The Appearance and Disappearance of Ryukyu: The Historical Views of Tō Teikan, Motoori Norinaga, and Ueda Akinari

Two of the renowned figures of Edo-era Kokugaku (National Learning), Motoori Norinaga and Ueda Akinari, famously debated the merits of their scholarly approaches to Japanese antiquity during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Their intellectual dispute was the result of the radical conclusions reached by Tō Teikan in his Shōkōhatsu (An Outburst of Provocations; 1781) in which he argued that the Korean peninsula and China influenced ancient Japan, and that Japan’s first emperor, Jimmu, was from Ryukyu. While Akinari supported the notion of continental influence on ancient Japan, Norinaga did not, and while the former was mostly agnostic about Jimmu’s Ryukyuan roots, the latter opposed that as well. Norinaga, however, was not opposed to the idea of ancient ties between Ryukyu and Japan, an issue with which Akinari’s silence seemed to signify some degree of agreement. This commonality between these two intellectual giants demonstrated the extent to which Japanese intellectuals of the Edo period viewed the Ryukyu Kingdom (now Okinawa Prefecture) as occupying an ambivalent geopolitical space, in which it was neither fully foreign nor fully native. At the same time, Akinari’s historiographical approach to Japanese antiquity, which emerged in his debate with Norinaga, exerted an influence on nineteenth-century depictions of Ryukyu’s historical and cultural ties to Japan, chiefly Kyokutei Bakin’s Chinsetsu yumiharizuki (Fantastic Tales of the Moon Bow; 1811).