A politician who in the 1990s became the first Cabinet minister to have been elected from Okinawa had drafted a document, recently unearthed, theorizing how the prefecture could achieve independence from Japan.
The manuscript was never published, and the author, Kosuke Uehara, died in 2017 at the age of 84, but the thought exercise by a one-time senior government official could aid discussions about Okinawa and its place in Japan at a time when the prefecture remains burdened with U.S. bases 50 years after its return to Japanese rule.
The conclusion reached by Uehara, in his writing tentatively titled "Ambitions for Okinawa Independence," was that "For Okinawa to gain independence in a way acceptable to the Japanese government, a one-country, two-systems is the most realistic choice."