Spiritual Enlightenment Monument in Japan

Tze M. Loo: Shuri Castle's Other History: Architecture and Empire in Okinawa

Source: Japan Focus (10-11-09)

[Tze M. Loo is assistant professor of history at the University of Richmond. She wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.]

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.

2008 Shuri Castle Festival poster

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.1 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.2

Nowhere is the assimilative nature of cultural valuation more stark than in the Japanese state’s 1925 designation of Shuri Castle’s main hall as a “national treasure” (kokuhō) of Japan. This designation is often lauded in the postwar as a sign of the Japanese state’s early recognition of the value of Ryūkyūan culture, but it also deftly transformed a marker of a prior independence into a marker of inclusion. The official text explaining the designation reads:

This is the main hall of the former Shuri Castle, and it is the Ryūkyū’s most important and largest piece of architecture … The current building was built in the 14th year of Kyōhō (1730) and underwent substantial repairs in the 3rd year of Kōka (1837). It has a very large, multilayered hip-and-gabled roof, a step canopy (kōhai) in the front [and demonstrates] unique Ryūkyūan form and techniques. Even though its large pillars and the decorative feature (fun) of the bargeboard (karahafū) resemble Chinese style (kan shiki), the frog-leg strut (kaerumata) and dragon carvings below the step canopy’s bargeboard carries the trace (obi) of the style of our Momoyama period [and is] extremely novel artisanship.3

Assimilation is performed in several ways here. First, Shuri Castle’s history is told in terms of Japanese reign names, mapping the castle’s history onto a regime of Japanese temporality even though the Ryūkyū Kingdom at this time was, for all intents and purposes, an independent political entity. Second, while the designation recognizes the uniqueness of Ryūkyūan form and techniques and even acknowledges its resonance with continental styles, the text – in the final analysis – folds these features into a narrative of Japanese architectural history. By discovering in these Ryūkyūan/continental features the “trace” of “our Momoyama” style, the designation skillfully sublimates any Ryūkyūan uniqueness into a larger, encompassing, and original Japanese cultural universe, diffusing the critical potential in these markers of difference.

There was, however, another way in which this designation appropriated and assimilated Shuri Castle into the Japanese national imaginary. In order for Shuri Castle’s main hall to be designated a national treasure in 1925, it was converted into the worshipper’s hall of Okinawa Shrine. This completed the layout for Okinawa Shrine, and Shuri Castle spent the period 1925 to 1945 as “Okinawa Shrine,” a functioning node in the ideological universe of State Shinto, put into the service of the emperor-centered Japanese nation state. This transformation occurred in part because Japanese heritage preservation laws until 1932 stipulated that only Shinto shrine and Buddhist temple buildings could be designated “specially protected buildings” to receive state protection and funding as “national treasures.” The problem is that the argument that the castle’s conversion was necessary for its preservation was privileged, both at the time as well as in our present, such that Shuri Castle’s tenure as a Shinto shrine is overlooked and its significance downplayed. This article traces Shuri Castle’s other history, to tell the story of its transformation into Okinawa Shrine in order to reveal the nakedness of the violence of Japanese colonialism as it is embedded in Shuri Castle.

The Silence around Okinawa Shrine

People have generally expressed surprise when I’ve posed the question, “Did you know that Shuri Castle used to be Okinawa Shrine?” This is not entirely surprising considering that histories of the castle – including the castle’s “official history” as it is told at the Shurijō Castle Park – do not reference its past as Okinawa Shrine. What is curious, however, is that the castle’s history as Okinawa Shrine is not exactly the object of a concerted campaign of silencing and obfuscation, with references to it readily available in the historical record. For instance, in prewar official inventories of national treasures compiled by the Home Ministry (Naimushō) which list all designated buildings and objects, Shuri Castle’s main hall is listed as “the worshipper’s hall of Okinawa Shrine” (Okinawa jinja haiden).4 In a relatively recent compilation by the Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō) of national treasures lost to war and disaster in the prewar period, the entry for Shuri Castle’s main hall, razed to the ground as a result of American bombardment, was similarly listed as the worshipper’s hall.5 Thus as far as one version of the Japanese state’s official record is concerned, “Shuri Castle” does not actually exist in the period between 1925 and 1945, replaced instead by “Okinawa Shrine.”