Rethinking Early Ryukyuan History
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Volume 17 | Issue 7 | Number 1 | Article ID 5268 | Apr 01, 2019 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Rethinking Early Ryukyuan History Gregory Smits Abstract the kind historians typically use rapidly become sparse in the case of the Ryukyu islands. For My recent book, Maritime Ryukyu, 1050-1650, example, it was only during the sixteenth is a revisionist history of the Ryukyu islands. century that the regime in Shuri began to use Adopting the interdisciplinary approaches of written records for domestic governance, and recent Japanese scholarship, Maritime Ryukyu only a very small number of those records are presents a new history of the region, treating extant. Records connected with trade between the Ryukyu islands not as a unitary, natural Naha and other parts of Asia are abundant and political community but as locations within a useful for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, maritime network that extended northward as but they shed little light on domestic life or on far as the southern coastal regions of Korea. parts of the Ryukyu islands other than the area This article briefly explains my trajectory in around Naha. Accounts by Koreans who found writing the book and then summarizes some of themselves in the Ryukyu islands as a result of the major arguments in Maritime Ryukyu. shipwreck or human trafficking during the late fifteenth century and accounts by Chinese investiture envoys from the 1530s onward are the only sources that discuss topics such as Keywords agriculture, laws, building style, local customs, Ryukyu, Shimazu, Shō Shin, Shuri, official and other matters connected with domestic histories, wakō, Maritime Ryukyu, Omoro society in Okinawa or other islands. I had long been interested in early Ryukyuan history and mildly dissatisfied with the I have been researching the history of the accounts of it found in survey histories and Ryukyu islands (“Ryukyu” in the paragraphs even many specialized works. Modern versions below) since the 1980s. My first book, Visions of early Ryukyuan history tend to adopt the of Ryukyu: Identity and Ideology in Early- narrative framework of the official histories of Modern Thought and Politics (1999, 2017), the Ryukyu kingdom, written between focused on the ideas, conflicts, and policies of approximately 1650-1750 (explained in more eighteenth century political actors. All of the detail below). The basic narrative, in which major figures in Visions were urban Okinawan lineages of kings arose in Okinawa as early as elites residing in the Shuri-Naha area. Although the thirteenth century, ruled the entire island, the story of competing visions among elites and and expanded their reach to other Ryukyu the Confucian-inspired program that eventually islands, had long struck me as unconvincing. prevailed is important and compelling, pragmatic reasons also guided my choice of In 2015, I discovered that several scholars in topic. Primary sources are abundant for the Japan had been finding useful new ways to early modern era. approach Ryukyu’s early past. Using multidisciplinary approaches that include Moving backward in time, written sources of insights from anthropology, archaeology, and 1 17 | 7 | 1 APJ | JF linguistics, they advanced new arguments Okinawa. They came from northern locations, about Ryukyu’s past and providedand Maritime Ryukyu highlights the deep methodologies that others might use and Japonic roots of the Ryukyu islands. It also extend. I read this work with great interest as advances other new arguments about early well as scholarship on Omoro sōshi おもろさう Ryukyuan history. し, a collection of songs first written down during the 1530s. Especially helpful has been The rest of this article introduces some of those work over the past fifteen or so years by arguments in question-and-answer format. I do Yoshinari Naoki 吉成直樹 and Fuku Hiromi 福寛 not cite specific page ranges or chapters in 美, who interrogate the Omoro songs for what Maritime Ryukyu because most arguments are they reveal about early Ryukyuan history and interconnected and develop over the course of societies.1 Benefitting from this and other multiple chapters and contexts. innovative work, I turned my attention to early Ryukyuan history, and my bookMaritime Ryukyu, 1050-1650 (University of Hawaiʻi Who dwelled in the Ryukyu islands and Press, 2019) has recently been published. from where did these people come? Maritime Ryukyu is a revisionist history. The This question became urgent during the late Ryukyu depicted in its pages looks significantly nineteenth century as anthropologists, different from the Ryukyu portrayed by George archaeologists, linguists, and others sought to 2 H. Kerr, the Ryukyu in typical Japanese survey discover the roots of various national or ethnic histories, or the Ryukyu of the official histories. groups in and around Japan. Much of that In Maritime Ryukyu, for example, wakō 倭寇 earlier scholarship and the assumptions behind (armed mariners prone to marauding) are the it appear problematic in hindsight. major actors in most previous work on early Nevertheless, in recent decades, significant Ryukyuan history. In that connection, the agreement among different academic formal tribute relationship that developed disciplines has emerged regarding the big during the late fourteenth century between the picture. Ming court and Okinawan rulers who controlled the port of Naha was an attempt by Although once part of the Eurasian continent, Chinese authorities to control piracy and the Ryukyu islands have existed for at least smuggling. Also in Maritime Ryukyu I push 400,000 years, well before the advent of forward to around 1500 the time when Ryukyu modern humans. We cannot be certain who became a centralized state, and I characterize first set foot in them. Going back to about the that state as a maritime empire. Military force ninth century of the Common Era, the Ryukyu was crucial in creating and maintaining that islands were sparsely populated. People related empire, and Maritime Ryukyu pays close to Jōmon-era Japanese were the main attention to warfare, including the 1609 war population from Okinawa northward. Across between Shuri and Satsuma. the Kerama Gap, Austronesian peoples related to the indigenous peoples of Taiwan lived in the Maritime Ryukyu situates the Ryukyu islands Miyako and Yaeyama island groups. Although I within nautical networks extending northward find the concept of indigeneity problematic, if through the Tokara islands, the Satsunan we had to identify the islands’ indigenous Islands 薩南諸島, coastal Kyushu, the islands of people, these two groups would be a Iki 壱岐 and Tsushima 対馬, and the southern reasonable choice. They vanished relatively part of the Korean Peninsula. Ryukyuan culture quickly, eliminated or absorbed by waves of and people did not spring from the soil of seafaring people from the north. These 2 17 | 7 | 1 APJ | JF northerners swept into the Ryukyu islands the Ryukyu islands is mainly coastal Japan, with during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and some connections to the Korean peninsula. established stone fortresses gusuku( ) and castles at harbors. They were mainly Japanese, but people, culture, and technology from the When, if ever, did “Ryukyu” become a Korean peninsula also found its way into the country, or kingdom, or some other kind of Ryukyu islands during thegusuku era (ca. 3 unitary entity? 11th-14th centuries). Geopolitically, the Ryukyu islands came under During this time, the Ryukyu islands were part at least the nominal rule of Shuri by the end of of maritime networks extending from southern the long reign of Shō Shin 尚真 (r. 1477-1527). Korea to Tsushima, Iki, and Hakata, moving Specifically, Shō Shin subdued power centers south along the western coast of Kyushu, and within Okinawa, conquered the island of then through the Satsunan and Tokara islands Kumejima 久米島 in the 1490s and/or in 1506, 吐噶喇列島. In other words, thegusuku era conquered the Yaeyama islands 八重山列島 in Ryukyu islands were not isolated. They were 1500, conquered Yonaguni 与那国 around 1513 part of a much larger network of people, goods, or 1522, and may also have conquered Kasari and cultures. 笠利in northern Amami-Ōshima 奄美大島around the same time. During the 1520s, local rulers Writing in 1924, linguist Miyanaga Masamori serving as Shuri’s agents begin to appear in the 宮良當壮 repeated a hypothesis already in various northern Ryukyu islands. The empire circulation regarding the Ryukyuan word for that Shō Shin forged, however, was restive. north, nishi. The argument is that this term Uprisings and re-conquests occurred comes from ancient Japaneseinishi 過去, occasionally throughout the sixteenth century. meaning “the past.” In other words, the north After 1609, the northern Ryukyu islands came (Kyushu and vicinity) was Ryukyu’s past.4 under the direct control of the Shimazu lords, and today they are part of Kagoshima As recently as five years ago, I tended to regard Prefecture. Prior to Shō Shin’s reign, not even this kind of argumentation, whether by Okinawa, much less the entire Ryukyu islands, Miyanaga or by more famous intellectuals like were a unitary political entity in the sense of Iha Fuyū 伊波普猷, as reflecting assimilationist being under the control of a single ruler. pressure and therefore unreliable. To be sure, assimilationist pressure was intense during the Culturally, the question is similarly complex. early twentieth century, and it contributed to One reason is that the Ryukyu islands were not conclusions that subsequent scholarship has isolated until the seventeenth century, a point rejected. However, the general point that reinforced by DNA studies. People flowed scholars like Miyanaga and Iha made during through the islands in all directions, although the early twentieth century, based mainly on the dominant direction was north-to-south. linguistic evidence, now has strong support Perhaps the clearest cultural marker is from other disciplines, especially archaeology, language. All Ryukyuan languages are related physical and cultural anthropology, and newer to Japanese and its dialects.