Jahana Noboru was a prominent Meiji period political activist for Okinawan rights, one of the leaders of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement (Jiyû minken undô).
As a young man, Jahana was selected to attend Okinawa's first modern-style teacher-training school for elementary schoolteachers. The following year, in 1882, he was one of the first five Okinawan students sent to Tokyo on official government scholarships. Of the five, he was the only one not from the gentry class. Rather, he was from a middle-class peasant family from Kochinda. While the other four studied liberal arts in Tokyo, Jahana focused on agriculture and forestry. In 1891, after studying at Gakushuin Middle School, Tokyo Sanrin Gakkô (Tokyo Forestry College), and Tokyo Nôrin Gakkô (Agriculture and Dendrology College), he became the first Okinawan to ever graduate from Tokyo Imperial University.
While in Tokyo, he also came to interact with prominent figures in socialist thought and movements, including Nakae Chômin and Kôtoku Shûsui. He then returned to Okinawa, where he worked as an engineer in the employ of the prefectural government, and pressed for reform in civil law, agricultural policy, and land taxes; this included working to see the tax system of payment in kind (in sugar) abolished. This brought him into conflict with Prefectural Governor Narahara Shigeru. In one incident particularly indicative of Narahara's autocratic and highly classed approach, the governor arranged to sell vast tracts of forestland, at inappropriately low prices, to Japanese capitalists and bureaucrats and to members of the Okinawan gentry, where previously Okinawan peasants enjoyed free access to what was, in a manner of speaking, public land. Jahana used his position on the project to block it from going forward, but was simply removed from the project and replaced with a Satsuma man who approved it immediately and helped it go forward. After becoming the head of the Agriculture and Industry Bank in 1898, Jahana resigned from working for the prefecture.
He would soon afterwards return to Tokyo, where he agitated for Narahara's dismissal, and for Okinawan suffrage, receiving support from such prominent figures as Itagaki Taisuke and Hoshi Tôru. He headed a monthly journal called Okinawa jiron in which he expressed these political views, attacking Narahara's policies, and generally preferential attitude and behavior towards mainland Japanese elite, at the expense of Okinawans' welfare or best interests. Even in Tokyo, Jahana was harassed by Narahara, who used the police force to harass and threaten Jahana and his allies, and even tried to have Jahana killed. Jahana came close to getting Narahara kicked out of office, but never did manage to succeed before Narahara managed to get the Okinawa jiron shut down, and to block Jahana from both income and his societal/political connections.
Back in Okinawa by this point, Jahana left Narahara's Okinawa in 1901 for Yamaguchi prefecture, where he was to take up a new post. He became mentally ill, however, as a result of his persecution, and had serious problems for the next seven years, until his death in 1908.
References
- "Jahana, Noboru," Portraits of Modern Japanese Historical Figures, National Diet Library, 2013.
- Mitsugu Sakihara, "Okinawans in Hawaii: An Overview of the Past 80 Years," in Uchinanchu, University of Hawaii (1981), 105-106.
- Gregory Smits, "Jahana Noboru: Okinawan Activist and Scholar," in Anne Walthall (ed.), The Human Tradition in Modern Japan, Scholarly Resources Inc. (2002), 99-113.