Shuri Castle's Other History: Architecture and Empire in Okinawa

The Ryūkyū Kingdom Festival (Ryūkyū ōchō matsuri), organized and sponsored by the Shuri Promotion Association (Shuri shinkōkai), is a fixture on Okinawa Prefecture's cultural and tourist calendar.This one-day festival is one part of the larger Shuri Castle Festival (Shurijō sai); together, they celebrate the grandeur of the Ryūkyū Kingdom and its court traditions as a pure cultural past for the prefecture. Of pivotal importance to these events is Shuri Castle itself. Not merely the stage on which festivities unfold, Shuri Castle - with its vermillion architecture epitomized by its main hall (seiden) and Shurei Gate (Shurei mon), and its high, imposing ishigaki stone walls - is cast as the very heart of Ryūkyūan culture. While this representation of the castle celebrates local culture, it is difficult to ignore the role it plays in Japan's continuing colonization of Okinawa. By suggesting that Ryūkyūan culture not only exists, but flourishes within the framework of the Japanese nation state, this representation plays an important part in a narrative that obfuscates the rupture of Japanese colonization of the Ryūkyū Kingdom and naturalizes Okinawa's inclusion into the modern Japanese nation state.