When you're researching a topic you don't know very much about, two best friends will always have your back: the citations section of a Wikipedia page and Google Scholar (I have this linked to "okinawa assimilation" so you can see how it works). We all get taught that you shouldn't cite Wikipedia, and this is true, but the resources they cite are fair game. These often have direct links to the PDFs they're sourcing from, so when you see a claim, you can go to the original source and double check it or even see more of what it has to say.

For my main ones: Early History of The Ryukyu Kingdom and its Relationship with China and Japan. The Okinawa Peace Network of Los Angeles (2005). - I wasn't sure where to start with outlining my book report, so a friend was helpful and sent me this. I started with this one as an outline.

“Shioki (Control)”, “Fuyu (Dependency)”, and Sovereignty, Yanagihara, M. (2015). Meyer, S. (2020, October 15). Between a Forgotten Colony and an Abandoned Prefecture: Okinawa’s Experience of Becoming Japanese in the Meiji and Taishō Eras - I couldn't find which Wikipedia pages I jumped off of, but I'm pretty sure these were from citations sections.

Haynes, M. G. (2021). Samurai Invasion: Japan’s 1609 Conquest of Ryukyu. - I looked this one up because I wanted more information about Satsuma and why it invaded Ryukyu. This is from a website, written by a U.S. Army veteran with a degree in Asian Studies, so I felt it was valid to include.

Meyer, S. (2007). The rhetoric of the assimilation ideology in the remote islands of Okinawa: becoming Japanese or Okinawan? - Google Scholar Tsai, S. S. H. (1996). The eunuchs in the Ming dynasty. Suny Press.(pp.144-145) - Google Scholar Hendrickx, K. (2007). The origins of Banana-fibre cloth in the Ryukyus, Japan. (pp. 38-41.) - Google Scholar Takeo, S. (1997). Culture in Struggle: Experience of Okinawa. - Google Scholar All of the Additional Readings I put at the bottom of the document were Google Scholar or just search results.

But some of the sources above are also in the Ryukyu Kingdom Wikipedia page. If the subject is niche, you're going to run into it sourced in different places (especially if it's keystone literature).

Limitations Section

• Because it was meant to be an entry-level book report, these sources felt like enough to plainly state the overall historical turn of events.
  • However, it's not adequate to capturing the FULL PICTURE, because (a) there's nowhere close enough resources in this paper to say that (b) I think it's a little lacking when it comes to any Ryukyu perspective or literature.
• Depending on who is writing it, there can be bias (i.e., Did historical accounts come from China? Japan? The US? Any other country outside of it? Each has their own potential bias).
• Additionally, these sources are the ones that were publicly available: a lot of the good ones I saw were not.