Gavan McCormack and Satoko Norimatsu's broad survey of Okinawan geography and history is intended to provide a frame of reference for contextualizing the articles that follow. They begin by locating Okinawa in its East Asian geographic context, identifying the climatic, social and cultural factors that set Okinawa apart from mainland Japan. They follow with a historical overview, beginning with a discussion of what Okinawans today remember as the “glory days” of the Ryukyu Kingdom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the monarchy held the island chain together and prospered as a commercial entrepot and trading power. They then discuss the first major historical transformation of Okinawa's political status wrought by the unilateral actions of an external power, namely the 1609 invasion of the Ryukyu Kingdom by Satsuma, the southern-most domain of feudalistic Edo Period Japan (1603-1867). The invasion set the stage for a peculiar dual vassalage arrangement in which the Kingdom maintained its formal status as an independent tributary state of the Chinese Empire while under the tight behind-the-scenes control of Satsuma, which benefited from maintaining the fiction that Okinawa was politically closer to China than to Japan. For MacCormack and Norimatsu, the 1609 political structure is the first instance of a recurring, “theatrical” pattern in which a staged outward equality of status very thinly veils a real structure of differential treatment and subordination. They go on to trace this pattern through its various manifestations in Okinawa's subsequent history via a series of shobun (punishment or, alternatively, disposals): namely, (a) the original Ryukyu disposal of 1872-79, (b) the post-World War II “disposal” that began with the 1945 Battle of Okinawa and culminated in Japan's ceding sovereignty over Okinawa to the United States, (c) the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japan, and (d) the post-Cold War restructuring of the U.S. bases in Okinawa within the context of a redefined U.S.-Japan Security relationship. They thereby shed light on the sources of Okinawa's “difference” from the rest of Japan and its ambiguous status of being simultaneously incorporated into, but never fully integrated with, mainstream contemporary Japanese society and culture.