Description
Unlike Japanese colonial activities in Korea and Taiwan from the late nineteenth century onwards, the Japanese colonisation of the Ryukyu Kingdom (modern-day Okinawa) in the 1870s has oftentimes been dismissed by mainstream Japanese studies as merely an act of internal territorial consolidation. Against this, this paper firstly argues that the Meiji government’s activities in Ryukyu during this period were very much colonial by examining both the policies and practices of the ruling oligarchs as well as how the Ryukyuan reacted to them. Once the act has been established as a colonial one, the paper argues secondly that partly because of this mis-categorisation, the motives for why the Meiji government decided to colonise Ryukyu have been unsatisfactorily analysed. Specifically, scholarship has tended to focus on the internal socio-political processes within mainland Japan and, consequently, neglected the undeniable importance of the international context that Japan was experiencing at the time: the intrusion of various Western nations in East Asia. As such, the paper lastly uses Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development to incorporate these international dynamics into explanations of why the Meiji sought to colonise Ryukyu during this period.
