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Rethinking Early Ryukyuan History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Gregory Smits
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Abstract

My recent book, Maritime Ryukyu, 1050-1650, is a revisionist history of the Ryukyu islands. Adopting the interdisciplinary approaches of recent Japanese scholarship, Maritime Ryukyu presents a new history of the region, treating the Ryukyu islands not as a unitary, natural political community but as locations within a maritime network that extended northward as far as the southern coastal regions of Korea. This article briefly explains my trajectory in writing the book and then summarizes some of the major arguments in Maritime Ryukyu.

Keywords

RyukyuShimazuShō ShinShuriofficial historieswakōMaritime RyukyuOmoro
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 17 , Issue 7 , April 2019 , e2
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2019

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References

Notes

1 See, for example, Yoshinari Naoki and Fuku Hiromi, Ryūkyū ōkoku tanjō: Amami shotō shi kara 琉球王国誕生：奄美諸島史から (Birth of the Ryukyu kingdom: from the history of the Amami islands), Shinwasha, 2007.

2 George H. Kerr, Okinawa: The History of an Island People, Rev. ed. (Rutland, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2000).

3 For a thorough summary of recent findings in Ryukyuan archaeology, see Richard Pearson, Ancient Ryukyu: An Archaeological Study of Island Communities (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013).

4 Miyanaga Masamori, “Waga kodaigo to Ryūkyūgo to no hikaku” 我が古代語と琉球語との比較, in Shigaku 史学, vol. 3, no. 3 (September, 1924): 64. It is possible that nishi meaning north indeed derived from inishi meaning the past, but this point is not certain.

5 Tanigawa Ken'ichi, Yomigaeru kaijō no michi, Nihon to Ryūkyū 甦る海上の道・日本と琉球 (Bungei shunjū, 2007), section title “Kita no bunka no shōgeki” 北の文化の衝撃, pp. 222-225.

6 Founded in 1405, the Sultanate of Sulu included islands in the Sulu Archipelago, parts of Mindanao, and portions of Palawan and NE Borneo.

7 For a close examination of the complexities of Ryukyuan diplomacy within East Asia and the world during the nineteenth century, see Marco Tinello, “A New Interpretation of the Bakufu's Refusal to Open the Ryukyus to Commodore Perry,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Volume 16, Issue 17, Number 3 (September 1, 2018).