Not far from the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz lies the curiously out-of-place Japanese farming district of Colonia Okinawa. Many of those living there are descendants of Okinawan farmers, forced off their land – by bulldozers or at bayonet point – by American soldiers in the 1950s. Some of the dispossessed were persuaded to make a new life in Bolivia. But when they arrived, instead of the fertile land they had been promised, they were dumped in the jungle where many died of hunger or unfamiliar diseases. Only the more fortunate made it on to Colonia Okinawa, now considered a model of Bolivian development.

This quirky footnote to Japanese (and Bolivian) history illustrates a broader point. Okinawa, a semi-independent kingdom until it was formally annexed by Japan in 1879, has always had a raw deal. Barack Obama, the US president, should ponder this fact when he arrives in Tokyo tomorrow against the backdrop of a messy tussle over an Okinawan base for US marines. He should know that there are three – not two – parties to any discussions about the US-Japan alliance, the half-century old military arrangement that has underpinned postwar Asian stability. Like Banquo's ghost, Okinawa hovers uncomfortably at the table.

Japan has always treated Okinawa, a tropical island far to the south of the mainland, as an inferior cousin. At the end of the war, in the infamous Battle of Okinawa, or Typhoon of Steel, up to 200,000 people were killed and a quarter of Okinawa's civilian population wiped out. Kenzaburo Oe, Japan's Nobel Prize-winning author, chronicled those tragic events in Okinawa Notes, which documented the role of Japan's imperial army in coercing Okinawan civilians to commit suicide rather than surrender. In 2007, more than 100,000 Okinawans demonstrated against an attempt by the government in Tokyo to erase the incident from school textbooks.