politically sensitive matter after World War II because the U.S. separated from Japan what it called the Ryukyu Islands. The U.S. Armed Forces harbored the divide-and-rule policy during the war while the State Department maintained that the Ryukyu Islands shall remain under the sovereignty of Japan. The State Department defined the Ryukyu Islands as the Amami, Okinawa, Sakishima, and Daitō Islands. The U.S. military, on the other hand, had obscure and inconsistent understandings of the geographical extent of the American concept. The Civil Affairs Handbook: Ryukyu (Loochoo) Islands (1944), for example, treated the Ryukyu Islands as a much wider area extending not only to the Tokara and Ōsumi Islands but also to the Uji and Koshikijima Islands, which are not even part of the Nansei Islands. When the U.S. first publicized its intention to separate the Ryukyu Islands from Japan in 1946, it set the boundary at the 30th parallel north, which in fact crossed the northern tip of Kuchinoshima, the northernmost inhabited island of the Tokara Islands. The procrustean boundary had its root in the wartime boundary between the areas of operation of the Sixth and Tenth Armies. The area under separate military occupation had shrunk since then. The Tokara Islands were returned to Japanese administration in 1952, which was followed by the Amami Islands in 1953. Okinawa was finally returned to Japan in 1972. The Treaty of San Francisco (1951) further illustrates the complexities surrounding the name Ryukyu Islands. In its draft, the U.S. used the phrase "The Ryukyu Islands south of 29° north latitude", but the Japanese government requested twice to replace it with "Nansei Islands south of 29° north latitude", arguing that the Amami island group did not belong to the Ryukyu Islands (i.e., Ryūkyū Shotō) but to the Satsunan Islands. As a political compromise, the final version adopted the redundant phrase "Nansei Shoto south of 29° north latitude (including the Ryukyu Islands and the Daito Islands)". For some reason, the CIA World Factbook still ignores standardized geographical names of Japan and attaches the non-standard label "RYUKYU ISLANDS" on the map of Japan. The U.S. military imagined a Ryukyuan nation. Although it never allocated sufficient resources to achieve this goal, it even tried in vein to create a national flag and a national anthem. However, the Okinawan view toward the U.S. military occupation critically worsened as it confiscated their ancestral lands with bulldozers and bayonets and