琉球民族
During the Meiji period, as with the Ainu people of Hokkaido, the Ryukyuan people had their own culture, religion, traditions and language suppressed by the Meiji government in the face of forced assimilation. From the 1880s onwards, schools forbade the display of Ryukyuan styles of dress, hairstyles and other visual aspects, considering them to be backwards and inferior, with students forced to wear Japanese clothing and to assimilate into Japanese culture. Indoctrination into a militaristic and Emperor-centred ideology for children began from the age of beginning elementary school onwards; the ultimate goal of this education was a total unification of the Ryukyuan people into the Yamato people, embodying the ideal of ethnic purity, with contemporary literature for the time ignoring Japan's minorities). Ryukyuans often faced prejudice, humiliation in the workplace and ethnic discrimination, with the Ryukyuan elite divided into factions either in support of or in opposition to assimilation.