Ueki Emori
Ueki Emori was a prominent Meiji period political writer and member of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement (Jiyû minken undô).
In 1880, he argued against the annexation of the Ryûkyû Kingdom the previous year, since there were no grounds for annexation, and since undoing the annexation would place Japan in a good light in the eyes of the world community, setting a precedent for a new form of East Asian international relations.
References
- Richard Siddle, "Colonialism and identity in Okinawa before 1945," Japanese Studies 18:2 (1998), 120.