Who is an Okinawan?

Note: a week of minimal internet connectivity has hamstrung my posting capability. The site should start updating as normal, on a daily basis, starting today.

Over Okinawa soba last month, the debate intensified. The one that had been raging in the back of my head, that is, except this time the arguing principals were friends of mine from Naha. He (fiery activist) and she (thoughtful journalist) found one point of disagreement to hash out between noodle-slurping. I listened.

The issue: When we say "Okinawan," who is an Okinawan, anyway? The meta-issue, for You, The Reader: What does this have to do with a trip to Nakijin Castle?

Let's start with the simple. Nakijin is the largest castle in Okinawa. The sturdy construction on the Motobu Peninsula is, even today, imposing as it looks out toward the East China Sea. When the landscapes were dominated by regional lords known as anji, having a fortress of rock and stone was an essential bulwark against the slings and arrows of one's rivals.

High vantage points helped keep track of the enemy's advance:

All the views in the world, though, won't defend a kingdom against a superior army. A recurring theme in local history, the poor denizens of Nakijin would fall to an invading force. Just another example of the unfortunate Okinawans being conquered.

Except this time they were conquered by other Okinawans. Kind of. Until the 15th century, when Sho Hashi conquered the whole of Okinawa, the island was divided into three kingdoms divided by geography.

A quick translation: the term for "conquer" in English historical language is "unify." Funny, that. I remember when kids in school used to unify our respective lunch monies in a wallet that wasn't mine. 

Nakijin, before the "unification," was the seat of Hokuzan ("north country"). The lord of the castle and his main aides all committed suicide after the battle to defend their kingdom went south. Reading about this campaign -- and later campaigns, in 1500 and after, to pacify the islands of Miyako and the like -- affected me more than I thought it would at first.

When you're writing a book about how an essentially nonviolent population has been consistently caught between larger, warring powers, there's more than a little disquiet that comes from reading about smaller scale internal violence -- to learn that Okinawans treated each other the way the Shimazu clan of Satsuma would later treat them, as subjects to be brought to heel. 

A little cognitive dissonance is good, though. Cleans the brain, opens one up to new perspectives. So it was as I sat and listened, soba disappearing, awamori glasses being refilled.

When we say Okinawans, she was saying, we're really saying "people from the main island, and even then, mostly people from the populated south." For a long time, people from the rural north were looked down on in the manner of American hillbillies. It's even more clear for people from the outer islands, she continued: the word Okinawans call themselves in the local language, "uchinanchu," doesn't exist in the southern dialects. Miyako people don't call themselves uchinanchu, and neither do people from the Yaeyamas.

Sure, came the gruff reply, we haven't always been one. But we're one now, and language doesn't matter as much as a shared fate, anyway. Besides, maybe we can tell the difference between a Kunigami villager, an urbanite from Naha and a surfer on Iriomote -- but can anyone else? Can the people building airports on hallowed ecological spots? Do they care?  

The discussion was polite, if forceful. And there was more than a little surprise that these two would disagree. Neither hesitates to use the label "Okinawans" when defending the island against those who would act against local interests, and this is illustrative.

Language is deployed differently for descriptive purposes than for activist purposes. "Leave the peace-loving Okinawans alone!" is a much better slogan than "Leave the largely non-aggressive, though occasionally internally violent, population of the former Ryukyu Kingdom alone!" "Save wild Okinawa!" works better than "Preserve the chain of Ryukyu Islands, which at one time politically did not include Miyako, Yaeyama and other outer islands!"

In communication, criteria matters. The journalist knows this, and I suspect she was playing a bit of academic Devil's Advocate.

Time, too, has to matter. Sho Hashi's aggression happened almost 600 years ago, ushered in an age of relative prosperity and created the entity we now refer to as the Ryukyu Kingdom. It gives me pause now, even at this point in time, to issue sweeping pronouncements about Okinawans as one unitary monolith. But my historical musings prove little other than that the victims sometimes become executioners, and vice versa. Identities form when they form, sometimes organically, sometimes from necessity.

One more informative detail. My Devil's Advocate friend? She's a transplanted mainlander with a background in Okinawan history. The staunch defender of uchinanchu identity is a local, born and raised. Note the different perspectives of the learned academic and the native-born rabble-rouser. With detachment comes perspective, on occasion at the expense of passion.

In history, there are times for unity. Then, there are times for taking sides. It takes intellect to see which is which and passion to follow through on what one knows.