Short Abstract

This paper examines Okinawan POWs and civilian detainees as a lens on Okinawa’s liminal legal status within the Japanese empire, focusing on Honouliuli to show how imperial citizenship and wartime law rendered Okinawan experiences historically invisible.

Long Abstract

This paper examines the experiences of Okinawan prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian detainees during World War II as a lens for understanding Okinawa’s liminal legal and political status within the Japanese empire and its enduring consequences for postwar identity and historical memory. While Okinawans were formally incorporated as Japanese subjects following the annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879, their social, cultural, and legal positioning remained ambiguous—an ambiguity that became especially pronounced during wartime mobilization and detention.

Focusing on Okinawan detainees held at Honouliuli National Historic Site in Hawaiʻi, this paper explores how imperial citizenship, colonial governance, and wartime legal regimes converged to render Okinawan POWs largely invisible within dominant narratives of both Japanese POW history and Japanese American internment. Unlike mainland Japanese nationals or U.S.-born Japanese Americans, Okinawans occupied a liminal position: legally categorized as Japanese yet frequently treated as internal others, and socially marginalized within diasporic Japanese communities in Hawaiʻi.

The analysis situates Okinawan wartime detention within a longer historical trajectory, beginning with Ryukyu’s incorporation into the Japanese state, the imposition of assimilation policies, and the extension of Meiji constitutional subjecthood that prioritized imperial authority over individual rights. During the Pacific War, Okinawa became Japan’s final defensive frontline, resulting in mass civilian mobilization, catastrophic loss of life, and widespread civilian capture. Many Okinawan detainees—often noncombatants, student conscripts, or forced laborers—were classified simply as “Japanese POWs,” obscuring their distinct historical and legal circumstances.

By comparing the absence of Okinawan-specific legal redress with the postwar litigation and advocacy pursued by Japanese American internees, this paper highlights how legal status shapes not only rights but historical visibility. It argues that the marginalization of Okinawan POW experiences reflects deeper structural tensions in Japan’s imperial legacy and postwar memory politics. Re-centering Okinawan POWs within Japanese Studies challenges monolithic narratives of wartime “Japanese” experience and underscores the importance of law as a mechanism through which empire, citizenship, and historical remembrance are constructed and contested.