A widely covered recent New York Times article (“Calls Grow in China to Press Claim for Okinawa,” June 14, 2013), regarding the question of who owns Okinawa, Japan or China, omitted some important historical and cultural facts that must be considered for a more informed discussion of this potentially volatile issue. The article cites a Chinese official’s argument against Japan’s sovereignty over the Ryukyus “because its inhabitants paid tribute to Chinese emperors hundreds of years before they started doing so in Japan.” It also quotes a Boston University professor that Japan conquered the Ryukyus in 1609. While it is true that the Ryukyus had been under the nominal suzerainty of China since 1372, it is a misconception of Japanese history to say that the Ryukyus paid tribute to Japan or that Japan conquered the Ryukyus in the 17^th century.

Until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when rule over Japan was returned from the military regime of the Tokugawa Shogunate to the Imperial Court of the Japanese Emperor, the Ryukyus, nominally ruled by their own king, had in fact been subjugated by the Japanese feudal domain of Satsuma (modern-day Kagoshima Prefecture) for around two and a half centuries. Satsuma, a leading force in the revolution to overthrow the shogunate, existed, along with some 260 other feudal domains, under the hegemony of the shogunate, as a semiautonomous political entity in the Japanese archipelago. In fact, Japan did not exist as a nation until the formation of the Imperial government at the beginning of 1868. Okinawa was not conquered by Japan until more than a decade later, by which time the former feudal domains, including Satsuma, had been absorbed into the Japanese nation as prefectures under the direct control of the central government in Tokyo.

The New York Times article should also have noted the centuries-old strong cultural ties between Japan and the Ryukyus and that the China-Ryukyus relationship became muddled around the beginning of the 17^th century when Satsuma started using the Ryukyus as a trading post with China. When Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy stopped at Naha, the capital of the Ryukyus, in June 1853 on his way to Japan, to force the country to open its doors to the West, thus triggering the revolution that would result in the fall of the shogunate fifteen years later, he was informed in writing by Ryukyuan officials that the Ryukyus were “outer dependencies of China,” while maintaining “intercourse with a friendly and near nation”–i.e., Japan–for the purpose of trade. The narrative of Perry’s expedition to Japan, based on his journals, cite the views of a certain Dr. Bettelheim, who had lived for some years in the Ryukyus in the mid-19^th century. Bettelheim spoke of the many “Japanese”–most certainly samurai of Satsuma–who “stroll about [Naha] as uninterruptedly as the natives,” and “intermarry with the [Ryukyuan women], cultivate lands, build houses . . . and in short seem to be perfectly at home. But a Chinaman is as much hunted and spied after, and pelted, and insulted as any other foreigner.” Bettelheim continues: The “language, dress, customs, virtues, and, vices of [the Ryukyus] correspond to those of Japan”; the trade of the Ryukyus was “entirely with Japan. If the island were a Chinese dependency this would not be so”; and “the country, though independent to a certain extent, (its ruler being permitted, for a good contribution to Pekin [sic], to assume the high-sounding title of king) yet is, to all ends and purposes, an integral part of Japan.”

As I write in my upcoming book, Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Through the Eyes of the Shogun’s Last Samurai (Tuttle, 2013), after the Meiji Restoration Japan considered the Ryukyus part of its Empire; as such it claimed the right to protect the people of the Ryukyus. In April 1874 Japan invaded Taiwan, ostensibly to punish aborigines in the southeast of that island who had murdered shipwrecked Ryukyuan sailors in 1871. Japan argued that if China, which claimed Taiwan, would not accept the responsibility of punishing the aborigines, it would. But Japan was more concerned about affirming its sovereignty over the Ryukyus–and it is important to note that at the time Japan’s Imperial government was run, to a great extent, by former samurai of Satsuma and that the Taiwan invasion was led by army lieutenant general Saigo Tsugumichi (Saigo Takamori’s younger brother), originally of Satsuma. Saigo’s troops easily achieved their purported objective of punishing the aborigines on Taiwan, after which China demanded Japan’s immediate withdrawal. Japan refused and war seemed imminent. But an accord was reached between the two countries in October, by which the most powerful man in the Japanese government, Okubo Toshimichi, also formerly of Satsuma, obtained China’s recognition of the legitimacy of Japan’s invasion of Taiwan. China’s acquiescence implied that it also recognized Japan’s sovereignty over the Ryukyus, which were finally incorporated into the Japanese Empire as Okinawa Prefecture in 1879.

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