Ryukyuan assimilation policies are a series of practices aimed at the Ryukyuan people with the intent of assimilating them into Japanese culture and identity beginning shortly before the Disposition of Ryukyu in 1879 and continuing to the present day.
Years after the annexation, Japan started to implement assimilation policies into the Ryukyu Islands.
[1][2][3] A famous example was the dialect cards (方言札, hōgen fuda), which were given out to students who spoke a Ryukyuan vernacular at school.
The mainland Japanese also looked down on Ryukyuan culture as being "backwards", accelerating the process even further.
[6] The same phenomenon happened in diaspora communities as well, including Hawaii,[7] where local Okinawans were often stereotyped negatively by other Nikkei immigrants.