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3 Moving for a Better Life (1921–1937) Even before the collapse of sugar prices in 1921 devastated Okinawa’s economy, compelling so many to leave the prefecture, Japan had fallen into a postwar depression that had ravaging effects in rural areas. The “World War I boom,” though it had created jobs in cities, resounded with a steep wave of inflation that was making it harder to pay for daily necessities. The price of rice soared to four times prewar levels by July 1918, more than doubling from the year before. Wages failed to rise in proportion with commodity prices, imposing severe hardships on urban workers. Poorer farmers, mostly tenants who worked absentee landowners’ fields, also suffered, benefiting little from higher prices for the crops they produced. Consumers began to hoard rice, provoking demonstrations in 1918 that escalated into nationwide “rice riots” (kome sōdō) in thirty prefectures, where mobs attacked rice sellers and other stores. They also battled with police, who, along with army troops mobilized by the government, arrested tens of thousands among the estimated 700,000 protesters. A disproportionate number of the more than 7,000 indicted were from the Burakumin minority. In some areas the authorities blamed the riots on this minority alone and hence meted out harsher punishments on Burakumin , including execution. The government subsequently adopted policies to halve the price of rice, stimulate domestic production and imports, and encourage the substitution of other grains. But a depression among farmers dragged on throughout Japan for more than a decade, into the 1930s. During this period, impoverished farm families contracted their daughters to brothels in the cities of Japan, China, and Southeast Asia.1 In mostly rural Okinawa, the impact of the postwar depression was particularly severe because farming households made up more than 70 percent of the population. Furthermore, local plots of farmland were, on average, 40 percent smaller than those in the nation as a whole, and land taxes were higher.2 Thus, the prefecture’s agricultural economy was already languishing when the world price of sugar collapsed in 1921 after a temporary rise during Moving for a Better Life (1921–1937) | 65 World War I. Unlike rice, produced mostly for the domestic market, sugar represented 80 percent of Okinawa’s exports. The shock waves first struck farm families, then pounded related businesses and banks, which failed one after another. Employers could not pay their employees, and, unable to collect taxes, even the Okinawa Prefectural Government went bankrupt. Unemployment reached 40 percent. Not only was rice now largely unobtainable, but people couldn’t even buy sweet potatoes , which had long been a staple food. As in earlier times of famine in Ryukyu, many resorted to eating the seeds and trunk fibers of Japanese palm fern (cycad) plants, which provided nourishment but required careful preparation to avoid food poisoning.3 Unable to feed their children, parents sent their sons out as house servants and fishermen, and, as on the mainland, some contracted their daughters as prostitutes.4 Okinawa during this period has commonly been referred to as “palm fern hell” (sotetsu jigoku). But for many Okinawans, this term sounds too much like some natural disaster, obscuring the responsibility of the Japanese government, which levied higher taxes and invested less in infrastructure and social services in Okinawa than in any other prefecture.5 Moreover, far from supporting the local sugar industry , the national government abandoned it to concentrate on developing sugar plantations in Taiwan, a colony Japan had acquired as one of the spoils of victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895.6 The effect of such policies was to accelerate outward migration, mostly to mainland Japan. Poet Yamanokuchi Baku (1903–1963) returned home from Tokyo, where he had gone as a student in 1922, after the Great Tokyo Earthquake the following year, but his stay turned out to be brief. It was a tragic homecoming. My mother cried as she told me what had happened . Another family had taken over our house after my father’s business went bankrupt. . . . Now he wanted to contract me to work for a charcoal maker who, in return, would pay off his debts. Hearing this, I secretly planned my return to Tokyo, determined never to come back to Okinawa. I managed to get as far as Naha, but our house there now belonged to someone else, and I couldn’t stay with our relatives in the city, who were all dunning my father to pay back money...

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