3 - Orientalizing Ryukyu in Nineteenth-Century Japan

This presentation examines the production, transmission, and circulation of knowledge about Ryukyu Islands, a semi-independent kingdom during the Tokugawa period before its annexation to Japan in 1879. As the subject of study and curiosity in Tokugawa Japan, a number of books and prints that show the islands’ history, geography, landscapes, cultures, and customs were published throughout the period, and increased each time when a Ryukyuan embassy crossed the country on their way to Edo, the shogunal capital (present-day Tokyo). 
The publications transmitted knowledge about the kingdom by referring and citing earlier texts, gradually adding new information gained through literati networks. One popular assertion in these publications (starting with Jōsai-hōshi den; ca. 1615–1624) was to call the kingdom the “Islands of Benten” (Sk. Sarasvatī), a place where females were more highly respected than males and sexually “loose.” While this might be the result of a misreading of women’s prominent role as priestesses in Ryukyu, it was repeated and even magnified in writings by literati of the day, including in Ryūkyū-banashi (1790) by Morishima Chūryō (1756?–1810), a scholar from a family serving the Tokugawa shogunate. 
The recurrent mention in these texts of women being superior to men in this foreign society could be seen as the “orientalization” of Ryukyu as an exotic, effeminate, and ultimately an inferior country to Japan.