The subtropical island of Okinawa Prefecture has an environment ... We hear folk songs recalling the sufferings and troubled history of Okinawa, from the samurai conquest incorporating it into ...

Just 350 miles from Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu, Okinawa was home to an ethnically diverse group of people. Many Okinawans had mixed blood, unlike their Japanese neighbors to the north.

June 23 is Okinawa Memorial Day, when people in the ... in a school history textbook about how the Japanese military forced local residents into mass suicides, an island-wide protest campaign ...

Both Okinawa and the Uezu family have a long history of suffering ... Uezu heard some people argue that Okinawa should gain independence from Japan. Others said the island prefecture would develop ...

"Okinawan people are very open-minded and inclusive," Yumiko says, pointing to the eclectic pottery creations on the island as proof. In many ways, Okinawa is another world unto itself, a mystical ...

In Okinawa, more than 22,000 people were conscripted in this way. This amounted to about 20 percent of the fighting force deployed on the main island of Okinawa. The policy was also called ...

In the final months of World War Two, the southern Japanese prefecture of Okinawa experienced ... He began to make regular visits to the island, interviewing people who survived the fighting.

RANGE: The Okinawa woodpecker lives only in Yanbaru, a small area of forested woodlands in the northern mountainous region of the island of Okinawa, Japan. MIGRATION: This species does not migrate.