E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 7, 2022

Nuchidutakara (life is a treasure): The Spirit of Okinawa inResistance to the Fascism of Democracy
Mai TAKAHASHIJapan Women’s University
1. Nuchidutakara — The thought of as an oath to inherit the memoryof war
Nuchidutakara has become a widely-known word that expresses the spiritual andideological character of Okinawa. It is a popular idea that thoroughly embodies peaceand rejects any spirit of sacrifice. The term holds a very important position considering
the future state of Japanese society and world peace.
However, Okinawans have not always recognized and circulated this term as asymbol of the heart of Okinawa. According to Osamu Yakabi, an Okinawan modern andcontemporary history researcher who carefully explored the coining of the term
Nuchidutakara, “The word Nuchidutakara is hardly confirmed in texts written during
and in early postwar times.” (Yakabi 2009:199). After the introduction of the term Nuchi
in the late 1960s, “In June 1987, a local newspaper reported that the description of theJapanese genocide in the Battle of Okinawa was completely removed from high school
textbooks by the Ministry of Education” (ibid.:199). Two newspaper companies, theOkinawa Times and the Ryukyu Shinpo, immediately began a three-month long series.
Related organizations also responded quickly to the “fight against the power that comesto crush” (Kinjo et al. 2019:129). They “broke the silence of 37 years and started talking
about the deletion of massacres by the Japanese military in the textbook examination
because they felt bitter that ‘if we don’t talk now, it will be miserable again.” One of themost notable aspects of this struggle was that not only organizations and researchers but
also readers who had subscribed to newspapers received the daily testimonies (Yakabi2009:203). Furthermore, in the process of collecting testimonies from people andquestioning about the experience of the Battle of Okinawa, researchers extracted the word
Nuchidutakara and it was published in the Okinawa Times. This was the moment when
Correspondence:
Mai TAKAHASHI, Japan Women’s University. Email: mai0718@smile.ocn.ne.jp

Nuchidutakara (life is a treasure)47

the word first appeared in a newspaper (Yakabi 2009:204). Thus, Nuchidutakara is a new
popular idea with less than 40 years of history that represents the Okinawans’ earnest
desire for peace and their oath of determination to inherit war memories in collaboration
with researchers.
However, the word had already been used in the speech of the Crown Prince during
his visit to the prefecture in 1983 to promote blood donation and in the speech of U.S.
President Bill Clinton at the Okinawa Summit in 2000. The intended ideological nature
has also been used in the language of the opposition（Kinjo 1987:20-22; Kano 2011:230).
The Okinawa People's Thought Movement, which continues to this day, is in the midstof a battle to refine its ideological character, in which the words Nuchidutakara are noteasily taken away by the authorities.
This report focuses on this point. Specifically, the author focuses on two thinkers
from the Yomitan village who have led the Okinawans’ ideas to this day, the sculptor
Minol Kinjo and the Shinshu Otani monk Shoichi Chibana. Through an overview of how
the ideological character of Nuchidutakara has been refined by these two thinkers, I
examined the ideological conditions and significance of Nuchidutakara which protects
people from war and enables them to live truly democratically.

2. Who coined the term Nuchidutakara?
The sculptor Kinjo adopted the term as his own way of life, but Nuchidutakara is
not originally invented by him. Kinjo testified that he had first heard the words in thepostwar streets as the voice of the people who had sacrificed a lot in the war (Kinjo
1987:21-22). However, he said that he learned the spirit of the term in his childhood justafter World War II. Kinjo was raised by his maternal grandfather Makari Miyagsk (Kinjo2001). His father had gone to war and died in battle on Bougainville Island when Kinjo
was less than a year old. Kinjo said that his grandfather, who was a fisherman's boss,
never exploited his fellow fishermen. He recalled, “If there are ten fishermen, some ofthem have been fishing for four or fifty years, and some of them have gone out to sea for
the first time yesterday or today, but they have the same share. In fact, what I've
experienced is that the deaf, who had just started fishing, worked in the sea together, but
we divided all the fish and shellfish in the harvest into equal parts. I think it was theNuchidutakara that supported this behavior, which is that life is a treasure.” (ibid.:1-2)
Thus, the term Nuchidutakara supposedly existed long before it was ideologized as thelanguage and spirit of the people, but it was reconceived out of the language of the people
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M. TAKAHASHI

who lived during the war. According to what Kinjo has learned from his predecessors,
Nuchidutakara can be understood as a spirit of equal distribution on the premise that there
is no superiority or inferiority in life.

3. Word of Okinawa in resistance to the fascism of democracy
Yomitan village, the birthplace of Shoichi Chibana, contains the remains of the war,
Shimukgama and Chibichirigama, known as the most important bases for Okinawa
peace learning (Yakabi 2009:65-75). Two people who had immigrated to Hawaii wereevacuated to Shimukugama. They realized that the U.S. military was not as cruel as thevillagers had been taught by schools and Japanese soldiers (as being “the demons, theU.S. and the British”) but that “they wouldn’t kill them if they didn’t even fight back.”
Therefore, the two of them left Gama and negotiated with the U.S. military, and as a result,the lives of 1,000 residents were saved (ibid.:71-72). On the contrary, a veteran soldier
and two nurses accompanying him on the Chinese front were evacuated to Chibitirigama.
They had only seen the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China and they told
the residents that they were the demons of the U.S. military. According to the testimonyof the survivors, this account triggered a group suicide by yelling “Tenno Heika Banzai”(Shimonoshima 1984). Parents killed children and adults set fire to futons, thinking that
it was better than being humiliated and brutally killed by U.S. soldiers. In fact, 85 out of
135 people were killed. Simukgama and Chibichirigama are considered indispensablefor peace learning because they demonstrated that “imperialization education” was thecause of life and death, depending on where the residents of the same district evacuatedto.
However, during Chibana’s youth, there was no such place for peace learning in
Yomitan village. Shoichi Chibana revived the memory of Chibichirigama that had been
reduced to a garbage dump (Kinjo et al. 2019:129), along with non-fiction writer Tetsuro
Simojima in 1983, and opened it up as a place to think deeply about peace. Chibana
continues to narrate the memories of the places as a peace guide to this day. Chibana’s
reputation as “the person who burned the Japanese flag” (Chibana 1996) was based on
his belief in peace and attempts to revive and inherit the memories of Chibichirigama’s
war so that there would never be another war. It is important to note that Chibana has kept
the Hinomaru as a treasure in the Buddhist altar drawer to this day. This Hinomaru is thenational flag of the country that Chibana had bought before Okinawa’s return to Japan in1972 (Ogasawara Islands returned to Japan in 1968), and waved many times to return toSymposium: Emotion, Democracy and the Philosophy of Education

Nuchidutakara (life is a treasure)49

Okinawa’s homeland. It is therefore kept as a precious memory of Chibana’s youth, wholived under the occupation of the America Yu. Chibana recounts that under American rule,
which was marked by unjust oppression, only Japanese schoolbooks provided
democratic things at the time (Asahi Shimbun Digital, 2011). Therefore, the Hinomaru
became a symbol of Chibana’s dream of breaking through the unjustly damaged situationand obtaining equal human rights. However, Okinawans who returned to the JapaneseConstitution and the Japanese democratic state for the first time in 27 years viewed theHinomaru as a symbol of fascism that completely betrayed the “nuclear-free mainland”(Chihana 1996:6) demanded in the movement to return to their homeland. Chihana
learned from this experience that democracy and fascism were not counter-concepts that
presented opposite societies to the people; whether it was prewar militarism or ademocratic country, fascism could be realized under the right conditions.
Media control enables populism and creates a majority that cleverly incites popularsentiment and crushes a small number as a result of legitimate consensus (Chibana 2017).
The use of the term Nuchidutakara by the side that imposed control eliminated the coreof the idea and modified it to suit the principle of majority rule. That is why Chibanaemphasizes the spirit of not abandoning the minority, that no one should be sacrificed, asa core part of Nuchidutakara that should not be exploited.
Then, through what kind of action do the Okinawans embody the idea of
Nuchidutakara? The code of conduct that Okinawans follow to interact with others isalso considered to be the feeling of Chimugurisa, which exists as the unique language ofOkinawa.

4. Act of finding pride as a human being in the vessel of one’s mind
that can conceive of the pain of oneself and others
The translation of Chimugurisa into Japanese is similar to the meaning of the word
Kawaiso（I’m sorry）. However, in this translation, the most important aspect ofChimugurisa is omitted. The word Kawaiso implies that one can break off relationships
with others, such as “I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything for you” or “I feel sorry for you,so I’ll leave you alone.” This feeling gives one the choice of how to deal with otherpeople’s wounds. On the contrary, Chimu means “heart” in Japanese and Gurisa means
suffering, which together means “my heart aches.” However, the word Chimugurisa also
implies the feeling of empathy for other people’s suffering. In other words, Chimugurisa
does not include the choice of whether or not to suffer the pain of others. Others’ suffering
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50M. TAKAHASHI

and that of one’s own are equally implied in “my heart suffers” without boundaries, andthe spirit of “equal life” (Kinjo 2003:3) is embedded in Chimugurisa. Therefore, those
who have a Chimugurisa mind overwhelmingly incorporate the suffering and sadness ofother people’s lives into their own compared to those who have a Kawaiso mind thatallows them to freely choose the extent of other people’s and their own suffering. It is noexaggeration to say that the process of life from the beginning to the end is the process of
forming a vessel of mind filled with the pain of oneself and others. When those with sucha vessel of heart shout Nuchidutakara for example, in a democratic country, they would
not be allowed to say that there is a “life” that can change its value inside and outside thenational boundaries.
However, Kinjo posits that it is not enough to have a Chimugurisa to truly live in thespirit of Nuchidutakara and advocates bringing in the traditional feeling of the Korean
people called Han (resentment).
The term Han strongly incorporates ethnic Korean ideas that are different fromthose incorporated in the Japanese term Urami and refers to “emotional activities” inwhich feelings of sadness, suffering, and resignation are precipitated and deposited within
oneself (Hanpuri) and created and sublimated into a new life (Unno＆Gombeye 1987;Hanazaki 1981; Kinjo 2001; Kawase 2018). Kinjo sees the possibility of life in Han’swork to solve his grudge. The empathy of Chimugurisa, which is accompanied by thesuffering of others and one’s own, enables a solidarity that does not isolate others, but if
suffering only builds up like a dam, people will have no choice but to be overwhelmedby life. Also, if these sufferings are caused by discrimination or exploitation, the victim’sresentment, despair, and anger will most likely transform into aggression and create astructure that engenders new sacrifices. If so, Nuchidutakara loses its original meaning.
However, if the dam of pain is the source of a new and desired life, Nuchidutakara will
mean exactly what it states. Kinjo said that “human pride” (Kinjo2001, Fukushima 2015,
Kawase eds. 2018) can only be revered by people who have been hurt can be seen in HanToki（solving）(Kawase eds. 2018). By adding the idea of Jodo to the term, Kinjo thenreaches the word “You live Jodo by solving Han.” The term Jodo refers to a new worldof life that can be seen before the end of resentment. Jodo refers to a world that is worthyof being a society where everyone lives together. It refers to a world where the sufferingof others and oneself is associated not only with each other but also with the pride anddignity that sublimates pain. As this Jodo is a state that can only be seen in the world oflife, it can be said that the spirit of Nuchidutakara which should not be sacrificed by any
person, can be an idea of peace that resists fascism in democracy.

Symposium: Emotion, Democracy and the Philosophy of Education

Nuchidutakara (life is a treasure)51

Acknowledgments
This report has been made possible thanks to the tremendous cooperation of Minoru
Kinjo, Shoichi Chibana, and the Association of NPO Okinawa Han no Hi no Kai that has
supported the democratic ideas of Okinawa. You have my heartfelt gratitude.

Funding
This report is part of the research that received a grant from the JSPS Research Expense(20K02502).

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Symposium: Emotion, Democracy and the Philosophy of Education