Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa

The first wave 57
Another major local political party, the Okinawa Socialist Mass Party (Okinawa
Shakai Taishūtō OSMP), was established in October 1950. The Party’s chairman
was Taira Tatsuo, who had also been elected the first Governor of Okinawa Guntō.
The Party first started as an English study group consisting of elite Okinawan males
who had graduated from Tokyo University. The members formed a new party,
based on socialism but not class-based, to avoid hostility from the US military
administration.
The Okinawa Democratic League basically represented the conservative establishment
of Okinawa, which gave priority to co-operating with the US administration
and protecting its economic interests. The Democratic League was defeated
severely by the OSMP in the election for Okinawa Guntō Governor. It briefly
changed its name to the Republican Party in 1950, under the leadership of Nakasone
Genwa, who advocated for Okinawa’s independence. In 1952, US-appointed GRI
Chief Executive Higa Shūhei defected from the OSMP, and established the Ryūkyū
Democratic Party (Ryūkyū Minshutō) in August 1952, which grew as a pro-US,
conservative party.
Schoolteachers’ union
Okinawan schoolteachers also became politically active, forming teachers’ unions.
Also, by the late 1940s, more than eighty local assembly members were teachers.
The US military government placed extremely low priority on the education of
Okinawan children (Warner 1995: 52). Destroyed in the Battle, there were almost
no school buildings, books, and other essential materials such as paper and pencils.
Teachers gathered children on the beaches and taught by writing on the sand, under
the trees, and in the tents and barracks provided by the US military. Old textbooks
were picked up from bomb shelters in the battlefields (Yara 1968: 16).
The major difference between schoolteachers and the political parties related to
the question of Japan. School teachers, in other words, formed the central force that
led the campaign for reversion. From the first, the teachers continued the prewar
nationalist educational emphasis on the development of Okinawan pupils as
Japanese citizens. The teachers’ enthusiasm for reversion was also helped by
their will to improve their working conditions to the level of mainland Japanese
educators. As early as 1951, the Okinawan Principals’ Organization (Kōchōkai)
resolved at one of its meetings to request Okinawa’s reversion to Japan. One of
the principals present read a Ryūkyūan poem that received a standing ovation:
‘Mushika America, nuchikandon ariba, uchina mangatami / yamato watara’ (‘If
America does not listen to our request, let’s carry Okinawa on our shoulders and
move across to yamato’) (Yara 1968: 28). Significantly, too, the teachers were the
main promoters of cultural integration with Japan, expressed in the form of cultural
assimilation.
Yara Chōbyō, a former chemistry teacher, was a pioneer of the reconstruction
of education in postwar Okinawa, and Chair of the Okinawa Teachers’ Association
(OTA), formed in 1952. Yara, Kyan Shinei, and other members who travelled to
the mainland for ‘educational field trips’ stressed how ‘rapidly the education system