The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community by Wendy Matsumura (review)

Before 1879, the Ryūkyū Kingdom had the status of a semi-autonomous state under the control of the Japanese domain of Satsuma, whose warriors had subdued the kingdom nearly three centuries earlier in 1609. The samurai leaders of Satsuma, in league with the shogun in Edo, sought to preserve the foreign status of the kingdom, rather than attempt to incorporate it into the Japanese state, as a way of enhancing the military and political prestige of both their own domain and the shogunate. However, following the formal abolition of the kingdom and its annexation by the Meiji government in 1879, as Okinawa Prefecture, the effort to maintain the foreignness of Okinawa was replaced by a new imperative to incorporate it into the nation-state. Wendy Matsumura argues that local Okinawan elites tried to seize the opportunity created by the conflict between ordinary Okinawan farmers and government-supported mainland capitalists intent on exploiting the cultivation of sugarcane (17). Their appeals to their poorer countrymen to rally together as an Okinawan community did not succeed, however, as Okinawan farmers harboured no special nostalgia for the Ryūkyū Kingdom.

After the abolition of their kingdom, Okinawa’s “commoners” (115) or “small peasantry” (144) found themselves caught between two parties: namely, wealthy industrialists from the Japanese mainland and the local bourgeoisie, both vying for the riches of the sugar industry. Matsumura interprets the various instances of popular social unrest that occurred during the period from 1879 to the 1930s as clear indications that ordinary Okinawan farmers trusted neither side, preferring to preserve much of their traditional ways of life (137), even if it meant sacrificing their own short-term economic gains in the process. A handful of Okinawan leaders and intellectuals crafted an ideology they called “Okinawa-shugi,” or Okinawan “economic nationalism” (157). Even the Okinawan diaspora, a product of the global crash in the price of sugar, was proof that Okinawan farmers rejected Okinawa-shugi, choosing to leave Okinawa rather than seek employment in local factories (158).

While Matsumura’s argument is both interesting and compelling, it is clear that she is uncomfortable with Okinawa’s premodern history as the Ryūkyū Kingdom. For example, she interprets the prohibitions imposed by the Satsuma domain against “Japanization” in Okinawa as evidence that its leaders wanted to “[maintain] a façade of Ryūkyūan independence,” which was true, but she misses the critical point that such independence, within the context of Japanese domination, made both Satsuma and the shogunate the recipients of foreign tribute from the kingdom, allowing them to emulate China’s tributary system (29). A related issue emerges several pages later, when Matsumura proclaims the end of the Ryūkyū Kingdom in 1872 with its classification as a han or “domain” by the Japanese government (37). Actually, the kingdom persisted until 1879, and its classification as a domain signified the end of its classification as an ikoku or “foreign country.” Moreover, her discussion of Nichiryuū dōsoron (“theory of Japanese-Ryūkyūan common ancestry”), which the author renders as “theory of shared ancestry” (119), made famous chiefly via the research of Iha Fuyū (1876–1947), betrays a somewhat weak grasp of premodern Japanese-Ryūkyūan relations. While Iha was certainly a proponent of this theory, he never claimed credit for creating it; instead, he relied heavily on the work of the Tokugawa-era scholar, Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), whose assiduous historical and linguistic research is not without its own legitimacy, even to this day. While the motivations of Okinawan elites like Iha and others were ideologically connected to their bourgeois origins, they were likely not as cynical as Matsumura’s brief discussion would have us think.

In addition to these misunderstandings, there are also a handful of factual errors and mistranslations in the book as well. For example, Shō Shōken (1617–1675) was not the “king...