and conscription and in the postwar flow of economic and political refugees. They number about 400,000 today.
Newcomers (shin-torai-min): newer immigrants since the 1980s — of Chinese and Southeast Asian origin, Latin American Japanese-descended workers, and others.

The evidence from language and genetics

According to surveys by bodies such as the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, several endangered languages exist within Japan — Ainu, Hachijō, and the Ryukyuan languages among them. The Ryukyuan languages share a common ancestor with Japanese, but on grounds of mutual unintelligibility they are often treated as an independent language group rather than as “dialects.”
Genetic research understands the people of the present-day archipelago as based on a mixture of a Jōmon-derived component (the resident populations of the Paleolithic and Jōmon eras) and post-Yayoi immigrant populations, with recent work modeling it as a mixture of still more lineages. Okinawans and the Ainu carry a relatively higher proportion of Jōmon-derived ancestry, giving them a genetic composition distinct from the residents of Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū (Saitō 2017; Kanzawa et al. 2021).

The history of the “single-ethnicity” discourse

In prewar Japan, the dominant self-image was less “single-ethnicity” than “multiethnic empire” (the slogans of “harmony of the five races” and “the whole world under one roof”). After the war, having lost its colonies, Japan shifted rapidly to a “single-ethnicity nation” self-image, and this became fixed during the economic-growth decades of the 1960s–80s. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s 1986 remark that “Japan is a single-ethnicity nation” is a typical example.

But this does not match the historical record. The common understanding of present-day anthropology, history, and ethnology is that Japanese society is a multiethnic society that includes the Ainu, the Ryukyuans, resident Koreans, and newer immigrants.

Karate and Multiethnic Japan

This multiethnic character matters for telling the history of karate.

The matrix of karate is Ryukyu; it is not a culture of the Yamato people. Even the history that followed Ryukyu’s incorporation as “Okinawa Prefecture” was formed through experiences different from those of the mainland.
Many of the Okinawans who carried karate into the wider world after the war were emigrants, and the descendants of emigrants, to places such as Hawai‘i, Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia. Discrimination against Okinawa and economic hardship were among the motives for that emigration.
Korea’s Taekwondo has, as part of its roots, Koreans who studied karate on the Japanese mainland during the colonial period (figures such as Choi Hong-hi, Lee Won-kuk, and No Byung-jik). This is a history in which colonial rule and the spread of karate are intertwined.
A movement to treat Okinawan karate as something distinct from the karate of the Japanese mainland (the Shōtōkan school, the mainland line of Gōjū-ryū, Wadō-ryū, and the mainland spread of Shitō-ryū) appears in recent Okinawa cultural policy — for example, the founding of the Okinawa Karate Kaikan in 2017. This is inseparable from a reaffirmation of identity as Okinawans.

A Note for Western Readers

When a Western karate book briefly introduces the subject with a line like “Karate was developed in Okinawa and became Japan’s national martial art,” the following history lies behind it.

The dissolution of the Ryukyu Kingdom and its conversion into Okinawa Prefecture (1879).
The transplanting of karate from Okinawa to the mainland (from the 1920s on) and its reshaping into “karate-dō.”
The Pacific War and the Battle of Okinawa (1945), in which about 94,000 Okinawan civilians died.
Twenty-seven years of U.S. military administration, and the concentration of bases that continues to this day.
Discrimination against Okinawa, and the reality of a multiethnic Japan.

To speak of “Japanese karate” as a single undifferentiated thing, without taking these into account, is to paper over Okinawa’s historical experience. At the same time, to grasp karate only as “something purely Okinawan, cut off from the Japanese mainland” is to miss the reality of a karate that has already developed on the mainland and across the world.

Karate is a product of the intertwined histories of Ryukyu, the Japanese mainland, and the wider world. Into every one of those layers, heavy experiences — colonial rule, war, emigration, and discrimination — are inscribed.

On Concluding the Series

This series set out to provide the background knowledge that karate enthusiasts in the Western world need in order to read the “What Is Karate?” — A Multidimensional Inquiry Through Thought, History, and Sociology. Across eleven articles, it has surveyed roughly six hundred years of history, from the founding of the Ryukyu Kingdom to present-day Okinawa.

Karate is not simply a “traditional Japanese martial art.” It is a complex historical product that includes all of the following layers:

the warrior-official (shizoku) culture of the Ryukyu Kingdom;
martial-arts exchange with Fujian Province in China;
the building of a modern nation-state in Meiji Japan;
the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai and school physical education;
university club culture;
war and colonial rule;
the U.S. occupation and globalization under the Cold War;
and the base problem of present-day Okinawa.

To understand it only as “a Japanese tradition grounded in the spirit of bushidō” is to see only half of karate. To shrink it to “just a sport” is to miss the other half. Anyone who trains in karate, speaks about karate, and lives karate must take on this complexity. If this series has helped in some small way toward that end, the author counts it an unlooked-for joy.

Notes on Terminology

Uchinānchu (ウチナーンチュ). “Okinawan(s)” in the Okinawan language; the self-designation of the people of the islands.
Yamatunchu (ヤマトンチュ). Mainland Japanese, as seen from Okinawa.
Gama (ガマ). A natural cave or limestone cavern; many were used as shelters — and became sites of death — during the Battle of Okinawa.
Shūdan jiketsu (集団自決). Literally “group self-determination”; the compulsory mass deaths of residents, now often called “forced group death” to reflect the role of military coercion.
Tetsu no bōfū (鉄の暴風). “The typhoon of steel”: the Okinawan name for the overwhelming U.S. bombardment of the battle.
USCAR. The United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (1950–72), the body that governed Okinawa under U.S. authority.
B-yen (B円). The U.S. military scrip used as currency in occupied Okinawa until the 1958 switch to the U.S. dollar.
Residual sovereignty (潜在主権). The formula under which Japan retained ultimate title to Okinawa while the United States exercised actual governing power (1951–72).
Bayonets and bulldozers (銃剣とブルドーザー). The standard phrase for the forced land seizures used to expand the bases in the 1950s.
SACO. The Special Action Committee on Okinawa, whose 1996 agreement promised (among other things) the return of Futenma.
Dojin (土人). A derogatory term (“natives,” “earth people”) carrying colonial-era connotations of primitiveness.
Ryukyuan languages (琉球諸語). The Kunigami, Okinawan, Miyako, Yaeyama, Yonaguni, and Amami languages — a group related to, but distinct from, mainland Japanese, classified by UNESCO as endangered.

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