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The Limits of Okinawa
Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community
By Wendy Matsumura Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7604-0
CHAPTER 1
THE BIRTH OF OKINAWA PREFECTURE AND THE CREATION OF DIFFERENCE
The Historical Significance of Ryukyu's Second Disposition
March 27, 1879, marked the birth of Okinawa Prefecture and the death of the short-lived Ryukyu domain, which came into being on September 14, 1872, after replacing the Ryukyu kingdom. The kingdom, whose establishment in 1429 required the subjugation of rival kingdoms and territories, experienced rapid change and growth as it maintained control of its subjects while building profitable relationships within and without its political boundaries. Broader geopolitical transformations in Asia had profound repercussions on the fortunes of the kingdom, which since its unification had forged active trade and tributary relationships that facilitated the movement of goods between East and Southeast Asia. As the Tokugawa regime faced serious challenges to its legitimacy from within and without, Ryukyu's nobles and officials clung to a political arrangement called dual subordination to Japan and China in an attempt to maintain the kingdom's autonomy in a world that they knew was rapidly changing. Contrary to the desires of its leaders, the kingdom was converted into Okinawa, a full-fledged prefecture of the Japanese nation-state, in a process that the postwar thinker Kawada Yo called the second disposition.
In its disposition, the Meiji regime settled upon a policy of incorporating Okinawa into the polity as a prefecture, rather than a colony. However, from the beginning, it treated the former kingdom differently from other prefectures. While insisting that the people of Okinawa were Japanese subjects, the policy that it instituted to facilitate the transition from kingdom to prefecture—called the Preservation of Old Customs Policy (Kyukan Onzon Seisaku; hereafter, Preservation Policy) was formulated on the assumption of cultural difference. Ostensibly designed to alleviate the tensions and conflicts anticipated by the kingdom's traumatic absorption into Japan, the policy transformed Okinawa into a distinct cultural sphere and a ground for Japanese capital's primitive accumulation process. It provided the material conditions for Okinawa's conversion into a periphery of the Japanese capitalist state, which in turn provided the foundations for a discourse of Okinawan community that local intellectuals and politicians mobilized in order to resist the discriminatory conditions imposed on the region. This chapter traces the process through which the Preservation Policy was arrived at by examining the conditions that early Meiji leaders encountered in the Ryukyus.
The Ryukyu Kingdom under Satsuma Rule
The settlement that the Japanese nation-state qua empire reached with kingdom leaders during the second disposition cannot be understood without understanding what Kawada called the first disposition of 1609. This first moment of subjugation coincided with an earlier moment of unification, this time, of feudal states by the Tokugawa regime. As a result of the kingdom's subordination to the head of a powerful southwestern domain, Shimazu Iehisa, who arrived in the islands with a 3,000-man force aboard a hundred vessels, it was officially incorporated into the Tokugawa polity as the Satsuma domain's subsidiary state. Iehisa's force raided Shuri castle and captured a hundred hostages, including King Sho Nei and the highest political officials of the kingdom, the Council of Three (Sanshikan). The domain justified this annexation as an unavoidable result of the kingdom's repeated refusals to send troops and provisions in support of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea ten years earlier, but it was in fact a calculated move that had the twofold objective of raising the stature of the domain in the eyes of the Tokugawa government and increasing the wealth of Satsuma's merchants by using the kingdom's strategic location to increase the volume of indirect trade with China.
After 1609 the Satsuma domain promulgated a series of laws in the kingdom that solidified the semicolonial relationship between the two governments. First, it attempted to increase its tax revenues by appropriating the Ryukyu peasants' products as tribute, transferring part of the kingdom's subjugated territories to itself, and taking over the power to decide what products could be submitted as tribute and how assessments would be determined. The islands north of Okinawa Island that had been under the direct control of the kingdom including Amami Oshima were placed under the domain's jurisdiction. As a result, it took over collection of their tribute payments, which amounted to one-third of the kingdom's total tax revenues. The domain only dispatched officials and merchants to the kingdom and never stationed troops, but the specter of military force was ever present and the ability of the people to take up arms was restricted by a demilitarization campaign that began in 1699. The stringency of enforcement and degree of exploitation fluctuated according to the domain's economic and political needs.
Despite this officially sanctioned semicolonial relationship, the Satsuma domain insisted on maintaining a façade of Ryukyuan independence through a series of cultural policies that it enacted in the kingdom, beginning with a 1613 order that prohibited the Japanization of Ryukyu's customs and habits. Keeping up the appearance of independence was crucial to fulfilling the domain's main objective of profiting from Ryukyu's flourishing trade, which was enabled by its existing tributary relations with the Ming. The domain promoted the kingdom's appearance as a separate and autonomous state outside of the Tokugawa state system, while controlling its trade and other diplomatic relations behind the scenes.
Ryukyu's trade with China had always been an important part of the tributary relationship between the two states, which had its roots in the late fourteenth century, even before the kingdom was unified. Through the early modern era, the kingdom customarily sent a tribute mission to China every other year, with 100–200 people on two tribute ships; it also sent 100 or so people on a single ship in the off years. As studies of these missions reveal, this arrangement provided the Ryukyuan king with political legitimacy and was an important opportunity for merchants to trade with their Chinese counterparts from their base of operations in Fuzhou. During these missions, they procured silk textiles, porcelain and metal goods, medicine, and other items that they sold at much higher prices to Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asian countries. Controlling the kingdom's trade policies became especially important for Satsuma's officials after the Tokugawa regime severely restricted its own ability to trade with foreign states.
Maintaining Ryukyu's appearance as an independent kingdom was vital to ensuring the continuation of these commercially profitable tributary relations with China. The infamous practice of edo nobori—a procession that made Ryukyuans into a spectacle as they marched, sang, and danced in the streets of Edo (modern Tokyo) on their way to pay their respects to the shogun—was part of the domain's effort to reaffirm the kingdom's difference from Japan proper. This parade of Ryukyuans dressed in ceremonial garb was designed to make it clear to officials of other domains, the Tokugawa shogunate, Chinese authorities, and Ryukyu's leaders that the kingdom merely paid tribute to the Shimazu family and was not part of the domain itself.
In addition to controlling Ryukyu's external relations, the domain established monopolistic control over the kingdom's key commodities like brown sugar, turmeric, and woven cloth. Brown sugar became particularly important after 1646, when the kingdom first used it to pay part of the tribute that it owed the domain. After that, the domain required that the kingdom submit a significant portion of its tax and tribute payments in brown sugar, which fetched a high price on the Osaka market. This transformed social relations in agrarian villages and made it difficult for small peasantry (shono) to maintain self-sufficiency especially after the kingdom government began padding its own coffers through the same policy. Compounding the problem was the kingdom's start of the kaiageto system, the official purchase of brown sugar at below-market prices, which obstructed the ability of the peasantry to buy and sell sugar on their own. Through the back-breaking labor of Ryukyu's peasants and as a result of the kingdom's control over the production and sale of brown sugar, Satsuma merchants were able to make huge profits in Osaka by selling the commodity, whose value rapidly increased in the 1700s as demand for it rose.
The growing economic pressures that the kingdom's agrarian villages had to shoulder after 1609 required significant adjustments to existing social and political relations. King Sho Nei's decision to create a new type of local official—the jikata yakunin, who were selected from among the farmers of a particular village to help with the details of administration, including the implementation of agricultural policy and the collection of taxes and tribute—was one such adjustment, which inaugurated a new chapter in both kingdom-village relations and social relations in the countryside. These officials initially occupied an ambiguous position as both servants of the state and members of their communities, but as the kingdom came to rely on them more, they became increasingly loyal to the center.
The elevation of the position of these local officials in the agrarian villages was facilitated by the kingdom's policies that on the one hand, confirmed their status as members of the local community who were entitled to receive a portion of village farmlands through a system of periodic redistribution (jiwari) alongside their fellow farmers. On the other hand, the kingdom government reaffirmed their privileged status as bureaucrats by exempting them from most taxes and tributes, paying them small salaries that included distributions of official lands called oekachi, and granting them the right to collect labor and other taxes from their fellow villagers for personal use. Through this doubly advantageous position, many local officials became usurers who lent money to their neighbors who were struggling to make ends meet under heavy tax burdens that absorbed two-thirds of the crops that they produced each year.
Even though the system of periodic redistribution of farmlands to villagers covered approximately 70 percent of all arable land in the kingdom, another 20 percent was granted to various officials of the kingdom. Local officials were entitled to receive both normal distributions of village farmlands and official lands reserved for bureaucrats who served the central government. After 1669 they were qualified to receive yet another portion of official lands that were uncultivated but designated for reclamation projects called shiakechi. This was an outcome of King Sho Shoken's decision to bring more land under cultivation to help pay the kingdom's debts to the Satsuma domain. As a result, a new category of large landowners called ueeki who held titles to reclamation lands emerged. It goes without saying that official recognition of these large tracts of land as the property of individuals profoundly transformed the socio-economic foundations of early modern Ryukyu's society and accelerated the process of differentiation in the countryside. The kingdom pursued reclamation together with the promotion of agricultural education, rationalization of management, and strict supervision of cultivators. Local officials who were direct producers themselves and thus most familiar with village social relations and agricultural techniques were deemed best equipped to carry out the important task of the kingdomwide project to increase agricultural yields. Since the kingdom relied on village power holders to donate money and grain to its coffers in times of financial crisis, it was happy to enact policies that reinforced these important donors' standing within their communities.
The harsh repercussions of this differentiation became visible almost instantly, as the practice of selling oneself to escape tax payments (miuri) increased and farmers were transformed into serfs whose sole task was to cultivate the vast tracts of land granted to these new large landowners. Studies by Namihira Isao and others reveal that just a decade after the official distribution of these lands, they had already begun recruiting cultivators to aid in the production of rice, sugar cane, indigo, and other commodities on newly acquired lands. Although these landowners and their families continued to serve as direct producers, they had to bring a variety of people onto their lands—not just cultivators, but other types of workers to help with the manufacture and sale of agricultural goods produced on their property. In most cases these people were tied to their landowner through some form of debt—a condition traceable to the emergence of local officials as usurers in the first hand of the century, which preexisted the formal recognition of the reclamation project in 1669. As a result of the heavy debts that farmers accrued, they often had to pawn the farmlands that they had received during the periodic redistributions of land, which left them no other recourse but to sell themselves to those who were willing to take over their tax obligations in return for total control of their bodies. These indebted farmers-turned-serfs had no other choice but to work the lands of local luminaries because the kingdom's policies prohibited them from moving outside their home villages.
The differentiation of agrarian society produced crisis conditions that forced the kingdom to waive payments on unfulfilled tax obligations in 1820. According to figures from 1825, 3,358 people starved to death that year. The kingdom issued a list of rules and regulations of conduct for local officials in 1831 and ordered the dispatch of agricultural specialists into particularly impoverished villages to alleviate people's suffering, which elevated social tensions to dangerous levels. Ironically, the position of local officials qua large landowners, whose drive to accumulate more wealth brought about the disintegration of many farming families was strengthened following this crisis as the kingdom came to depend even more on their donations to balance its own accounts.
As this examination of the changes to the kingdom's agrarian villages following the first disposition shows, local officials who were installed in the countryside to serve as intermediaries between local communities and the central government came to wield significant political influence due to the financial benefits of their posts. Local officials benefited from their unique position as both within and above their village communities. The kingdom's practice of selling official titles to wealthy farmers in exchange for monetary contributions reveals the power that local elites had amassed by the early nineteenth century. Given these conditions, Iha Fuyu's characterization of the process of the kingdom's disposition between 1872 and 1879 as a "type of liberation from slavery" may have meant more than a liberation from the psychological enslavement of the Ryukyuan people that accompanied subordination to the Satsuma domain; it could have also meant the cultivators' freedom from the shackles of large landowners who bound them to their fields, aided by the agricultural policies of an ailing kingdom. As we will see below, the Preservation Policy accomplished the first type of liberation, but not the second.
The Ryukyu Kingdom in the Meiji Restoration
The internal problems outlined above put strains on the semicolonial relationship between the kingdom and the Satsuma domain, but it was the European states' encroachments in East Asia, particularly starting in the late 1840s, that brought this relationship near its breaking point. The Tokugawa state's signing of the Treaty of Peace and Amity with the United States in March 1854, which opened the three ports of Nagasaki, Shimoda, and Hakodate to American whaling ships, signaled to Shimazu Nariakira, the twenty-eighth feudal lord of the Satsuma domain, that the opening of foreign trade was inevitable. In an attempt to gain control of the process, Nariakira negotiated the 1854 Compact of Friendship and Commerce between the Ryukyu kingdom and the United States and a similar treaty between the kingdom and France in 1855. He hoped to prove his domain's ability to control the kingdom that he regarded as an indispensable buffer and unlimited treasure trove through which he could realize his own vision of rich nation, strong army (fukoku kyohei).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Limits of Okinawa by Wendy Matsumura. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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