The colonial annexation of Okinawa and the logic of international law: the formation of an ‘indigenous people’ in East Asia

Although the United Nations human rights bodies have dealt with the Ainu people as an indigenous people since 1987 and have accepted Okinawan delegations as members of the community of indigenous peoples since 1996, the Japanese government still has not recognized these two peoples as indigenous peoples, asserting that Hokkaido and Okinawa have been part of Japanese territory proper since time immemorial. This article offers a review of the annexation of Okinawa in relation to the building of the nation-state of Japan from the perspective of international law. It shows that the process of annexing Ryu¯kyu¯ is a violation of Article 51 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties that stipulates that the expression of a State's consent to a legal effect is definitely invalid if it has been done by force, in international customary law. In this regard, we should be reminded that the peoples who were unilaterally, forcibly and ‘illegally’ annexed to a given nation-state as an unrecognized colony are ‘indigenous peoples’ in a global context.