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Beatris Ninh
The latest PALM was held in Fukushima Prefecture in May 2018. The PALM Leaders affirmed that long-term efforts to shape their partnership through the PALM process which will be guided by the following shared vision (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2018).
The island groups of Amami, Okinawa, Miyako and Yaeyama were subjected to the Ryukyuan Kingdom (1429-1879). The larger are mostly volcanic islands and the smaller ones are mostly coral islands. The largest of the islands is Okinawa. The climate of the islands ranges from the humid subtropical climate in the north to tropical rainforest climate in the south. Precipitation is very high and is affected by the rainy season and typhoons. Except the outlying Daitō Islands, the island chain has two major geologic boundaries, the Tokara Strait between the Tokara and Amami Islands, and the Kerama Gap between the Okinawa and Miyako Islands. The northernmost of the islands, Osumi, and Tokara Islands, fall under the cultural sphere of the Kyushu region of Japan; the people are ethnically Japanese and speak a variation of the Kagoshima dialect. The Amami, Okinawa, Miyako, and Yaeyama Islands have a native population collectively called the Ryukyuans although they cannot communicate easily with their own dialects. Administratively, the Amami island group belongs to Kagoshima Prefecture, while the southern part of the island chain belongs to Okinawa Prefecture.
Okinawa is the only Japanese prefecture to lie wholly in the subtropical ocean climatic zone. It is located on the northwestern edge of the Pacific Ocean, just east of the Asian continent, and the southwestern tip of Japan with a total land area of 2,265 square km (874 sq. miles) . It spans a distance of 1,000 kilometers (622 miles) from east to west and 400 kilometers (248 miles) from north to south with 160 islands, of which 39 are inhabited (Figure 2).
The precise origin of Ryukyuan people is unknown. But historians and archaeologists believe that they migrated from China, Japan, Southeast Asia and Micronesia. The earliest human bones discovered on the Island of Okinawa indicated there were human life about 32,000 years ago. There are many evidences to indicate that the earliest inhabitants of these islands crossed a prehistoric land bridge from modern-day China (Takamiya, 2005). Culture is a way of living that is closely attached to a given land or society, whereas civilization could be considered the institutions and functional apparatus of living that can be utilized universally beyond land and society. These cultural traits are transmitted from generation to generation through the socioeconomic impacts of endogenous as well as exogenous forces, and they change over time.
America, or more precisely, the United States Department of Defense at the Pentagon ruled Okinawa for twenty-seven years from 1945-1972. Huge U.S. bases remain, including Kadena Air Base, the largest airbase in the Far East.
The Peace Memorial Park and Museum, which is a legacy of the U.S. involved Pacific War. The most visible symbol of the park is the Cornerstone of Peace which was unveiled in June 1995 in memory of the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Okinawa and the end of World War II. When US President Bill Clinton visited the Cornerstone of Peace in 2000 he delivered a speech promising efforts to reduce and consolidate US bases in Okinawa, as previously agreed by the US and Japanese governments. The Cornerstone of Peace is inscribed with the names of all those who died, regardless of nationality, civilian or military status. As of June 2015, there were 241,336 names. The breakdowns of the inscription are 149,362 from Okinawa Prefecture; 77,402 from other prefectures of Japan; 14,009 from the USA,; 82 from the UK; 365 from the Republic of Korea; 82 from North Korea; and 34 from Taiwan. A significant aspect of the Battle of Okinawa was the greatest loss of civilian life which far outnumbered the military death toll.
Networks of obligation with homelands may persist for generations, as Cook Islanders in New Zealand and Paupans in Australia show. Diaspora communities like Guamanians in California and West Indians in Toronto retain or replicate so much island culture they can be said to replenish rather than diminish the home society. Indeed, emigrants whose education and economic success foster self-awareness assert their land identity more strongly in exile than those at home (Lowenthal, 1998:14).
Amid declining trend of Japanese population, Okinawa's population increased from 970,000 in 1972 , when Okinawa reverted to Japan, to about 1,445 thousand in 2018 (Figure 7). Okinawa is the only prefecture, which has more than doubled its population since World War II.
A rapid population increase after reversion, accompanied by a proportionally larger labor force, has generated a continuous labor surplus in Okinawa's job market. Over the post-reversion period (from1972 to the present), the labor force has increased by 2.3% annually. Although local employment has also increased by 2% annually during the period, it has not been enough to absorb the increased labor force. Consequently, the jobless rate jumped from 3% in 1972 to about 5%-9% in recent years, which are about twice as high as Japan proper. The creation of jobs has been the most important economic and political agenda in Okinawa since reversion.
The second important economic growth factor is the tourism industry. The number of visitors to Okinawa has increased more than 15-fold, from 440,000 to over 8 million during the period 1972-2016, which constitutes an annual increase of 5% compared to a GPP growth rate of 2.5% as is fully discussed later.
The relative importance of U.S. military base expenditures, including the wages of civilian employees, base land leases, and base-related expenditures by U.S. forces and their dependents for local products and services, has declined from 15.5% of GPP in 1972 to about 5% in recent years. The U.S. bases, however, still generate 200 billion yen annually, and provide employment for about 9,000 local people. There are always more local job applicants for base employment than jobs available, owing mainly to the lack of stable and attractive job opportunities in the local market. Beyond that, a large chunk of Japanese central government transfers is directly and indirectly related to the maintenance of bases.
Although Okinawa's agriculture has been diversifying away from traditional sugarcane and pineapple cultivation to flowers and vegetables, such as chrysanthemums, orchids and goya (bitter melon), and tropical fruits such as mangoes, citrus and dragon fruit, the relative contribution to Okinawa's GPP may continue to decline in the future because of increasing international competition, stagnated productivity gains, and aging farm workers.
Okinawa's average monthly wage per manufacturing worker, for example, was US$2,706 for 2012, which was about twice as high as that in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where per worker productivity is higher than in Okinawa. That is to say, the unit labor cost in Okinawa (wage per worker/per worker productivity), which determines international competitiveness, is more than three times higher than those countries mentioned.
Despite the various incentives and preferential measures to promote industry over nearly four decades of implementing long-term economic development plans since reversion, the Okinawan economy is still on the long way towards achieving self-reliant or self-sustainable development financing its mounting trade deficits and reducing the high unemployment rate through internally generated economic growth. Economists and policy makers have persistently pointed to the lack of entrepreneurship, that is, the lack of initiative, well-conceived plans, actions, self-assessment and calculated risk-taking on the part of the private business sector. It can only be an idle dream to talk about sustainable development for Okinawa without strategically nurturing entrepreneurs who must play a vital role in this age of mega-competition. Nurturing entrepreneurship is profoundly linked to human resource development. The subject has been a hot topic for many years because Okinawa, with limited natural resource endowments and with small markets, must pursue its development efforts through effective utilization of its relatively abundant human resources. Compared to Japan proper, where the population started to decline in 2008, Okinawa's population is expected to increase until 2025. This effectively means that Okinawa will be a position to supply portions of the labor force for Japan's future development provided, of course, that this labor supply is well-educated and skillfully trained.
One worrying aspect of Okinawa's human resource development, however, is the close to stagnant trend of college enrollment rates (percentage of college and university enrollments against the number of high school graduates) which declined from 21.3% in 1972 to 19.1% in 1980. Although the enrollment rate picked up to 37.3% in 2015, it was much lower than Japan's 51.5%, itself a remarkable improvement from 29% in 1972. Although household affordability for higher education in terms of per capita income increased by more than 5 times during the period, two important reasons for this stagnant trend of college enrollments can be isolated. One is increased cost of higher education, particularly in Okinawa prefecture where seven local universities and two junior colleges accommodate about a half of applicants; the remainder must leave for more expensive mainland colleges.
Food security is particularly important for a small, isolated island economy where a stable supply of food is often interrupted by natural disasters such as drought, typhoons, tsunami and unexpected environmental changes. Quite often, for these small islands, domestic food supply is the last resort for survival when natural disasters occur. This is particularly true for small Pacific islands where islands are fragmented and located far from their major markets. Ironically, however, domestic food supply in these small islands has been neglected for a long time. As is fully discussed later, subsistence agriculture, which has provided basic necessity of foods to indigenous islanders, has been rapidly disappearing in all Pacific islands, including Okinawa. Increasing cheap and subsidized food imports at the expense of traditional food supply have been major issues in terms of food security and nutritional standpoints (Kakazu, 2012a).
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