Ogasawara Subprefecture

Ogasawara Subprefecture is a subprefecture of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in Japan. The subprefecture covers the Bonin and Volcano Islands and three isolated islets (the "Ogasawara Archipelago") and is coterminous with the village of Ogasawara. The subprefecture covers and has a population of 2,415 people. It maintains a main office on Chichijima and a branch office on Hahajima, the two permanent settlements in the islands. (The SDF base on Iwo Jima is supported separately, although still notionally part of the subprefecture and village's jurisdiction.) Bonin Islands The subprefecture bears the Japanese name of the Bonin Islands, derived from a false 18th-century account of their discovery by a member of the Ogasawara clan of samurai. Although the Ogasawara Islands themselves are still more often known as the Bonins in English, the modern subprefecture is usually known as Ogasawara. Micronesian tools and carvings have been discovered in the Bonin Islands but in the modern era the islands were uninhabited until 1830, giving risethrough a series of errorsto the English name of the Bonins. The initial settlement of the Bonins was from the Kingdom of Hawaii under the auspices of the British Empire, who formally claimed them in the 1820s before yielding them to Japan. The descendants of these initial settlers make up Japan's small Ōbeikei ethnicity. Once Japanese settlement began, the islands' seven main villages were administered as part of Tokyo's government (Tōkyō-fu). Okinotorishima was added to the subprefecture in 1930, and the villages were finally incorporated in 1940: Ōmura and Ōgimura-Fukurosawa on Chichijima, Kitamura and Okimura on Hahajima, Iōtō on Iwo Jima, and Ishinomura and Nishimura on North Iwo Jima. All civilians on the islands were forcibly evacuated to Honshu in 1944 near the end of World War II. After the Surrender of Japan in 1945, the United States Armed Forces occupied the Ryukyu and Nanpo Islands, notionally in preparation for a future United Nations trusteeship but chiefly as staging areas for nuclear weapons.