August 8, 2020. This is a republication of essays first issued on July 25, 2018, and July 9, 2019. It examines Japan’s enormous economic assistance to China and South Korea, Ifa Fuyū’s argument that Okinawa and mainland Japan share common linguistic, ethnic, cultural and social roots, his observation that Okinawans “easily forget their debts of gratitude,” and the broader question of whether Japan should have devoted more of its resources to strengthening its own national resilience.

2020-08-08
This article republishes a chapter issued on July 9, 2019, under the title, “Ifa, who studied linguistics at Tokyo Imperial University, demonstrated that Okinawa and mainland Japan belong to the same lineage in language, ethnicity, culture and customs.”
That chapter itself was a republication of an article first issued on July 25, 2018, under the title, “At the same time, I am astonished by the ingratitude of South Koreans who continue to repay such enormous favors with hostility.”
The South Korean government, like the Chinese government, has not informed its people of these historical facts, and therefore most of its citizens are probably unaware of them.
Above all, I myself, a Japanese citizen, knew nothing of these matters until I discovered the relevant article on the Internet.
For that reason, I believe that most Japanese citizens were also unaware of them.
Under such circumstances, Japanese politicians and the mass media, led by the Asahi Shimbun, continued to speak of “Japan-China friendship” and a “future-oriented Japan-South Korea relationship.”
I can state this from personal experience because, until August four years earlier, I had subscribed to and read the Asahi Shimbun closely for a very long time.
I never once encountered this information in its pages.
Nor do I recall seeing it reported by commercial television stations or by NHK.
By contrast, I had seen more than enough reporting portraying Japan, and especially the Japanese military, as the villain.
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It is not enough merely to be astonished by these facts.
There must be countless Japanese people who would like to turn against the politicians who continued to provide such vast amounts of assistance, and against the Asahi Shimbun, so-called human-rights lawyers and so-called scholars who encouraged such policies, the very kind of words once used by one of their prominent representatives, Jiro Yamaguchi: “…I’ll cut them down.”
At the same time, I am astonished by what I regard as the ingratitude of South Koreans who have continued to repay such favors with hostility.
Some time earlier, while publishing the words of one of the great figures produced by Okinawa in the Meiji period, I recalled that the great Okinawan scholar Ifa Fuyū had identified “ingratitude” as one of the weaknesses of Okinawans.
In an essay entitled “The Greatest Shortcoming of the Okinawan People,” written in 1909 and later included in Ancient Ryukyu, Ifa stated that their shortcoming was that “they easily forget their debts of gratitude.”
He added that this tendency had probably been produced by Okinawa’s circumstances over several centuries.
In this context, “easily forgetting one’s debts of gratitude” meant something like following whichever power was strongest at a particular moment and readily abandoning those whom one had previously followed.
[Passage omitted.]
Ifa studied linguistics at Tokyo Imperial University and demonstrated that Okinawa and mainland Japan share the same roots in language, ethnicity, culture and customs.
His work became part of the foundation of modern Okinawan studies.
The people of Okinawa should never allow themselves to become, in the author’s view, like the South Koreans described below.
After all, Okinawa has continued to receive exceptionally large amounts of fiscal support from the Japanese state.
Had the astronomical sums of aid provided to China and South Korea instead been devoted to strengthening Japan’s national infrastructure and disaster resilience, the author argues, perhaps not a single Japanese citizen would have had to die in a natural disaster.
The author believes that Okinawans, too, should reflect deeply on the scale of support they have received from Japan.
Official Development Assistance from Japan to South Korea.
Note: This does not include the US$500 million provided by Japan to South Korea under the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea.
The following continues from the preceding chapter.