Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the tsunami and meltdowns that followed in its wake, there have been many moving stories about how the disaster impacted, and continues to impact, especially Japanese living in Fukushima and the Sanriku Coast. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, life returned to normal for the vast majority of the population within a few years. March 2011 and its aftermath seem like distant memories, something that happened a long time ago in a region far, far away.

Every day except for Sundays, holidays and typhoon days hundreds of huge dump trucks enter the US Marine Corps' Camp Schwab at Henoko, in northern Okinawa, carrying landfill – dirt, sand, stones – and dump it into the sea offshore from the base. Eventually, they hope, they will be able to dump enough to support an airstrip on top of the pile, and transform Schwab from a camp into a superbase. Every day except for Sundays, holidays and typhoon days, Okinawans and their supporters from Japan and abroad carry out a sit-in at the gate aimed at preventing, or at least slowing, the entry of these trucks. This sit-in has continued now for more than 1700 days – possibly qualifying for the Guinness Book, if anyone would take the trouble to make the application. Okinawans have any number of reasons for opposing this new base: the fact that the land reclamation will probably kill one of the world's last undamaged coral gardens in the adjacent Oura Bay; the fact that US bases have always brought with them crimes, accidents and pollution; the fact that mainland Japan's refusing to accept this base but forcing it on tiny Okinawa is a straw-that-breaks-the-camel's-back act of discrimination. And there is the fact that this and all the other bases here trample on Okinawa's essentially peace-loving sensibilities.

On February 1, 2019, the Japanese Ministry of the Environment submitted to UNESCO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) its nomination of four areas in the Ryukyu archipelago for UNESCO World Natural Heritage status. The areas are Amami-Oshima Island, Tokuno-Shima Island, the Northern Part of Okinawa Island, and Iriomote Island (see the Nomination Document and the Nomination Annexes).

The present article deals with the ‘educational movement’ of the 1950-60s focusing on the issues of discrimination against zainichi Koreans and Okinawans. It examines the moments of mutual gaze between zainichi Koreans and Okinawans as both struggled for freedom and liberation against the US-Japanese system of domination. Zainichi Koreans and Okinawans were autonomously choosing their respective identities in accordance with the changes in political circumstances. They initially wanted to become liberated peoples belonging to (unified) Korea and Japan respectively. Of course, their goals of withdrawal of foreign armed forces from Korea and Okinawa and social reforms were ultimately thwarted. Nevertheless, the attempts of the marginalized to forge horizontal unity and relativize the Japanese nation state via the concepts of ‘motherland’ merit attention.

Months before the U.S. invasion of Okinawa in April. 1945, thousands of civilians evacuated Okinawa with their families to rural areas of mainland Japan. Tamaki Rieko's father, a physician, decided to stay as his duty in the war effort. Among his family of ten only Rieko survived the battle. She writes, “even as the onslaught worsened, Okinawans believed that, if they could just endure a little longer, a huge force of support troops from mainland Japan would be coming to their rescue.” Later the family decides to leave the cave-shelter where they'd evacuated and move farther south to avoid advancing U.S. forces. “We heard from the adults speaking in low whispers about what the enemy did to prisoners of war. The ‘devil-beast Americans’ would slice them up into little pieces, they said. We firmly believed this, which was … why we had to leave the shelter.” Of the battle's end she writes, “How could the war be over, I wondered again, never imagining that it could end with Japan's defeat. After all, we'd been taught that Japan was ‘the land of the gods,‘ and no matter how desperate the situation might be, the kamikaze winds would blow and bring the nation victory.”