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Gregory Smits, "The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
01:15:31
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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I am Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Most people only know one of the Ryukyu Islands, the island of Okinawa, home to sandy beaches and one of the US's most important bases in Asia. Now, there are a lot of myths about this island chain, which stretch from southern Japan down to the island of Taiwan, that it owed loyalty to China, given its place in the imperial tribute trade, that it was a pacifist kingdom, that it was quasi sovereign even within Japan. Gregory Smits tackles a lot of these myths in his expansive history of the islands titled the Ryukyu A New History from the Stone Age to the Present. His book and today's conversation dive into all the ways that the Ryukyu Islands will frustrate anyone trying to fit this place into an easy historical or political narrative. Gregory, center of History and Asian Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of several books, including Early Ryukyuan A New Mode, Maritime Ryukyu 1050-1650 and Visions of Identity and Ideology in Early Modern Thought and Politics. So, Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book on the Ryukyu Islands. I feel like the most famous one of these islands is Okinawa, and that's probably the only island that people know kind of in this region. So what exactly are these islands? You know, what's the climate like, what's the terrain like? You know, like you talk about it not being great for agriculture, but like what, what are, what exactly are these islands like? Kind of that, that sit between Japan stretching all the way down to Taiwan.
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All right, yes, thank you for that. That's, that's the perfect place to start because even the basic geography is subject to either misunderstanding or just most people just don't really have a clear idea. If we start with the geological definition, and the term would typically be the Ryukyu Arc that goes all the way from the islands of Tanegashima and Yakushima, which are just below the Kyushu, and then in an arc that extends all the way to within sight of Taiwan. So, and all this is the Ryukyu Arc. Now, if we have a little bit more narrow definition of the Ryukyu Islands based on islands that were at least at one point in time, part of a centralized state that was located in Okinawa, then we would go from the northern Ryukyu Islands of Amami, Oshima and Kikaijima in the, the northern edge, and then again in an arc all the way down to Yonaguni, which is within sight of Taiwan. In other words, you can, on a clear day with good eyesight, in a high point from Yonaguni, you can barely see Taiwan. But it doesn't work in the reverse direction because the aisle is too small. And so when I say the Ryukyu Islands, I'm typically referring to this zone. But above Amami, Oshima, there's these little islands known as the Tokata Islands, which are kind of a transition area culturally and otherwise. And so they often get brought into the picture at different points in time, depending on circumstances. The islands are basically subtropical, and thus they do. They're ideal for tourism and beach tourism, which is the main industry in Okinawa for sure, as well as many of the others. They're often categorized in the northern Ryukyu Islands, which often mean Amami, Oshima, Kakaijima, Tokunoshima and surrounding islands, and then the central Ryukyu Islands, which is Okinawa, and the little islands right around it, and then the southern Ryukyu Islands, which are the Miyako Islands and the Yayama Islands, again, all the way to within sight of Taiwan. But those, and those distinctions are not always rigid. Some people include Okinawa and part of the northern Yuku Islands. It just, it's rather relatively vague. The islands are included within two different Japanese prefectures. Okinawa Prefecture is basically Okinawa and the immediately, very close, small islands. And then all the way to the south and above Okinawa is Kagoshima Prefecture. And there's a historical reason for that having to do with Kagoshima, the conquest of the islands in a War in 1609. One last thing that I would say is if you look at the Ryukyu arc as a whole, the geographic span of them, if you were to transpose that onto the main Japanese islands, it would go approximately from Tokyo all the way down to Fukuoka and Kyushu. So in other words, it's. It's a big area in terms of just its. Its Spam. Even though the total amount of land is relatively small. The. There are two very different types of islands. They're called low islands and high islands. But let's not worry about that here, because it would really get into the weeds in terms of, you know, things about agriculture and so forth. When we talk about that, that distinction.
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And, and I know I'm, I'm. I'm jumping ahead a bit here, but, you know, when you write about, like, there are. There are kind of Korean influences in, in Ryukyu culture, and my immediate thought was, isn't Korea kind of far but then actually you look at a map and it's not that far at all. Like Japan is much further north than you'd expect. But it's actually also pretty close to Korea, right?
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Yes, especially in the sense of navigable sea lanes, relatively easily navigable sea lanes. So one of the terms for the northern Ryukyu Islands as well as the Tokara and Satsunan Islands just above them is Michi no Shima, which literally means islands that constitute a road. And that is because you can sail from, let's go north from Okinawa, heading north up the, up the island chain. In good weather you can see the next island from a typical ship of, you know, small ship of the pre modern times. And you can see the, the island that you've just been left in back of you. So you've got these two reference points. So it does not require sophisticated navigation. And you can go all the way up to Kyushu, that way, and then along the western coast of Kyushu and then from to modern day Fukuoka, you can island jump right over to Korea. Again keeping islands within sight. And so although it's kind of a long process, it is a relatively easy path to traverse. And it's a path that since ancient times ships have been traveling up and down, not necessarily sort of like the Silk roads. And it's not so much the ship would go the entire distance, although sometimes that happens, but typically part of that distance and then the goods and the people and whatever would then get on other ships and go the rest of the way. So yes, indeed, close ties, especially in really early periods with the Korean peninsula, especially the southern Korean peninsula.
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B
So what are, what, what's some of the earliest evidence we have of human society and human civilization on the Ryukyu Islands? And that's not to say that like the current population has anything to do with who was there in the past, as you note in your book. I mean there's lots of dead ends in ancient history, but. But what's some of the kind of earliest evidence we have of people living on the islands?
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Yes. Now if we just talk about human habitation, uh, you know, as opposed to any kind of civilization, you know, even flies a little bit more, something a little more elaborate. But the oldest extant human remains, not only in the Ryukyu Islands, but in the entire Japanese islands is, are two small pieces of leg bone from a girl of approximately eight or nine years old. And they are about 35,000 years old, give or take a thousand or so years. And that's all we have. We don't know no other bones around Them we don't have any artifact assemblages. We can't say anything about who this little girl was, although presumably she had parents who were also on the island. So we get a lot of that of different discoveries especially in recent 30, 40 years as like a new airport Runway is being built or something and putting the excavation ahead of time and dig up more, more bones and more remains. So we have, I would say just I could be wrong in the exact number, roughly 6, 7, 8 different sites in the Ryukyu Islands of very early Stone age people like 20,000 years before the present or earlier. And in each of those cases we are not able to say much about them because we don't have artifact assemblages. The most famous is probably the Minatogawa skeletons that were discovered in the 1960s 70s in southern Okinawa we've got reconstructed four skeletons, two male, two female. And even into the early 1980s people assumed or supposed or imagined that these might have been the precursors to the modern population of the, of Okinawa or even the whole Ryukyu Islands. That's as you mentioned, that's not the case. None of these Stone Age assemblages of bones and skeletons and so forth seem to have any connection to the modern population. So a little more relevant to the, I mean still way far back in the past, but still somewhat more relevant would be the shell mound Ero. Now let's, there's different ways of defining it, but let's just say approximately 300 BCE to about 1050 CE. So quite a long time and even longer in some people's estimate going back before 4,300bce we used to, there was a long standing debate as to whether these different communities who are characterized by shell mounds, literally garbage heaps, were they Austronesian or were some of them Austronesian? Did they come over say from Taiwan or up from the Philippines? Because there are, there is Austronesian material culture there. But recent very good full genome genetic evidence has given us pretty much the answer. And the answer is these were Jomon people, maybe not 100% but in the vast majority of them, not only in Okinawa, but even in the southern Ryukyu islands near Taiwan. And so this would be the same general group of people who once inhabited all of the Japanese islands. The, the changeover in mainland Japan between the, the Jomon people and the so called Yayoi people, they also go by other names was from about a thousand BCE to 300 BCE it's, it was a gradual changeover and today about 10% on average of, of the genome of modern Japanese people is Jomon, with variations from one place to another. In the Ryuku Islands the changeover happened. The same changeover happened but was much later, from roughly 12 to 15 centuries later. The changeover begins in the 11th century CE. So and you know the, and then on average we now know that the amount of Jomon DNA in the Ryukyuen or at least Okinawan population is about 15%. Which makes perfectly good sense when you think that this changeover happened 12 or so centuries later than in mainland Japan. But that's basically in a very nutshell that's sort of the pre Japonic up to about the 11th or 12th century Ryukyu Islands were prior to the Japan population coming in, they were Jomon people.
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So and, and I know, I know this, this is, this question implies a question before it, but you know, when does the society that we traditionally think of as kind of the, the Ryukyu society, I wouldn't call it Ryukyu Kingdom because there were multiple kingdoms, whatever. But like what did you think of like, like Ryukyu society? When did that to start? And how did these societies kind of get integrated into like the broader regional system of the time? You know, things like the tribute trade with, with China?
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Yeah. All right, so that's, this is a really important question because it is, it is very common for people to think of the Ryukyu Islands as some kind of singular unit. And, and it's true that we, you know, we only have so much bandwidth in our attention. And when he was looking over the world broadly, it kind of looks like that, but it's actually somewhat unclear. So just a few things I would say is that in, if we were to start with this is a little odd, but in people's imagination, and I mean especially in the popular imagination, not so much among experts, the what you would see in YouTube videos, for example. It is still surprisingly common to, to see YouTube videos for example, that will posit that the modern population of Okinawa comes from Stone Age people like the Minato Gala people or others. And so, you know, you still have that out there, even though that's been shown to be completely incorrect. Japonic Ryukyu is probably the most important turning point. I use this term Japonic loosely. It comes originally from linguistics. A linguist named Leon Seraphim coined the term and I'm just taking it and broadening it to include culture beyond just language. The Ryukyuan languages are all Japonic, but also the broader culture. And so that begins in the 11th century with waves of migrants coming in from the main islands of Japan sweeping into different parts of the Ryukyu Islands, mostly in a north to south pattern. And it's complete by roughly the 13th century. And when I say complete, what I mean is that the previous Shell mound era population, which was quite sparse, these, the Jomon people, were complete, were completely swamped out by these newcomers by about the 13th century. It probably doesn't seem to have been a particularly violent thing. It's just that just so many people from the Japanese islands come in, they prosper and the local population either dies out or is absorbed. So that's 12 11th to 13th centuries. However, still the situation geopolitically in throughout the Ryukyu Islands was that there were harbor fortress communities headed by local warlords or pirate leaders or people like that all over the Ryuku Islands with no central government. And we don't get a central state forming until much later, sort of from about. Over the course of about 30 or so years from say 1495 or you could say 1500 to keep it nice, easy to remember date to about 1525 or 30. That's when a central state forms, which I call the Shooty Empire because it's based at Shooty, which is today part of Naha. And so those would be the, the dates 11th century for the Japonic Ryukyu beginning 13th century for complete all the Ryukyu Islands being Japonic and having a common material culture and state formation around 1500. So, and, and we could even give other dates like the 1620s circa 1620 or so is when the Ryukyu Islands become isolated and cut off from the main Japanese islands, somewhat counterintuitively because that's also when they become the territory of a Japanese entity. But you know, we'll talk about that, that later when we, when we talk about the theatrical state. I'm sorry.
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Yes, yes. Yeah, yes, let's, well, let's, let's talk about how they relate to China first and then let's say be bringing a bit of the Korean stuff as well. Well, but let's talk about China first.
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Yes. Okay. So it is commonly supposed today, and you can see this just all over the place, especially in journalism and popular media, that the culture of today's review Q Islands is a mixture of Japan, Japanese culture and Chinese culture. This characterization is mostly wrong. It's not totally wrong there. All right, so we can find bits of Chinese culture all throughout the Japanese islands, obviously that this Japan broadly defined as part of. As part. Was part of the Sinosphere broadly defined. And so perhaps a little more so in the Ryukyu Islands because they're a little bit closer. We can find bits of Chinese popular religion, for example, that are still around and, and things like that that we don't typically found north of that. But there were no significant popular, no significant population movement from China into the Ryukyu Islands ever happened. There may, there may have been a few traders and people like that who, from China who end up living there. A tiny, tiny number of people. There is no significant Chinese cultural strata in, in the Ru Islands. During the early modern era, the, the 1700s, there were a small number of elite Ryukyuans who were charged with mastering Chinese high culture and then conducting diplomacy with China. Those that small group is very easy to study because that we have so many records about them. My first book focused on them for example, and many other books do. So it tends to give a skewed impression of, of more Chinese influence in terms of culture than there really was. So and now the, the tribute trade and this will probably come up in some other context but this is a, a tricky thing to, to summarize concisely because it, it started out as an anti piracy policy and the early Ming dynasty who's very much concerned with piracy. So the Ryukyu Islands were full of pirates. I'm going to use that term even though it's not exactly the best term. They also did trading like regular merchants, but they were potentially and in fact pirates and the Ryukyu Islands were full of them. And the Ming dynasty decided to give them very attractive tribute trade terms. I mean it's called tribute, but that term is misleading as well. It's basically trade terms such that it became more profitable or ideally would become more profitable to trade with China in a lawful manner through this tribute system than to go raiding along the coast. And that was partly successful initially and then it gradually becomes it eventually was was successful in the sense that piracy in their Ryuku Islands did at least decline somewhat. And the, whoever controlled the port of Naha depended on trade with China. Legal tribute trade for, you know, part of that person's wealth. These people then appear as Wong in Chinese records. The term means is always translated as king. But it's very misleading because the term king in English often implies a monarch sitting on a throne with bureaucrats and officials who are as part of a centralized kingdom. And these, these so called kings were not that they were people who held, they were local warlords with a license to trade with China. They had very attractive terms because the whole point was the Ming dynasty wanted to buy them all Those terms gradually get tightened up as time goes on as. And. And so forth. So the relationship through the tribute trade with China, with various Ryukyuan powers, was it typically fraught with problems and tensions? I should say it, it can, it keeps going, but there's all sorts of crime. Well, that's what happens when you bring pirates over. And, you know, it's smuggling. They're, they're, they're accused of producing clothing that they're not allowed with. You know, like dragons with four or five claws on them and then selling those things in Japan, they're, that they, they commit crimes literally. You know, there are Chinese records in which local officials saying these Ryukyuans are so rowdy, they're drunk and brawling, and there's way too many of them. There's more than we're allowing to come, but they just keep coming and they're costing all this money and it's a security problem. What do we do? And the central government says, just deal with it. Come on. That's these and so forth. So in my book Maritime Ryukyu, which came out in 2019, I talk about this in great detail. So it's, it's very complicated. And the nature of China, the China Ryukyu relationship via the tribute trade changes significantly at different points in time.
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And could you talk a little bit about, about the, about the Korean influences in, in the, in the Ryukyu Islands?
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Yes, yes. So just as I would say that the, the early culture of the Ryukyu Islands was not sinitic. It, you know, China was a source of wealth in, in for trading purposes and raiding purposes. Korea was also a source of wealth and very much an object of raiding by, by pirates. But we, we. And, and that's partly the reason that we find deep Korean influences in classical Ryukyuan culture. Let me just give a few very important examples. All right, so you'll often read in text that a type of sacred grove, which is called utaki or uganjo or a bunch of other terms, but utaki is the most common, and this is often referred to as an indigenous or a native. These are terms I don't like, by the way. Religious site distinctive to the Ryukyu Islands. No, not distinctive to the Ryukyu Island. We find sacred groves all the way up this chain of islands that I just had talked about, that so called Michi no Shima chain. So we find them in Okinawa, actually throughout all the Ryukyu Islands. But, but in the northern Ryukyu Islands, we find them in western Kyushu, in Kagoshima Prefecture, Kumamoto Prefecture, and they go across to Korea and they're. They, as I argue in my book Early Ryukyuan History A New Model, which came out in 2024 in detail, I. I traced the lineage of those utopia and show that they clearly come from Korean sacred groves known as Dong in in Korea. So the local, the most important aspect of local religion comes from Korea. Almost certainly because of all this pical interaction with Korea. There were all. We are pretty sure that there were communities of Koreans living in the Naha area. Many of them who came again there against their will. There were always. Every single official diplomatic shipment to Korea, you know, literally on a ship included enslaved Koreans who had been liberated and were being sent back to Korea because Naha was a major slave trading region. So this is almost certainly how the Korean influence comes in. So Utaki is one example. And then what about these stone walled fortresses that today are such a huge tourist attraction? Many of them are UNESCO World Heritage sites, Shirty Castle being the most famous of them. But Zakimi Castle and Nakagusuku Castle and many others, these are really impressive too, and this massive. They show that there was quite a concentration of wealth in certain areas. These come from Korean mountain fortresses. They are almost identical not only in their physical appearance, the way that they are built into the landscape and kind of snake along using mountains and. And cliffs and so forth as part of the. The defensive works. They not only look like Korean fortresses, but they have the same functions, the same range of functions. They're primarily military installations, but they all include sacred sites within them. And in many other ways they're just a transposition of Korean mountain fortresses into the Ryukyu Islands. And incidentally, these fortresses in the Ryukyu Islands do not resemble Chinese walled cities. They're almost completely different from them in terms of their construction and where they were built in many other ways, just very quickly. There are actually two types of fortresses in the Ryukyu Islands. There are the stonewall fortresses that are famous. Those are from Korea, at least not the stone itself, but the know how to make them. And then there's also a trench and earthworks type of fortress. They don't have nearly as impressive remains because they were earthworks. So they're typically completely overgrown hills these days. But they were very effective fortresses. Those come from Japan, but the walled ones came from Korea. So just one more example. The first person to hold the title King, that is a correspondence to the Chinese term Wong in the Ryukyu Islands, which is a guy whose name is always Pronounced in the Japanese manner as Sapto King Sato of Urasoe. That's in the Naha area. He and his group, I call it the Sato group because we don't even know for sure if there was really one person that, that name. They all are closely connected with the Korean Peninsula. Many of them came from Korea. And when eventually in intense warfare at the end of the 14th century, around 1398, they disappear completely from Okinawa and reappear in Korea and the last of them dies in Korea. And that's according to Korean records. So the first king, I mean, but with, with scare quotes around the word king, I call them trade kings, was almost certainly Korean. So that's just a few examples of the deep stratum of Korean influence. So if we want to talk about ancient Ryukyuan culture, we would say it's Japonic for the most part, but with a heavy dose of Korean input.
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So when were the Ryukyu Islands, I guess, quote unquote, unified kind of as one. As one kingdom?
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Yeah, very important question. And if you read the official histories of the Ryukyu Kingdom or most modern histories, which rely heavily on both the framework and the dates in those official histories, you would get typically the date of 1429 as the date when the Ryukyu Kingdom came into existence. But some would go into the third, back to the 1370s when this guy Sato was around. And though that is not accurate and, and it's typical of, of official histories. And by the way, the Ryukyuan official histories were written between. There's about four of them. They're written between 1650 and 1750, so way after the fact. And they reflect the, the intellectual and political agenda of the 1650-1750 era. So they, they tend to push everything way back in time to make things look older and, and so forth. So to cut. When was. When did all or most of the Ryu Islands come under a single political. Come to be part of a single political entity? And the answer would be a big turning point is 1500, when a huge invasion force from Okinawa goes into the southern Byuku Islands and conquers most of them or many of them, especially the big island of Ishigaki. It'll take a little while longer for the island, for all of the southern Byuku Islands, including Yonaguni, to be completely conquered. And it takes a while for institutions of governance to be set up in these territories and also in the northern Ryukyu Islands, which also get conquered. So through a series of military campaigns spanning from about the very late 1490s or certainly or 1500 for sure. And maybe a little earlier into the 1520s and 30s, all of the Ryukyu Islands come under the control of the king in Shuri. And so therefore I would call this entity, although we always call it the Ryukyu Kingdom, which isn't wrong, but it's a little bit deceptive. It'd be more accurate to call it the Shuri Empire or the Ryukyu empire. And so 1500-1520 ish is when the central state comes into existence. And I might just add that it was in a sense independent, although that's a little tricky term because all these other islands who get conquered aren't independent. They're starting to be taxed heavily for no benefit. They just simply. The benefit is we won't reconquer you if you send us taxes. So in a sense they're not independent. But this independent kingdom that people today love to harp about, to access, you know, dates from about 1520 ish to 1609 at the very latest. But even by the 1570s it was. Its independence was heavily curtailed. So this is the ear, also the era of, if you want to talk about an independent Ryukyu Kingdom, although with a little bit of caution, because it's not everyone in the Ryukyu Islands is independent. It would be in this era then,
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B
then we kind of move into, I mean, because I think Satsuma gets involved, they take over part of the refuse and then, and then you come up with this idea called the theatrical state. And, and I wonder if you might explain a bit what, what you mean by that term, particularly because there were things like the Ryukyus had to hide their, like they had to hide the fact that they spoke Japanese and they went to, when they went to Edo and all of this stuff. So like, it all seems very odd. So could you just talk a little about kind of what, what, what kind of this, this quote unquote, theatrical state was.
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Yeah. Now the term theater state is coined by Clifford Geertz. I'm not using the term though, in his sense. And so I modified just a little bit and call it theatrical in a. In a sense. The very early iteration when these little trade kings were around was also had some theatricality to it or some fake qualities to it, where Chinese merchant officials stationed in Naha were presenting the Ryukyu Islands in a certain way to the folks over in China, but put them all aside. The what this term theatrical state for the early modern Ryukyu kingdom. So from 1609 to about 1880, I think this is it's it's a very important term because the, the standard formulation is so problematic. All right, so what's the standard formulation? The usual formula in Japanese is called nishibyozoku, literally to between China and Japan or as a possessed by both China and Japan. And the way it's almost always illustrated in slides in presentations throughout YouTube now you can see them all is with a Venn diagram with two circles of equal size overlapping in the middle, though the middle overlap oval is you two and then one circle is Japan and one is China. This is highly problematic because it suggests that there was an equality or a similarity in the nature of the relationship between the two. And when in fact the relationship between this Ryukyu Kingdom and China in this Ryukyu Kingdom and Satsuma specifically, and then the rest of Japan was radically different. And so I think that the theatrical state is a much more accurate term. And what very simply what I mean by that is that after 1609 all of the Ryukyu Islands became the possession of the domain, the Japanese domain of Satsuma. Today that would be Kagoshima Prefecture for the most part. So I'll worry about all the details. And the Bakavu the Tokugawa Bakufu recognized as such. So Satsuma's kokudaka or total assessed income included all of the total assessed income of the all the Ryukyu Islands. So the Ryukyu Islands are actually Satsuma territory and thus in a very real sense Japanese territory. But of course this is the time when there isn't a really strong centralized state. I mean there's the Shogunate but there's all these different domains. And so that's in a sense the real situation. That's I'm over, I'm glossing over a bunch of details, but so then the northern Biuqiu Islands are become directly administered by Satsuma. Satsuma officials go in and they rearrange the bureaucracy a bit. But with by 1630 or 40 it's, it's all settled and they are directly administered by Satsuma. However, Okinawa and the southern Ryukyu Islands pose as an independent kingdom and they do that to maintain the tribute trade with China and all the ties to China that go with it. And this is especially valuable for Satsuma because the Tokugawa bakufu failed to come to an agreement with the Ming Dynasty for full diplomatic relations between the top Gao Bakavu and the Ming Dynasty. Basically the Tokugawa Bakavu was not willing to bow down even symbolically to the Ming Dynasty. And so while yes, there were Many Ming Chinese traders and lawyer Qing Chinese traders in the port of Nagasaki. Japanese personnel were not able to go over to China and especially not able to go up to Britain Beijing whereas Ryukyuans could posing as this independent state. And so you get this, all this theatrics connected with that in both directions actually because there's also a as you mentioned, a theatrical component to the Japan side of things where Ryuk processions would march overland up to Edo and they would be instructed to act like they were Chinese, to wear Chinese clothes, to play Chinese music and to. They couldn't speak Chinese but they could pretend they didn't speak Japanese. And that was partly just to enhance Satsuma's reputation as a domain that that has conquered a foreign kingdom. Foreign in quotation marks and but vis a vis China it's really important because potentially if the fact that the Ryuku, the so called Ryukyu Kingdom was actually part of Swatsimo were had become known to Chinese officials the whole thing could have collapsed. Right now that results in all sorts of elaborate rules. So for example Ryukyuans, even ordinary people throughout the Ryukyu Islands are forbidden from. From taking Japanese names. Prior to that time they all had Japanese names. In fact the name Yamato was the most common name childhood name for boys like it would usually be in a compound like my Yamato or something like that. All that stopped. And you're forbidden from wearing Japanese clothing. Especially when Chinese envoys might be around. All these rules are put school is strictly enforced at certain times and not others. And when Chinese investiture envoys this is part of the tribute trade system. You were in the Ryuku Islands, all Japanese people there had to go into hiding and so forth. It's all the details are in the book. But what's interesting. Well, many things are interesting but one thing is that the Chinese investiture envoys who would periodically be sent over to formally recognize a new Kim they couldn't help but notice Japanese influence all over the place. You just couldn't hide it. There's just so much of a Japanese calendars, Japanese money. Heard someone speaking in what sounds like Japanese, you know that that kind of stuff. Japanese writing, all these books have Japanese reading glasses in them and. But they. And they wrote a little bit of this down briefly in their accounts. They always had to write a lengthy report book length typically. But they didn't pursue this very closely. And that makes perfectly good sense. These are very low ranking Chinese officials who's at the beginning of their careers. They do not want to rock the boat. If one of them came back and said hey, hey, hey, these get this place is really part of Japan, I'm pretty sure that would not be good for anybody. So they would discreetly just comment briefly on some of the Japanese stuff they saw, but not go into detail. So in other words, people knew, even though it wasn't necessarily widespread knowledge, but, but yeah, very elaborate procedures for pretending to be an independent state and especially vis a vis China. The elite Bucuins who were charged with mastering Chinese culture and then pursuing maintaining this relationship with China, they became extremely good at their job by circa 1800 and they were just charming Chinese visitors right and left. So when the real situation comes to light in the 18, late 1870s, ish, it's a genuine shock to high ranking Chinese officials. The real situation. One other just fact that I'll mention in this connection, and that is illustrative, is that the tribute trade itself is not something that the Ryukyu Kingdom was capable of carrying out on its own. It with its own resources in the. By the late 18th century, the tribute trade with China was almost entirely financed by Satsuma. In other words, the goods that are going to send over to China were mostly purchased by Satsuma agents with Satsuma money. And there was a complex relationship as to sharing potential profits and things like that. But even as early as the 1530s when we had the first formal Chinese embassy going over to Okinawa, we're not aware of any before that, even though people think sometimes there were. Even from the 1530s, Japanese merchants were absolutely required because it was impossible for local Ryukyuans to purchase all of the goods that the Chinese traders brought over with them to sell. And they wouldn't leave until all the goods were sold. So a huge influx of Japanese merchants, many of whom were pirates, slash merchants come into Naha every time Chinese investiture envoys were in town with their entourage of traders to buy up all the Chinese goods. So even as early as the 1530s, Japanese merchants were essential for the conduct of Ryukyu's tribute trade with tribute trade with China. So I'll stop there. I could go on and on, but yeah.
- [43:53]
B
So what was life like in the Ryukyu Kingdom? You know, kind of like in today. Today people often talk about it as like, oh, it was a pacifist kingdom. Everyone was very happy and that, you know, the actual documents, it does not look like a great place to live at all. Like taxes were high, everyone was forced to grow sugar. Like it did not seem like a fun place to live. Like, what was life actually like in these islands at the time?
- [44:24]
A
Yeah, I cannot imagine it was a fun place to live unless you were an elite person. And then, you know, I could once I had this inside tour of Shuri Castle, it was just like about a year before it was open to the public, as it's being reconstructed, and was sitting in some pavilion where the king would sit with his concubines. And I'm saying, yeah, if I were the king, this could be quite a nice place. But if you're the vast majority of people, it wasn't such a nice place to live. So, first of all, this idea that the Ryukyu Islands are a pacifist or pacifist is something I'm writing a book about right now. So I talk about it in, you know, in the book we're talking about and in some of my other books. But it's such an important topic. It really needs a book of its, its own. So I've got a book I'm about two thirds finished, that looks at warfare throughout the Ryuku Islands. And then how did this modern idea that they were pacifist ever come about? And it has to do with the Napoleonic wars and a bunch of other things, including the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. So they, they start out as an idea. The Japonic Ryukyu Islands essentially become bases for powerful local war, not local warlords. Some are more powerful than others. But another term for these local warlords would be wako, or pirates. Pirates, merchants. And many of them definitely acquired some serious wealth from archaeological excavations we know, and these massive stone walled fortresses built by slave labor, by the way, there were some huge concentrations of wealth locally and significant power that goes along with it. But even this was mercurial because there was constant warfare, and one warlord attacks and destroys another and another and another. And so even among these folks, much like pirates the world over, they might enjoy brief, spectacular success, but it wasn't typically long lived. Once we settle into a more, you know, formal state situation, say in the 16th century, then, yes, ordinary people are heavily taxed, especially starting in the 17th century, and especially people in the southern Ryuku Islands from the mid 17th century into the. Until 1903, literally, their lives were akin almost to slavery, maybe not quite that bad, but. But not much different. The tax burden was so heavy and, and so severe, and ordinary people in Okinawa itself were somewhat better off, but they still lived precarious lives, heavy, heavily taxed, as the. The kingdom extracted resources from a group of islands that were poorly suited for agriculture, they were better. They were great locations for trading and raiding, but terrible for agriculture. And so by. Let me just mention the agricultural part for a minute. Cereal grain agriculture, growing rice, wheat, barley, millet, that kind of thing is very difficult in the Ryukyu Islands because of the climate, saltwater intrusion and soil quality, among other things. And I have a whole long chapter on that in my book Early Ryukyuan History, which are summarized in the Ryukyu Islands book. The once the Ryukyu Islands have to rely on agriculture, so that would be after 1609. I mean there's the tribute trade with China that's conducted entirely by elites. It is true that sugar comes along which adds another dimension to things, but that doesn't really make anyone's life a lot better. Once we have to rely on agriculture, taxes go up. There are periodic times of famine. In some of those cases of famine, people literally die of starvation by the thousands, although that would be an extreme case. But there was at least two such cases and some so called Confucian reformers. Most famous is a guy named Scion who I have written about extensively in my first book, the 1999 book Visions of Ryukyu. He made valiant, strenuous efforts to make the islands into a viable agricultural society in the classic understanding that a Confucian would have of what a society should be like. And it worked a little bit for a little while and it fell apart in the, in the late 18th and then into the 19th century with a huge tsunami that wiped out a bunch of places and with epidemic disease and all kinds of problems. And so by the 1840s or 50s, arguably the U2 kingdom was a failed state with respect to its economic basis of agriculture. It was just in terrible, terrible shape. People were on the edge of starvation, There was, were exhausted. And when the kingdom did come to a formal end, there was absolutely no, as in zero. And I always like to emphasize this point, popular opposition to that. In other words, there was no popular loyalty or attachment to the kingdom. And that was because, and for many reasons, but one of which is that this kingdom was just this entity that taxed the hell out of everybody and nobody mourned its passage except elites and royal officials who were part of that. So actually now I forgot your original question, but basically the point about agriculture is really crucial for understanding, especially in the early modern era, why this Ryukyu kingdom essentially failed to, to. To be viable and, and also failed to be this wonderful place where everybody was living in happy harmony. They were people. Will, it's not necessarily that the Society is wracked by warfare and, and banditry. But, but people were just desperate to get by and punitive laws were significant and, and penalties were quite severe on paper for sure. We don't always know the extent to which they were enforced. So yeah, not an idyllic place in the pre modern era, especially during the early modern era, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
- [51:28]
B
So how do the Ryukyu's eventually kind of become Japanese? I mean again you note that today, and this is obviously like centuries after, after Jeff, like after Japan like formally took it over. But you know there's like, there's, there's very little push to have any kind of independent Ryukyu's apart from like maybe a couple people in like Hawaii. But, but like how, how, how does, how do these islands like eventually kind of adopt kind of a Japanese identity?
- [52:01]
A
Yeah, very important question question. And, and it is I would let me start out by reiterating your, the point you made that if, if we look just at newspaper surveys and you know in Japan they love to do surveys now it may be just very recently it's becoming more difficult to do accurate surveys. But back 10 years ago and before all the newspapers would do detailed surveys of everybody all throughout Japan and the case of the Okinawa Prefecture, one of the questions would always be, you know, do you favor independence from Japan? And who get a very consistent response over, you know, decades in the 2000 teens and the 2010s and the so forth. And that is between about 2 and 4% answer yes. I mean 4% is about the max you'll ever get. And those are people who say that on the survey. I suspect that if you brought them all together and gave them the genuine power to do that, they might not because they will know that these islands are not viable as an independent country, especially in today's geopolitical climate being so close to China. The moreover though, but more important is that most, and I should say there are a couple of colleagues I have who dispute me on this. But I'm, I've not found any of their arguments to be convincing and is, is partly subjective based on my having lived at different times in the southern, central and northern Ryukyu Islands. In general, the population in these places is unproblematically Japanese. They don't sit around ruminating about their identity. This term identity is much more common in, among Anglophone academics than you know that he would and certainly the world over. People's identities are multi layered. You know, I grew up in the southern United States in the state of Georgia. I have some affinity for this particular region and its distinctive foods, other things about it, but, you know, but I also identify as a citizen of the United States with all its problems and whatever, and, but I'm also have lived all over the world and, and you know, so, you know, I, My identity is this complex mixture of a whole bunch of different things. And so it is for people who live in, say, the island of Okinawa, they are certainly aware of distinctive local things. They could tell you all about it. Um, they're perfectly proud of that. But they are unproblematically Japanese. And everywhere in Japan has distinctive local things. I've lived in Kagoshima, very distinctive language, place names, personal names, peculiar foods and, and so forth. And we just find that all over the Japanese islands where people combine local identities with this broader national identity and most, most people are fine with that. They don't ruminate about it. And so the same thing goes with Okinawa in the northern Ryukyu Islands, all the more so that would be the case. And the southern too. The one place you would find even a little bit of a sense of we want to be independent from Japan is the island of Okinawa and nowhere else in the Ryuju Islands and already in Hawaii and a few other places, they have large diaspora communities where it's just so much. You can sit back in the comfort of being in the United States and ruminate about an independent view kingdom that really isn't viable. So, yeah, let me just keep going on that for just a little back up into the. Not say the 1920s, because you will often. I've often encountered writings or YouTube videos or other things in which that era is highlighted by people in saying, oh, the central government of Japan treated the Ryukyu Islands terribly, as if they were an internal colony of Japan. For example, they forced school children to use standard Japanese and made them wear shameful tags around their necks if they were found speaking local languages and thus there was an attempt to stamp out local languages and etc. I'm, I don't agree with this kind of characterization, although the facts are technically correct, at least to some extent. We find that all around living the world, the world in the 1920s or, you know, a few decades earlier, we find central governments imposing cultural standardization on their territories because, you know, for industrial efficiency, for other kinds of efficiencies. We find it in France, we find it in the United Kingdom with Welsh speakers and such. Bret hall speakers in, in, in southern France, you know, we find it in the extreme north of Japan and the Tohoku region, a place that has many, many similarities in a broad sense with the. The Ryukyu Islands. They're kind of on the northern edge as opposed to the southern edge. And it's true that the, the edges get treated somewhat more badly than the center. That just always seems to happen. No, no question about that. But consider the Ryukyu Islands at the point where they become formally Japanese territory, which would be 1879 or again, 1609 in some sense, but 1879 the most to the world. We're dropping the pretense of the, of the, of the, of the theatrical state. Right. So at that point you would not be able to travel around the island of Okinawa and converse with people freely because they. There were multiple languages just within the island of Okinawa. And then if you go to any other Ryukyu island, the local language would not have been, you know, you'd understand some bits of it, but. But each island had its own different language. I was recently. Spent a lot of time, for some time in Miyakojima in the southern Ryuki Islands. Got to know somebody who's a, you know, grew up there fairly well, who explained to me that she used the word language, Gengo it. We probably call them the dialect. But she said, in just this island of Miyakojima there were. There are five languages, and I can passively understand the Hirata version of Miyako, but I have relatives who speak the, you know, some other, I forgot which, which was. Or some other place, you know, language. And when we have big family gatherings, they talk to me. These old, old, older relatives talk to me in this language. I can't really understand what they're saying. I just make something up, nod along with them, but I really can't understand them. And, and this is a fairly small island, smaller than the island of Okinawa. So when you think of that situation circa 1880, this is incredibly inconvenient. People need to be able to talk to each other. And as we're building roads and networks of communication and as people are as poor, starving farmers want to advance themselves economically. Well, you can't go to the mainland of Japan unless you speak Japanese. Can't even go to another Ryukyu island without, you know, so today, you know. So my point is that it was an economic necessity that was widely accepted and recognized by, by the people who lived in the Ryuku Islands, that everybody needs to learn to speak the same language that was. It's not the case that we want to abandon any other languages. Indeed, in the 1920s, there was a revival of Writing poetry and even prose in Ryukyuan languages because there were still a lot of people who could do that actively and fairly easily. We zoom up come up to today, virtually nobody in the Ryukyu Islands can speak a local language as their first language or and with confidence actively they all claim to somehow or other be able to understand passively the local language. And so in other words, everybody's first language is Japanese and has been now for several generations. And so again, that's the, the, they're just, they're Japanese. And this is what happens all around the world. We can lament the, the fading away of local languages because we do lose something culturally from them. But on the other hand, there's a tremendous advantage in every, in, you know, people being able to speak a common language. When I've lived in China, you know, wherever I'd go I'd see government propaganda signs and you know, in parks and so forth, you know, urging everybody to correctly speak the national language or patong, a common language. And you know, again, there's just, that's what we find all over the place in, in the modern era. So I'll stop there, go on and on.
- [61:34]
B
But yeah, so I mean I, I, I, I want to kind of close off this, this conversation by kind of going back to the big picture. And it seems like, you know, the, the Ryukyu Islands seem to frustrate every single political argument that could have been made about what they are and their status. You know, they weren't particularly pacifist and they weren't particularly idyllic. They were part of Japan but not really. They owed loyalty to China but not really. They were quasi sovereign but also not really. And of course like multiple people have tried making these arguments to make broader political claims about the Ryukyu's or the UK islands or China or Japan or something. And none of these things seem to be, none of these things seem to be true. So like, but in your opinion, I mean, what do you think is the best way to think about what the Ryukyu Islands represent?
- [62:27]
A
All right, well, of course it is extremely complicated and your characterization just now is, is very apt. Okay. I would re reiterate that we should always think in terms of time and space. So the Ryukyu Islands are a bunch of different island communities. Yes, they do have some broad cultural things in common, especially from the 17th century onward when they all get, become part of Satsuma, but each one is distinctly different. Just a real, here's a real good example. Each Ryutu island, or at least island group has Its own distinct and complete, completely different and unrelated origin myths. It's completely different set of deities, a completely different narrative. They all roughly resemble each other. And the broader Japanese origin myths of some heavenly or solar deity doing something to create an island and then putting people on it, but each one is different. If there were a single cultural or ethnic entity, they'd have a common origin. Now, you know, and there's many other things I could cite, but that's just a real obvious one. And so I think, you know, it's important to keep in mind that each Ryukyu island is distinctive and that Okinawa does not stand in for all the Ryukyu Islands. But even more important is time. This, The. The nature of the situation in all of the Ryukyu Islands, or in certain parts of them, changes radically over. Over time with certain events, and sometimes gradually, but sometimes with a certain event, we'll just change it like. Like the war with Satsama in 1609. Another thing to consider is that we tend to superimpose modern concepts into the past that aren't where it's not appropriate, Particularly modern concepts of sovereignty, which often called Westphalian sovereignty. It comes from the. The trees of Westphalia, you know, in the. In the 17th century. So, yeah, Westphalian sovereignty starts to spread in Europe in the 17th century, but it doesn't become common in East Asia until much later, you know, until the end of the 19th century, with Japan sort of leading the way in adopting it and then using that strategically, you know, in certain ways. So modern people just can't use. Was the Ryukyu kingdom independent? Was it quasi independent? Was it sovereign? Was it. Was this. And these terms might. Might make sense today, but they don't. They don't make sense in 1750 or 1650 or. Or earlier. So we just have to accept that people just had different conceptions of human arrangements and relationships. If we want to just boil it down something really simple. In, say, the year 1800, throughout East Asia, centers were more important than edges. So a center would be a place like the port of Naha or Fuzhou or Beijing and. Or Edo. And the further you get away from the center, you're kind of gradually moving into the cultural zone of the next center to where you're heading. But the edges, the. The borders, the boundaries were not clearly defined. Exactly when did Ryuq end, and where did the rest of Japan begin? It's absolutely unclear. In, say, the year 1800. Where did Ryukyu end in China begin? Is it somewhere in Taiwan? Well, you know, it's very complicated. And. And so One of the things that happens in the modern era is with Japan leading the way way is Japan realizes it is essential to clarify its edges, its borders, if it's going to avoid becoming imperial, you know, a victim of imperialism. And, and it's in that context that the Yuqu Islands become formally incorporated into Japan in a public way vis a vis the whole world. The whole world. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's. You have. Is very tricky. I don't think there is any one way to characterize the Ryukyu Islands, although here's something though, that, that maybe we want to have something to hold on to. The Ryukyu Islands have been Japonic culturally in terms of the majority of its population since the 12th century or so. And also they, they, you know, for that very reason, they were a frontier region of Japan. So the Ryukyu Islands, in a sense, have been part of Japan since the 11th or 12th century in a very important sense, culturally, in terms of population. People were free to come and go between the Ryukyu Islands and the main Japanese islands, and they did frequently. And so the Ryuku Islands have been Japanese for a long time in that sense. But in the sense of, you know, being a formal prefecture of Japan, that's of course, something that happens much more recently. So you might say the Ryukyu Islands have been Japanese culturally and as a frontier region of Japan since the 11th, 12th century, and they've been formally a part of Japan from either 1609 or 1879, depending exactly how you define it. And the Ryukyu Kingdom was independent from about 1500 to 1600, you could say. Even, for example, Toyotomi Hideyoshi regarded the Ryukyu Islands as his own territory, and he literally gave them away to one of his retainers at one point. So, you know, and that's in the, you know, the 1580s and 90s. So, you know, there's this very narrow period when it's a fully independent kingdom or empire. And then beyond that, it's always been in the complex, layered relationship with the rest of Japan, but also maintaining ties to China through the tribute trade. That's the best I can do in terms of summarizing things.
- [68:43]
B
So I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Gregory Smitz, author of the Ryukyu A New History from the Stone Age to the Present. Greg, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [69:02]
A
All right, so this book is published by the University of Chicago Press. Unfortunately, it's reasonably priced for an academic book. It's a long academic book though, especially I can get it for retailing for about $35 or so, as well as E versions and paperback and so forth. So through Amazon or anywhere else, it should be readily available. My other books are also in print
- [69:26]
B
and
- [69:29]
A
they're in most of them are in paperback. Those are from the University of Hawaii Press. They are a little bit more narrowly academic and technical. But you could start with the Ryukyu Islands and then if some aspect of that really interests you, you can go back and read the more technical and detailed previous work that I've done, also available through all the usual channels. And. And then. So what am I working on next? I'm actually had. I had to take a bunch of stuff out of the Ryukyu Islands to, to get it to within the the word limit that the press and I agreed on. And so I'm, I'm currently writing this book on warfare, as I mentioned. That's about the first 2/3 of it goes into great detail, technical and otherwise, literary, archaeological, in terms of the structure of fortresses and everything else about warfare in the Ryukyu Islands. And then the last third, ask the question, given all this overwhelming evidence of warfare throughout such a long period, how did this place ever get becoming a pacifist kingdom? So that's the next book and then after that I plan to write a book on technology applied especially applied science, especially in the early modern era of the Review Kingdom. So those are the two projects that are coming up.
- [70:53]
B
So you can follow me Nicholas Gordon on Twitter Ick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to as reviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter @BookReviews8Asia. That's your views plural and you can find many more awesome news at the New Books network in new booksnotwerk.com we're on all of your podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends of course earning those running in around and about Asia. Next week join us for interview with Matthew Campbell, author of the man who Stole the Gods. But before then, Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [71:29]
A
You are very welcome and thank you and your listeners for for for your interest in my.