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4 Wartime (1937–1945) As more Okinawans moved to the mainland, their residential communities continued to grow. It was Japan’s involvement in full-scale war that brought in thousands of Okinawans for military-related jobs. In its final years, however, the war wrought death and devastation on their communities , which were mostly located in urban industrial areas. The number of Okinawans residing in Greater Osaka more than tripled between 1935 and 1940, from 18,774 to 56,828, after having declined by 4,565 over the previous five years.1 During the second half of Japan’s turbulent 1930s, more Okinawans than ever left home for work on the mainland, where war-related production, planned and subsidized by the Japanese government, was fueling rapid industrial expansion. Meanwhile, the construction of new factories in Osaka’s environs accelerated a “secondary migration” to other cities in Osaka, Hyōgo, and Shiga Prefectures. As for the war, by mid-1942, after a decade of invasions and offensives, Japan controlled not only much of northeastern China, including the capital of Nanking (now Nanjing), but also the Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong, Singapore , French Indochina (now Vietnam), and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). But in June 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy suffered a major defeat near Midway Island in the Central Pacific. Seizing the strategic advantage, the Allies pressed a broad counteroffensive , capturing territory in battles that often inflicted heavy casualties on both sides and local civilian populations. With the capture of Saipan in July 1944, U.S. forces began closing in on Japan itself, now within range of American B-29 bombers. As the prospect of air attacks loomed, evacuations began of civilians deemed unessential to the war effort. Individuals, families, and organized evacuee groups left industrial centers for suburban and rural areas, where large numbers, especially children, suffered from dislocation and severe food shortages. By this time, many Okinawans who had earlier moved to the mainland for jobs and had not been drafted into the military were conscripted for labor in local factories producing munitions and other war supplies. Wartime (1937–1945) | 95 They were among the recorded 10,388 killed and 29,807 injured in massive firebombings that devastated Greater Osaka in the spring and summer of 1945. From March to mid-August more than 2,200 Allied bombers flew eight major air raids, especially targeting the kind of factory districts where most Okinawan residential communities were located, leaving them in ashes and rubble.2 Meanwhile, the invasion of Okinawa, launched in late March 1945, bogged down into a devastating war of attrition that dragged on for three months, taking a recorded total of 237,318 lives, more than half of them Okinawan civilians.3 In the aftermath of massive human, material, and environmental destruction, entire families disappeared and whole villages were destroyed. Many Okinawans in mainland cities who hoped to escape the burnt-out ruins and return to their homeland after the war had nothing left to go back to. Furthermore, the U.S. military that now occupied and governed Okinawa not only made travel to and from the Japanese mainland difficult, requiring documents that were often unobtainable, but also seized local farmlands, including some owned by mainland residents or their families , for a major expansion of military bases. Wartime Labor Shortage: More Jobs, Higher Pay This tumultuous period began in 1937, after Japan had invaded and occupied Manchuria some six years earlier. The skirmish between Japanese and Chinese forces near Peking (now Beijing) on July 7, 1937, known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, quickly escalated into full-scale war. Responding to the “emergency situation” (Japan never officially declared its war against China), the Japanese government implemented laws regulating capital investment along with imports and exports, and mobilized industry with large government subsidies for military production. Two years later, in 1939, with indications that the war would be prolonged, the government passed the National Mobilization Act, which tightened controls on labor, imposing strict worker registration requirements that would later expedite mandatory job assignments. Civilian industries predictably declined, while those serving military needs expanded rapidly. In Osaka, once called “the Manchester of the East” for its many cloth factories, the textile industry shrank by half after 1937, along with chemical and heavy industries not related to the war effort. That meant layoffs for some Okinawans, especially those working in textiles and lumber.4 However, many more found jobs in factories switching to warrelated...

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