As background, Okinawa was once the independent Kingdom of the Ryukyus, with strong influence from China through trade, from 1429 until its invasion by the Japanese Shimizu Clan (of Satsuman-han) in 1609. Even after invasion it continued to be a separate entity from Japan. The Ryukyus were discovered by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, before Perry sailed to Edo, Japan. When Perry expressed interest in the archipelago to Edo, Japan began to fret about ownership. The central government conducted a normalizing of conditions in the Ryukyus (education, law, etc.) to prevent another entity claiming the archipelago. The normalizing began in the 1870s and ended in 1879 with the former kingdom's status changing to that of Okinawa Prefecture, Japan.
Then, the last battle of WWII was then fought on Okinawan soil in 1945. Now, the prefecture is home to over 74% of the land in Japan used for US military facilities. Okinawa itself accounts for only 0.6% of the landmass of Japan. Geographically, the archipelago stretches from the south of Kyushu (the southernmost of the four main islands of Japan) to Taiwan.
So, as you can tell Okinawa is a conglomeration of influences, and through this has harbored and developed traditions and culture all its own. The kingdom had its own language and therefore 沖縄弁 (okinawa-ben, Okinawa dialect) is unique with its own words that are not recognized elsewhere in Japan.
Some well-known examples of traditional Okinawan things are as follows:
1. エイサー (eisaa, eisa) is Okinawan dancing. I don't understand much about it yet myself but I will link to a good English-language description of the practice here.
2. 三線 (sanshin) is a three-stringed Okinawan instrument. 三 (san) means "three," and 線 (shin) means "line." That's pretty self-explanatory. There are different varieties of sanshin but I will not go into them here. The sanshin has even made its appearance on mainland Japan, but with a somewhat different execution. In Okinawa sanshin are made with snake skin. On the mainland, however, cat skin is used.
3. 石敢當 (ishigantou, ishiganto) are stones with "ishiganto" written onto them, marking forks in the road where you cannot go straight, but only right or left. Apparently evil spirits can only move straight ahead, so the ishiganto are put outside houses at forks or Ts in the road, to keep evil spirits out. There must be more to it than this, but I do not fully understand yet.
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| rather tourist-y ishiganto |
Just a couple examples of the dialect I have run across in daily conversation are:
1. がじゃん (gajyan, mosquito), which in standard Japanese is simply 蚊 (ka).
2. ビニールハウス (biniiru hausu, greenhouse), called 温室 (onshitsu) in standard Japanese.
As a side note - mainly just for Lane because he introduced me to it - one food I have been choosing to buy at times for budgeting reasons is Calorie Mate. It comes in a variety flavors and is supposedly nutritionally balanced. The point of Calorie Mate is that it is for people who are too busy to eat a proper meal, much like a granola bar. Each package contains two sticks of Calorie Mate, each 100 calories, that look kind of like cookies. They are pretty dry and not particularly tasty, but are good for their purpose.
They come in the following flavors from what I have seen:
1. plain
2. chocolate
3. cheese
4. maple
5. fruit
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| left: fruits flavor, right: maple flavor |
I hope you will enjoy hearing about Okinawa in the following days!
(All names used in this blog are pseudonyms.)
