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Abstract The rewriting of history in the post-colonial period is often accompanied by significant adjustments to the power structure of occupied regions and profound reconstruction of ethnic identity, which essentially is a process in which the dominant power realizes its own interest demands and ruling legitimacy through discourse construction. On April 1, 1945, U.S. troops landed on the main island of Okinawa, and after a brutal Battle of Okinawa, they completely took control of the Ryukyu Islands and quickly established the United States Military Government, marking the beginning of a 27-year occupation and rule over the Ryukyu Islands. This period, which followed Japan’s colonial rule (1879-1945) and preceded Japan’s administration period (since 1972), became a crucial turning point in the historical development of the Ryukyu Islands.
After its establishment, the U.S. Military Government strictly followed the strategic positioning of the Ryukyu Islands by the U.S. military during the Battle of Okinawa, clearly implementing the core ruling principle of “separating Ryukyu from Japan” and establishing the basic policy of “pro-American and anti-Japanese, supporting Ryukyu’s subjectivity”. At the same time, it gradually established autonomous institutions participated by Ryukyuans and indirectly managed by the United States, attempting to politically sever the historical ties between Ryukyu and Japan, strengthen Ryukyu’s “independent” image, and lay the foundation for the United States to long-term control this strategically important location in the western Pacific.
To maximize its own strategic interests and consolidate the legitimacy of its rule in Ryukyu, the United States did not limit itself to political and military control, but took cultural and educational means as an important tool to systematically reconstruct the historical memory and cognitive system of the Ryukyu people. In this process, various cultural carriers such as textbooks, museum exhibitions, and academic publications became the core positions for the United States to promote the construction of historical narratives, all centered on the core orientation of “taking Ryukyu as the center”. They deliberately highlighted the subjectivity and uniqueness of Ryukyu, weakened or even erased the profound impact of Japanese colonial rule on Ryukyu, and implanted pro-American values.
In this specific historical context, the rewriting of Okinawa’s history was by no means a simple rearrangement of historical facts, but a profound transformation of the discourse system. It completely subverted the hegemonic discourses constructed during the Japanese colonial period, such as “Okinawa is an inalienable part of Japan” and “Ryukyu and Japan share the same ancestors”, and broke Japan’s long-term monopolistic narrative of Ryukyu’s history. At the same time, taking advantage of the opportunity of the U.S.-led historical rewriting, the Ryukyuan intellectual class got rid of the ideological imprisonment during the Japanese colonial period, actively participated in the excavation, collation and dissemination of ethnic history, reorganized the historical context of Ryukyu as an independent kingdom, retrieved the language, culture and folk memories suppressed by Japanese colonialism, and thus realized the re-memory of ethnic history and the reconstruction of identity, promoting the revival and development of Ryukyu studies.
Focusing on the historical writing and narrative of Ryukyu in the early period of the U.S. occupation (1945-the 1950s), this paper systematically analyzes how the United States realized its strategic demands through discourse construction from four dimensions: the U.S.-led macro historical writing strategy, the narrative construction in post-war textbooks, the civilized display narrative in museums, and the historical research of Ryukyuan scholars. It explores the internal connection between historical writing, power operation and identity, reveals the complexity and diversity of Ryukyu’s historical narrative during this period, and provides an important reference for understanding the multiple aspects of Ryukyu’s history and the evolution of East Asian geopolitics.
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Published: 30 March 2026
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