“I do love these ancient ruins:
We never tread upon them but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history.”
—John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
When I lived in Okinawa (1969 to 1972), the island’s most significant architectural site was only a ghostly footnote for the few of us among the occupying military forces, dependents, and DOD personnel at all interested in Ryukyuan history. I’d read that the island used to be ruled by three clans, each operating from stone castle/fortresses (gusuku). You couldn’t get to the main northern castle, Nakijin,even if you’d wanted to, as the roads had been bombed out. Nakagusuku (in the middle, nearest to my house) was basically a pile of stones with a barely identifiable gate that made it vaguely picturesque. Of the once magnificent Shuri Castle, in the capital city of Naha, which became the seat of a consolidated Ryukyu kingdom in 1429, no discernible traces remained — certainly not any remarkable enough to go look at them.
Nakagusuku, Central Okinawa (naka = middle; gusuku = castle/fortress).
The site has been tidied up since the 1970s but not rebuilt.
The site has been tidied up since the 1970s but not rebuilt.
Imagine my surprise when, a couple of weeks ago, engaged in the random web browsing that has superseded rifling through card catalogs, I came across links to Shuri Castle, including photos like the one at the beginning of this blog. Where in the heck did this historical confection come from? Was it a high-tech heritage shrinky dink or maybe a theme park hologram?
How did this happen? Answering this question requires a trip in the way-back machine.
Like forty-four years ago this month, when the United States and Japan signed the ‘Reversion Agreement,’ which was to transfer control of Okinawa. Okinawa had been the site of the last major Pacific Theater battle, resulting in huge casualties (1 of 4 Okinawans were killed, a distressing number of whom committed suicide on Imperial orders) and destruction of every structure taller than hinpun, the low stone privacy walls that block evil spirits as well as prying eyes. From the end of World War II to 1971, Okinawa had been ruled by the U.S. military headed by a High Commissioner, the top-ranking American officer on the island. ‘Reversion’ was part of a geopolitical deal that allowed the U.S. to retain most of its military bases on Okinawa while acknowledging Japan’s new status as an important East Asian ally and trading partner.
Shuri Castle during and after the Battle of Okinawa, 1945
(which ended seventy years ago this month)
'Reversion,' however, was based on revisionist history, Japan-style. Until the 17th-century Tokugawa Shogunate, Okinawa had been an independent kingdom with strong cultural and economic ties to China. Although the Satsuma clan invaded the islands in 1609 and briefly occupied Shuri Castle, Okinawa remained somewhat autonomous although firmly roped into Japan’s sphere of influence. Only between 1879 and 1945 was Okinawa actually considered to be a part of Japan, albeit a backward country-cousin part with nothing much to recommend it except being the birthplace of karate and of bingata, distinctive dyed banana-leaf textiles.
Karate practice, Shuri Castle, 1938; Karate demonstration, Shuri Castle, 2003.
Performer at Shuri Castle folkloric festival, dressed in traditional bingata kimono;
souvenir bingata featuring Shuri Castle.
Some Okinawans demonstrated against Reversion. I remember seeing people in red and white headbands clustered in front of military checkpoints, shouting about dokuritsu. They were claiming (accurately) that the Ryukyus were not actually part of Japan and demanding independence instead, demands ignored by the Superpower and Would-be Superpower negotiating Okinawa’s political fate. But virtually drowning out calls for independence was a deep-seated resentment against the massive American occupying presence, a resentment that culminated in the “Koza Uprising” in December, 1970. Given the choice between United States or Japanese rule, most Okinawans preferred the latter.
MPs patrolling Koza after ‘riots’ stemming from a traffic accident involving an American driver and an Okinawan pedestrian. Approximately 60 people were injured and 80 cars were burned. Koza (now Okinawa City) was about half a mile from my house.
Contributing to the dismissal of independence claims was the sad fact that material evidence of Okinawa’s autonomous history had been reduced to rubble, most notably the Shuri Castle complex. But It wasn’t only the devastation visited by World War II that made Shuri Castle and its meanings invisible in Reversion talks. It was also the way Meiji and Showa Japan repurposed it, particularly in the militarily expansionist decades between the two World Wars.
The first repurpose was turning Shuri Castle into a military barracks, a logical move for an aggressive state bent on increasing its East Asian dominance. With Taiwan, China, Manchuria, and Korea in its sights, Japan treated Okinawa as an afterthought, already-picked easy pickings that had nothing to contribute other than, perhaps, a strategic location for staging troops bent on more important conquests (not unlike the United States’ treatment of Okinawa during the Vietnam War years). Further, and somewhat uncannily considering later events, it transformed what had been the center of Ryukyuan national identity into a foreign military base.
Soldiers from the Kumamoto Garrison in front of Kankaimon (official welcome gate),
Shuri Castle, 1890s.
In 1898, after Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War, the garrison was moved and its quarters were used as a conscription office, another marker of colonial hegemony. Turn-of-the-century plans to convert the Shuri Castle grounds to a public park came to nought.
The second major repurpose came in the 1920s, when a fewJapanese scholar-patriots launched a campaign to ‘preserve’ Shuri Castle as an example of distinctive Okinawan architectural traditions. The way they secured funding was to completely efface the history and purpose of Shuri Castle, substituting instead a fabricated political-religious identity. Shuri Castle became a State Shinto worship hall, an appendage to the previously non-existent Okinawa Shrine, an instantly concocted devotional nexus for State Shintoism in which the Japanese Emperor was the object of devotion.
The Okinawa Shrine was established in 1923 to solidify the island’s fealty to the Japanese mainland; the Shuri Castle grounds were chosen so that a former political order could be overwritten, in material and ideological terms, by the present one.
Of course, no Okinawans had ever ‘worshipped’ the Japanese Emperor at Shuri Castle, nor did they do so during the interwar years. But the bogus narrative did at least keep the architecture from further deterioration . . . until the utter ruin wrought by World War II.
And now? ‘Shuri Castle’ is a tourist attraction. It’s a venue for cultural pageants and a yen-generator for main-island Japanese vacationers who can’t afford to go to Hawaii. Starting in the 1990s, twenty years after ‘Reversion,’ it has been ‘restored’ into a Dizuni Warudo destination, an 'educational' Orientalized Williamsburg equipped with staffers in period cosplay. As authentic as the plastic cherry blossoms that used to decorate Naha’s streets (because the subtropical climate was not friendly toward living cherry trees), Shuri Castle is nearly as stripped of actual Okinawan historical meaning as it was when it was a barracks, an ersatz shrine, or a scatter of bullet-pocked stones.
Poster for the 2008 Shuri Castle Festival.
Maybe the strange history of Shuri Castle is not all that strange. Striving and ascendent political regimes have always reappropriated, redefined, and reconstructed material culture to serve their own purposes. From what I can learn, the ‘new but genuine’ Shuri Castle was built with careful attention to whatever architectural documentation was available. But it is being marketed in ways that continue to efface the original site’s significance.
I suppose it’s a good thing that Shuri Castle has been rebuilt. If I were to go back to Okinawa, I’d no doubt include it on my itinerary. But I’d also return to Nakagusuku, which like the other twenty-odd gusuku, remains in ruins. It’s at places like this, or like Nakajin Castle in northern Okinawa, once the home of the island’s most powerful ruler, that speak most profoundly to me of lost histories, lost lives, lost cultures.
Nakajin gusuku, Northern Okinawa. Now easily accessible by train as well as by road, the ruin is included in many island sightseeing tours.
References
Appleman, Roy E., James M. Burns et al. Okinawa: The Last Battle. Washington DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2000.
http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/okinawa/index.htm
“Exposure to History and Culture of the Ryukyu Kingdom World Heritage Site ‘Shuri Castle.’” Okinawa Clip 10 August 2014. http://okinawaclip.com/en/detail/263
Figal, Gerald. Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa. Lanham MD: Rowman & LIttlefield, 2012.
Kerr, George H. Okinawa: History of an Island People. Rutland VT: Tuttle, 1958.
Loo, Tze M. “Shuri Castle’s Other History.” Japan in Focus 12 October 2009. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tze_M_-Loo/3232/article.html
Mitchell, Jon. “Military policeman’s ‘hobby’ documented 1970 Okinawa rioting.” The Japan Times 17 December 2011. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2011/12/17/general/military-policemans-hobby-documented-1970-okinawa-rioting/#.VZCfkO1Viko
Quest, Andreas. “A Word in your ear.” Martial Antiques 1 May 2015. http://ryukyu-bugei.com/?p=4284
“Shuri Castle.” Jcastle: guide to Japanese Castles. (n.d.) http://www.jcastle.info/castle/profile/69-Shuri-Castle
“Survivor looks back on madness, hell of mass civilian suicides in Battle of Okinawa.” Asahi Shimbun 21 June 2015. http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201506210012
Tanji, Miyume. Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa. London: Routledge, 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment