Okinawa Trip Prep Notes

Naha City, Okinawa Main Island

Brief history

Ryukyu Kingdom period (1429–1879)

Okinawa’s main island, home to Naha, was once the capital of the independent “Ryukyu Kingdom” — Shuri Castle sits within present-day Naha City. The Ryukyu Kingdom flourished through entrepôt trade between China (Ming/Qing), Japan, and Southeast Asia. Culturally it was deeply influenced by China (via the tributary system), while retaining its own language and religion (Utaki worship). Notable sites: Shuri Castle, Tamaudun, Shikinaen Garden.

The Satsuma invasion of Ryukyu (1609)

Officially called the “Ryukyu Invasion,” also known as the “Shimazu Invasion” or the “Keichō Campaign,” this was the pivotal turning point where the Ryukyu Kingdom shifted from independence toward Japanese control.

Background: The Shimazu clan, lords of the Satsuma domain, had backed the losing Western Army at the Battle of Sekigahara and urgently needed to rebuild their domain’s finances and standing. They set their sights on the trade profits flowing between Ryukyu and China (Ming). The stated pretext was that Ryukyu had failed to send envoys thanking the Shimazu for past favors; the real motive was coveting Ryukyu’s trade access and expanding territory.

The campaign: In March 1609, roughly 3,000 Satsuma troops on nearly a hundred ships set out from Yamakawa Port in Kagoshima. They first took Amami Ōshima, Tokunoshima, and Okinoerabujima (then Ryukyuan territory) with almost no resistance. They then landed on Okinawa’s main island, captured Nakijin Castle, and advanced on Shuri and Naha, taking Shuri Castle on April 1. Ryukyu’s military was badly outmatched and unable to resist; King Shō Nei was captured, sent first to Satsuma, and then to Edo to meet Tokugawa Ieyasu and Hidetada.

Postwar arrangement — “dual subordination”: Satsuma didn’t formally annex Ryukyu outright. Instead, it let Ryukyu maintain the appearance of independence and continue paying tribute to China, while in reality controlling it — this let Satsuma keep its back-door access to trade with China. Whenever Ryukyu received Qing investiture envoys, Satsuma would deliberately hide its own involvement.

Carving off the Amami Islands: Satsuma cut the Amami Islands (Ōshima, Tokunoshima, Kikaijima, Okinoerabujima, Yoronjima) out of Ryukyuan territory and made them its own direct holdings — this is the historical reason the Amami Islands belong to Kagoshima Prefecture today, rather than Okinawa Prefecture.

Economic exploitation — the “brown sugar hell”: Satsuma restructured the Amami and Ryukyu economies around a brown-sugar (cane sugar) monopoly system, forcing farmers to grow sugarcane and pay their annual tribute in brown sugar, while banning private trade. This squeezed food production and caused severe famine and population decline.

The same logic, three centuries later: the “cycad hell” (Sotetsu Jigoku)

In the 1920s, Okinawa’s economy, under Japanese rule, had become heavily dependent on exporting cane sugar as a single crop. When world sugar prices collapsed, farmers were driven to desperation — some even had to grind poisonous cycad seeds into a starchy paste to survive, which caused poisoning if not processed correctly. This period became known as the “cycad hell.” It was also the true peak of Okinawan emigration — Tōyama Kyūzō, the “father of Okinawan overseas emigration,” had been helping Okinawans move to Hawaii, the Philippines, Brazil, and elsewhere since 1899, and emigration numbers peaked during the cycad hell years.

This event is often seen as the true starting point of the complicated relationship between Okinawa and mainland Japan. Many scholars trace a direct line from here through the Satsuma oppression, Ryukyu’s formal annexation in 1879, the Battle of Okinawa in WWII, and the postwar US military base issue.

Annexation by Japan (from 1879)

The Meiji government abolished the Ryukyu Kingdom and established “Okinawa Prefecture,” formally incorporating it into Japan. Language and culture began to be reshaped by assimilation policies, and the Ryukyuan language gradually declined.

Geopolitical context: from the tributary system to the Westphalian system

The National Palace Museum’s Southern Branch held a 2026 special exhibition, “The Global Panorama of Geopolitics,” which frames the 500 years from 1368 (founding of the Ming dynasty) to 1895 (Treaty of Shimonoseki) as one complete cycle of the East Asian international order. Its final section is titled directly: “The End of the Tributary System: The First Sino-Japanese War and the Treaty of Shimonoseki.” The Treaty of Shimonoseki ended not just the war itself, but marked the shift from a China-centered tributary system to a Western-style Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states.

Ryukyu was the earliest casualty of this transition. Ryukyu had long maintained “dual subordination” — paying tribute to China while also swearing fealty to Japan (the shogunate/Satsuma). The exhibit’s British Museum piece, the scroll depicting the Ryukyu Kingdom’s two envoys’ procession into Edo Castle, portrays Ryukyu’s 1710 tribute mission to Edo (Ryukyu sent eighteen such missions between 1634–1850) — visual evidence of this dual-loyalty ritual.

Under the new order’s logic, which demanded single, unambiguous sovereignty, this kind of “identity ambiguity” as a tributary state was precisely what made a country most vulnerable. The “Disposition of Ryukyu” (1879) happened 16 years before the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) — Japan moved first, using force to annex Ryukyu and fold it into a single sovereign framework, sidestepping any future sovereignty dispute with the Qing dynasty. This echoes the 1880 “Divided Islands, Revised Treaty” proposal (the plan to split Ryukyu in two) in the timeline below — Japan once considered splitting Ryukyu, ceding half to China and keeping half for itself — clear evidence that Ryukyu’s status was treated as a bargaining chip during this transition between old and new orders.

The Battle of Okinawa (1945)

One of the most brutal battles of the late Pacific War. After landing, US forces fought Japanese troops for nearly three months, causing massive military and civilian casualties. This battle left a deep mark on Okinawan collective memory.

Why Okinawa had to be taken

The US goal in attacking Okinawa was clear: cut off mainland Japan’s communication lines to the south and to China, while turning Okinawa into a forward base for invading the Japanese mainland — the reason the largest amphibious landing of the Pacific War happened here. On April 1, 1945, US forces landed on the central-west coast of Okinawa’s main island (Yomitan, Kadena, Chatan) because Japanese forces held the North and Central airfields there — controlling the airfields meant controlling the air. The US operation, codenamed “Operation Iceberg,” had “invading the Japanese mainland after taking Okinawa” baked in from the planning stage — Okinawa was never the endpoint, only a stepping stone. On April 21, US forces took Ie Island, aiming to seize Ie Airfield, then billed as the largest airfield in East Asia, to prepare for the attack on the mainland.

The Japanese defense force (32nd Army) wasn’t tasked with “holding Okinawa” either — its job was to buy as much time as possible, sacrificing Okinawa to delay the US advance on the mainland and prepare for the “decisive battle for the homeland.” In Japanese military strategy, Okinawa was fundamentally treated as a sacrifice, a consumable — a continuation of the same logic that had long placed Okinawans at the empire’s periphery.

The parallel air campaign: precision bombing vs. incendiary bombing

During the same period as the Battle of Okinawa (March 26 – June), the US was also carrying out massive incendiary bombing campaigns against Japanese mainland cities. Both were driven by the same overarching strategic logic of forcing Japan’s surrender — just with different weapons: on the ground, the bloody war of attrition in Okinawa; in the sky, the indiscriminate burning of cities.

The 21st Bomber Command, responsible for bombing Japan, was based in the Mariana Islands (Saipan, Tinian, Guam) — selected for the same reasons Okinawa’s airfields were: close enough (about 1,500 miles, within B-29 range of Tokyo) and directly resuppliable from the US mainland. It was the same “forward chain of air bases” logic in both cases.

In January 1945, commander Haywood S. Hansell was relieved and replaced by Curtis LeMay. The two represented completely different bombing philosophies: Hansell insisted on daylight, high-altitude precision bombing of specific military-industrial targets, believing carpet bombing was both immoral and militarily unnecessary — but this approach kept getting disrupted by the powerful jet stream over Japan, producing terrible accuracy. After taking over, LeMay judged that high-altitude precision bombing simply wasn’t working over Japan, and flipped the tactics entirely — switching to low-altitude, nighttime, carpet incendiary bombing. This approach peaked with the great Tokyo air raid of March 9–10, 1945, which burned 16 square miles in a single night and killed nearly 100,000 people. LeMay’s incendiary campaign continued until Japan’s surrender, ultimately destroying 67 cities and 180 square miles of built-up area, killing at least 300,000 people.

The more brutal the Battle of Okinawa became, the more it reinforced US military leadership’s judgment that a full-scale invasion of the Japanese mainland would produce even more horrifying casualties than Okinawa had — this was part of the logic behind the later decision to use atomic bombs.

US administration to reversion to Japan (1945–1972)

After the war, Okinawa was placed under direct US military administration and only “reverted” to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. To this day, the island still hosts a large number of US military bases, a politically sensitive issue in Okinawa.

The present

Shuri Castle has burned down and been rebuilt multiple times over the centuries. Following the 2019 fire, it’s still under restoration, though parts are currently open to visitors.

Okinawa–Taiwan timeline comparison

Placing the three timelines of Okinawa, Taiwan, and the Japanese government side by side reveals how the two islands’ fates intertwined under Japanese rule. Especially notable: the 1871 killing of Miyako Islanders shipwrecked in Taiwan — this is precisely what led to the later Mudan Incident (Japan’s 1874 military expedition to Taiwan), the first historical moment where Okinawa’s and Taiwan’s fates formally intertwined. Also worth noting is the two-way population flow during 1944–46: Okinawans were first evacuated to Taiwan, and later repatriated back from Taiwan to the Ryukyu Islands.

The table below is drawn from the book Okinawans Adrift in Taiwan.

Map of historical sites

Naha city area (Ryukyu Kingdom period)

Southern area (related to the Battle of Okinawa)

Local Okinawan vocabulary (Ryukyuan/Uchinaaguchi)

Greetings

Common everyday words

Layers of pronunciation for a name (using “Kinjō/金城” as an example)

The same surname written in kanji has three different pronunciations, reflecting layers of history where one language got overlaid by another, from oldest to newest:

1. Kanagusuku — the oldest reading, closest to the Ryukyuan language itself. “Gusuku” is the Ryukyuan word for “castle,” meaning something close to a fortress or fortified settlement.
2. Kinjō — a “Ryukyuanized Japanese” reading, still very common locally in Okinawa.
3. Kaneshiro — the fully mainland-Japanese kun’yomi reading (金 kane, 城 shiro). This is the version actor Takeshi Kaneshiro’s name uses.

Common place-name characters:

• 城 (gusuku): castle, castle ruins — appears in many place names, read differently from the standard Japanese “shiro”
• 御嶽 (utaki): a sacred site, a place of worship

Notes from the Makishi Public Market — seafood

How the market works

Buy fish on the first floor, have it prepared for you on the second floor (the “mochiage” system). Cooking/preparation fee is roughly 500 yen per person.

Fish notes

Irabuchaa

• An Okinawan dialect umbrella term for parrotfish (family Scaridae), not a single species — common examples include the bluish “Ao-budai”
• Corresponds to the English “parrotfish,” also a family-level umbrella term
• They graze on coral and algae; the fine sand they excrete is one important source of white sand beaches (ecologically the same role as Taiwan’s parrotfish, though in Taiwan they’re a protected species while in Okinawa they’re a common food fish)

Akamachi

• Standard Japanese name “Hamadai” (Chinese common name red snapper-ish fish, English “long-tail snapper”), called “Onaga/Onagadai” in the Kantō region
• Bright red body, long forked tail fin, can grow to about 1 meter
• Lives at depths of 200–500 meters, nicknamed the “deep-sea ruby,” can only be caught by boat
• Along with Makubu (white-lip wrasse) and Akajin-miibai (leopard coral grouper), one of “Okinawa’s three luxury fish”
• White-fleshed fish with a mild flavor, works as sashimi/salt-grilled/simmered/fried; professionally handled, it’s bled and aged for two weeks
• Name origin: in “Akajin-miibai,” “aka” = red, “jin” = money, “miibai” = an umbrella term for grouper — together, roughly “the red grouper that makes you money”

Cooking notes

Maasu-ni

• “Maasu” = Okinawan dialect for “salt”
• Method: simmer fish in salted water (sometimes with awamori added) to keep it moist and tender
• Note: this is not the same as “shio-yaki” (salt-grilling) — that’s called maasu-yaki instead (seasoned with salt and grilled). The two dishes often appear together on menus and are easy to mix up.

Ordering phrases

• “Hanshin wa sashimi ni, hanshin wa maasu-ni ni shite kudasai” — half as sashimi, half as maasu-ni
• Shorter version: “Hanbun wa sashimi de, hanbun wa maasu-ni de”
• If you’re not sure how to split the portions, you can add: “Omakase shimasu” — leave it to the shop’s judgment

Okinawa Soba

• Despite having “soba” (buckwheat noodle) in the name, the noodles contain no buckwheat flour at all — they’re made from wheat flour, with a texture somewhere between ramen and udon
• The broth is usually a clear pork bone + bonito stock
• Common toppings:
  • Sanmainiku — simmered pork belly
  • Sōki — tender simmered pork ribs; the most famous variation is “Sōki Soba”
  • Shredded red ginger, chopped scallions, fish cake