American Occupation of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands

U.S. military forces occupied the Ryūkyū Islands following the defeat of Japan at the Battle of Okinawa. Beginning in the 1950s, the Ryūkyū Islands were governed by the United States Civil Administration of the Ryūkyū Islands, an agency created to oversee the territory. During this period, many native Ryūkyūan people came to resent the U.S. occupation and long for reincorporation with Japan [Bairon and Heinrich, 2007]. Two thirds of the Ryūkyūan electorate signed a petition that called for the Ryūkyū Islands to be returned to Japan, and many local movements began to promote Japanese nationalism to link the Ryūkyū Islands to Mainland Japan and protest American occupation. As a part of their mission, these organizations advocated for the Ryukyuan people to speak the Standard Japanese language over their native languages [Heinrich, 2005]. Local governments on the Ryūkyū Islands also began to revive many of the language suppression policies that were enforced under Japanese rule, including the use of dialect tags in schools. In 1950, a conference of local school directors decided that the educational policies on the Ryūkyū Islands would mirror those of Mainland Japan, including the policy that all classroom instruction was to be done in Standard Japanese. This self-imposed suppression reflected the belief of large portions of the Ryūkyūan population that speaking Standard Japanese was necessary for the Ryūkyūan people to modernize and succeed economically [Heinrich, 2005].