Teruya Yuken: Heavy Pop

My latest trip to Okinawa happened, by chance, to align with the exhibition “Heavy Pop” at the Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum – the first large-scale solo show of Teruya Yuken’s work to be held in Okinawa. I have been fortunate to see Teruya’s work a number of times now, in smaller galleries in Okinawa, at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and elsewhere; seeing so many works all together here it was really fantastic to start to get a better sense of the themes that run through so much of his work.

^{直線に並ばない子は悪い子、美しい子 A Child Who Doesn’t Line Up in a Straight Line is a Bad Child, a Beautiful Child. Balloons. 2023.}

The exhibit opens, at first, with groups of balloons and pictures of balloons, and I think there is really something wonderful about the interplay between works being colorful, visually appealing, visually interesting, and at the same time deep with meaning. So much of what we see in this exhibit is just plainly colorful, fun – it brightens our day. Or it is visually interesting, capturing our attention at first simply by its creativity, as Teruya displays entire cars upside-down in the gallery, stacks of newspapers with little cutouts rising up out of them in the shape of seedlings or sprouts, gorgeous bingata robes, or a sprawl of cardboard pizza boxes. But then we look closer, take another moment to think a bit more about the meaning or ideas suggested or addressed in these works, what histories or issues or ideas they might be addressing, referencing, or conveying, and there are always these deeper, intriguing, often emotionally powerful or thought-provoking, layers.

Entering the gallery, we see a line on the ground leading straight down the corridor, with a small number of bright red balloons floating freely to either side. Do we walk the straight line, along the path set out for us? Or do we deviate, and walk off the path?

^{空へ２ To the Sky 2. Balloons, artillery shrapnel. 2022.}

A large bundle of balloons is tied together and tied to a rusted piece of metal shrapnel from the Battle of Okinawa. Do we see the balloons as lifting up this piece of WWII shrapnel from the ground, or the shrapnel as weighing down the balloons? Certainly, the upward pull of the balloons is, in total, here, stronger. They are not being weighed down all the way to the ground; to the contrary, without the ceiling, they would float away. But the weight of the shrapnel is still very tangible as we view this bunch of balloons, and as we (with permission) touch the shrapnel and feel the pull upwards and downwards ourselves. The people of Okinawa continue to build a better, brighter, future, with hope that lifts people up, but the weight of the legacy of the war is still there.

We tend to think of Aug 15, 1945, as the one and only date of Surrender, as if it all happened instantly. It took some time for the actual, logistical, on-the-ground, surrendering of each individual set of troops to take place. Sept 7, 1945 marks the final, official, surrender of Japanese generals in the Ryukyu Islands to their American counterparts.

^{失ったもの（売ってます）missing (for sale). Various items, price markers. 2023.}

Yuken puts small bits of personal items found along with the bodies of those who died in the war up for sale in the gallery. How can we put a price on – and buy and sell and trade in – items so immediately associated with war and with death, the personal items of people who died? How can we think of the preciousness of life, and the emotional significance of war memory, in terms of monetary amounts? And how can we be complicit in allowing such items to be dispersed into private hands, including overseas, in the hands of collectors all around the world? But. But, on the other hand, local Okinawan museums, peace museums across Japan, have so many such items. They genuinely have no need for more, and it costs space, human resources, etc. to keep such collections. So, conversely, as the curator Oshiro Sayuri explained to me, perhaps it actually is better that people buy these, and use them in whatever way they do – for education, for telling the stories of the war. And while I’m not sure where the money goes to, from people who do buy these things, regardless of whether it goes to the Museum, or Yuken, or to non-profit orgs dealing with recovering remains (still!) from war sites, either way it does go to support Okinawan arts, culture, and/or non-profits doing meaningful work.

^{結い You-I. Bingata dye on hemp cloth. 2002.}

Teruya is a rather prolific artist, producing works in many different media, and within each series also, creating not just one piece but many variations on an idea. His bingata robes, designed by Teruya and hand-dyed by a master of this traditional Okinawan textile art, are perhaps one of the types of works for which he is most well-known. But he did not make just one or two or three of these and move on; there were many of them in this exhibit.

^{結い You-I. Bingata dye on hemp cloth. 2002.}

At first glance, these resemble fully traditional-style bingata robes, ornately decorated with designs of birds and flowers and so forth. But look closer, and you quickly realize that Teruya has hidden in the designs a mix of historical and contemporary elements – particularly elements related to the ongoing struggle with the extensive US military presence in the islands. We see paratroopers, fighter planes, dugongs (a manatee-like sea creature severely endangered by the current US military base expansion project at Henoko Bay), barbed wire, and English text taken from Occupation-era or other military contexts. So much of contemporary Okinawan art is read as being a clear and direct critique of war, of militarism, of the dangers to lives and land. But in these pieces, I also read a critique that’s closely related, but maybe different in nuance: that is, in these bingata robes we see an infiltration, an altering, of what is Okinawan iconography, Okinawan culture. Is this Americanized, military-influenced, culture, “Okinawan culture”? Is this what Okinawa is, what Okinawa means, today? In one of the newer bingata pieces, we see the Main Hall of Sui gusuku (Shuri castle), the former royal palace of the Ryukyu Kingdom, featured prominently. The palace was destroyed in World War II because of a Japanese military headquarters hidden beneath it; this Main Hall, and a number of surrounding central buildings, were restored and opened to the public in 1992, and quickly took on great meaning for many Okinawans. These central buildings were then tragically lost again, in an accidental fire in 2019, and are now being restored once again. So, we have this symbol of the kingdom’s sovereignty and of Okinawa’s vibrant, rich, distinctive traditional culture, contrasted with all these symbols of the US military presence which so colors life in Okinawa today.

^{自分のこと、あなたのこと It’s about me, it’s about you. Newspaper. 2015.}

It’s About Me, It’s About You. It’s about solidarity between all minority or indigenous peoples, all people of the world. Yuken takes newspapers talking about large-scale marches against US militarism, against the stationing of Osprey VTOL aircraft in Okinawa, which are noisy and which have crashed so many times, and in my interpretation he tries to draw attention to these issues, posting in multiple languages that we are all linked together. Some issues in the world attract a disproportionate amount of attention, but I believe Teruya is calling upon us to turn our attention, yes, to Israel and Palestine, but also to Okinawa and Myanmar, and though not featured explicitly here, I would add, to Hawaii and Xinjiang, to Lebanon and Iran, to Ainu Moshir and Puerto Rico, and so many other places where people are suffering, and to recognize our shared humanity. To see one another, and our struggles, and to cultivate compassion, sympathy, support for one another, across the world.

^{A still from video captured by local Okinawan TV news cameras, as US military took over a section of Okinawa International University campus, pushing out local news reporters, local police or first responders, nearly everyone, through I suppose just sheer numbers and intimidation. I don’t remember where I got this still from, I’m afraid.}

In 2004, a US military helicopter crashed on the grounds of Okinawa International University. US military immediately took over the site – private land belonging to a Japanese/Okinawan institution, not US land! – and blocked nearly anyone, from professors and students to local Japanese/Okinawan law enforcement, first responders, and journalists, from entering the site. Only the pizza delivery people were allowed in.

_{来るべき世界に For the World to Come. Pizza boxes. 2004.}

Teruya created these wonderful pizza boxes, covered in phrases satirizing and commenting on the event, and reprinting a segment from NYTimes reporting, and created a community event in which he asked local people – children, grandparents, and others in-between – to draw images inside the boxes.

^{お父さんの好きなゲーム（天と地をひっくり返し競争）My Father’s Favorite Game (flipping earth and sky). 2018.}

A pair of flipped cars, accompanied by planning drawings and video of the flipping event, remind me of the annual Naha Tug-of-War or other centuries-old local village festival traditions, even as they also recall the Koza Uprising of 1970, the only major violent protest I’m aware of in the entire 27-year period of the Occupation (1945-1972). Americans’ cars were flipped and torched, as Okinawans expressed their frustrations with life under Occupation in a spontaneous, unplanned, outburst of collective anger.

This is only a sampling of what was a rather extensive exhibit. But I think I’ll leave it at that for now. Always wonderful to see Teruya’s works – his creative, clever, and so beautifully executed works that are at once both visually appealing / intriguing, and rich in political meaning.

Confederate Flag over Shuri

I don’t remember when or how exactly I first learned that when US military forces took control of Shuri castle (Sui gusuku) – the former royal palace of the Ryukyu Kingdom – on May 29, 1945, marking a significant stage towards total victory in the Battle of Okinawa, the first flag American servicemembers raised over the former palace was not that of the United States, the Stars and Stripes, but rather the flag of the Confederacy, the Stars and Bars.

_{Right: Photo published in the Charleston Evening Post (Charleston, South Carolina), June 12, 1945.}

I am not a historian of the layered and complex social politics of the American South, or of the Confederacy, or of the legacies and meanings of that flag. I imagine there is a lot more to be said, that others might be able to say.

But to me, I find this just a really intriguing piece of historical trivia. It helps us to realize, first of all, that World War II and the American Civil War were not, actually, that far apart in time. In fact, Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr. (1886-1945), the commanding officer who reportedly ordered that the Confederate flag be taken down and replaced with the Union flag, and who several weeks later (on June 18, 1945) would become the highest-ranking American officer killed by enemy fire in the entirety of World War II,¹ was himself not the grandson, let alone great-grandson, but simply directly the son of a Confederate general, Simon Bolivar Buckner, Sr. (1823-1914). It also signals something about how strong Southern pride, or identification with the Confederate flag (if not with the Confederacy itself), was, still, in 1945, though of course we know that use of that flag remains widely common throughout much of the country still today, in 2023. Though, again, I would leave it to others to discuss precisely what it means when different people use it – what percentage of people mean what by it, or to put it the other way around, the nuances or complexity of the question of how to interpret what an individual might or might not have meant, or intended, by flying that flag on any particular occasion.

In any case, ever since hearing this story, I’ve been wanting to learn a bit more. Or at least, to find a photo of the flag flying over the castle. I have yet to find that photo, with the exception of Photoshopped versions (e.g. left). But, I recently finally took the bother to look into trying to find some old newspaper articles about it, and was successful in finding quite a few.

A May 31, 1945 article from the Charleston News and Courier under the headline “Confederate Flag on Shuri,” indicates that it was the Marines who led the way in penetrating the castle, and who raised the Confederate flag as they had done at Peleliu, and I presume elsewhere though it’s not mentioned in this article. The article shows some knowledge of the history of the site, stating that “there was only a shell of defense left at Shuri castle, 16th century home of Ryukyu kings, once visited by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, [United States Navy], who opened Japan to Western trade in 1854.” In fact, the main central palace structures destroyed in the Battle at that time dated to the 1710s, and the palace (gusuku), in some form, is believed to date at least as far back as the 14th or 15th century, not the 16th.

I had assumed, or I suppose imagined, that the Confederate flag flew over Shuri for only a few minutes before an angry Gen. Buckner, or someone else, called for it to be taken down. A 1957 newspaper article indicates, however, that it was up for 25 hours, and a 1999 article says it was not Buckner, but Marine Maj. Gen. Pedro del Valle, who ordered it replaced with the Stars and Stripes.

Interestingly, an article from May 29, 1946 indicates that Dusenbury “denies having [planted the Confederate flag] at Shuri,” even while so many other articles give his name. Nevertheless, his widow, in a 1999 interview, “said her husband raised the flag in an effort to boost the spirits of his men,” and “both she and [combat photographer John T.] Smith[, who took the photo,] wondered if Dusenbury was denied the Medal of Honor because of the flag.”

A newspaper article from July 25, 1945, indicates that Dusenbury received the flag from a member of his local Florence, SC, chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that the Texas State Historical Association describes as “promoting the “Lost Cause” interpretation of southern history, which positions Old South slavery as a benevolent institution, Confederate soldiers as heroic defenders of states’ rights, and Reconstruction as a period of northern aggression.”

According to combat photographer John T. Smith, interviewed in 1999, “‘the phone rang off the hook’ in Marine headquarters on Okinawa from Army officers who were upset at seeing the Confederate flag.” But, in typical petty boyish inter-service rivalry fashion, Smith attributes this, perhaps, not to serious political or racial concerns but to the idea that “they may have been upset because the Marines had beaten the Army to the old castle.”

Wounded multiple times later in the war (sometime after Shuri), it seems that Dusenbury, only 24 years old when the war ended in 1945, used braces or a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Elected to the South Carolina state House of Representatives twice, he seems to have been quite the racist conservative Democrat, saying in a 1957 interview that he opposed both immediate or gradual integration (i.e. desegregation), and that in his view “the salvation of the South and the nation rests in resisting those who would destroy the foundation upon which the country was built and has grown.” I can’t help but to think of how closely so much of Republican rhetoric today, nearly 70 years later, echoes exactly this same stubborn, regressive, racist dogwhistling ideology. I suppose maybe there may be some readers here from South Carolina – or, who are more expert than I in the history of shifts in American political rhetoric – and, I guess I should take a moment to apologize if I am misunderstanding or misrepresenting him, but I doubt I am.

Dusenbury died in 1976.

Of course, if one were to research the topic properly, that would involve consulting a wider range of sources than just this one local Charleston, S.C., newspaper. Googling, one does indeed find numerous other blog posts, forum postings, etc. So, this is not entirely unknown. I didn’t think it was. But, in any case, this is just a blog post, and I’m not going to devote the time or energy to investigate farther. I was rather interested to read what I did in these news articles, and I think that’s good enough for me, for now.

^{1. Sarantakes, Nicholas, ed. (2004). Seven Stars, The Okinawa Battle Diaries of Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. and Joseph Stilwell. Texas A & M University Press, College Station. p129.}

Netanyahu and Hamas

I realize this has inadvertently become a rather Israel-heavy blog in the past year or so, only because I visited Israel this past summer, and have been just super behind on posting about anything else.

But, in the aftermath of October 7, what many are now calling Black Shabbat, or the Simchat Torah War, here we are. A flood of things to talk about, think about, respond to. Overwhelming grief and horror, at what has happened to both Israelis and Palestinians in the past few weeks. The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, followed by a military which prides itself as one of the most sophisticated in the world leveling half of Gaza – killing thousands (more, I am told, than died in the Bosnian genocide) and leaving more than half the population of Gaza homeless – rather than do something (I don’t know what; I’m not a tactical expert), whatever that may be, to actually attempt to minimize civilian losses while eliminating the threat Hamas has demonstrated themselves to be. Another Black Shabbat can never be allowed to happen again; the threat must be eliminated. But surely not like this?

I was out with a friend, I don’t recall precisely where or what we were doing, but out and about in Kyoto, when I happened to open whichever social media app it was on my phone. I read whatever it was that I read – an IG post, a few tweets, about terrorists attacking homes and villages in southern Israel, murdering and kidnapping people – and I just didn’t appreciate the gravity of it, the size of it. How unprecedented this was; how significant. It is a tragic fact of life that terrorism, violence, is indeed a fact of life in Israel. To what extent, I honestly couldn’t say. Whatever my relationship to Israel may be – not all that different I believe from the relationships that I know my Okinawan- and Taiwanese-American friends have with the histories, politics, freedom, well-being, and culture of Okinawa and Taiwan, to name just two examples – whatever my diasporic relationship may be, I didn’t grow up in Israel, I’ve never lived there. It was upsetting to read about, to hear about, to think about, and I did break down in tears for a moment, as my friend asked me what was wrong and I just said “there’s been a terrorist attack.”

That first day or two after Oct 7, I immediately was thinking about how, after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, people rallied and marched and protested against the government & the military, calling this an intelligence failure, a security failure, and ultimately succeeding in ousting that government. I am no political expert, nor a military affairs expert, and I do not know the numbers on the ground. Just how much were Israel’s defenses weakened by the IDF Reserves refusing to serve, as a protest against Netanyahu’s undemocratic judicial reforms and other right-wing policies? What else exactly was going on that might have caused such a dramatic intelligence failure, and security failure, that such an unprecedented thing as this “al-Aqsa Flood” could take place?

But then, I started seeing social media posts alleging that Netanyahu was somehow responsible for creating or causing, or propping up, or supporting, Hamas? I didn’t really get it. But then I read these articles, from Haaretz (“A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance“), The Hill (“The symbiotic relationship between Netanyahu and Hamas“), and Foreign Affairs (“Why Netanyahu Must Go“).

Essentially, they explain that Netanyahu has never supported a two-state solution, has never wanted peace, and to the contrary, has done everything in his power to maintain instability and disunity in the Palestinian Territories. Fearing, I suppose, that the Palestinian Authority should become too powerful, he worked to prop up Hamas, to block the PA from regaining control of Gaza, to block the PA from having strong, stable, good governing power in the West Bank…. As a progressive who does believe in the two-state solution; as someone who always has, this strikes me as the very opposite of what should have been done. And it’s horrifying, and devastating, to think of what might have been, instead of this. Instead of more than a thousand Israelis massacred, thousands of Palestinians killed…

I mean, look. I’m no expert in any of this. And I know that Abbas and Fatah are not good people. Abbas literally wrote a book alleging a secret relationship between Zionists and the Nazis, that Zionists helped cause the Holocaust so that Jews could be made to move to Palestine. Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, are probably not the greatest partners in peace. But, Rabin came close, and Olmert came close, or so I thought; who knows to what extent Arafat or Abbas actually intended to hold up their side of the bargain and to actually work towards peace. I don’t know. But to my mind, a two-state solution, with a Palestinian Authority that actually wants to devote attention to building a productive, prosperous, safe, stable, and peaceful Palestine, existing within whatever borders – X% of the West Bank and Gaza, with or without East Jerusalem, with whatever arrangement to allow transit and transport between the West Bank and Gaza; a fully sovereign Palestinian State agreed to under whatever XYZ terms of agreement – in peace with the State of Israel, this has always been the solution I have envisioned.

But now it seems – was I naive? woefully uninformed? or is this news, that most people didn’t know, didn’t realize? – now Haaretz reports that Netanyahu intentionally, for the past 15 years, worked to “bolster… the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and … weaken… the Palestinian Authority,” “resist[ing] any attempt, military or diplomatic, that might bring an end to the Hamas regime,” and actually actively supporting and funding the group. I am reeling. What did I ever actually know about Netanyahu? That he was corrupt, that he was the head of perhaps the most right-wing government Israel has ever had. But this? I had no idea.

Hamas. A group that has stated countless times, and enshrines in its Charter, its complete opposition to ever recognizing the State of Israel or ever agreeing to peace, and its total support for the killing of every Jew not just in Palestine but around the world. Outright calls for genocide, again and again. A group that not only represents a direct, overt, threat to Jewish lives, freedom, well-being, and to political stability in the region, but a group that has also, ever since their founding and especially since taking over complete control of Gaza in 2007, impoverished Gaza residents’ well-being or hopes for prosperity, and endangered their lives.

People are endlessly calling for an end to occupation. In 2005, Israel pulled out of Gaza entirely, in the hopes that this would bring greater security. De-occupied, de-colonized if you’d like, the area entirely. Every last settlement, every last Jewish resident, every soldier, every speck of Israeli control or presence, removed from the region. The entire Gaza Strip, left to the Palestinians to run and rule as they wish. Some at the time expressed that even a tiny place such as that could grow, like Dubai, into a rather well-to-do place. Technological innovation, beautiful beaches, access to the sea for import/export. Instead, Hamas took over and immediately started devoting resources to military buildup and to attacking Israel. Israel – along with Egypt – responded by implementing various security measures, including a fence or wall on one side of the Gaza Strip, and a maritime blockade on the other, both to attempt to block out violence, and to prevent Hamas from obtaining weapons or certain other sorts of materials. All the oppressive “occupation” “open-air prison” aspects that so many anti-Zionist activists love to talk about as if Israel is just doing it just to be cruel, just purely because Israel is an evil, colonialist, imperialist, entity, all of these things exist for one reason and one reason only: to protect Israel from Hamas violence. It is Hamas’ fault, and not Israel’s, that all of this existed. People call for “ending the occupation.” I don’t know what that means. Israel already vacated Gaza entirely, and it didn’t bring peace. Now you think that removing the walls and blockades will actually bring peace? Every time that Israel has eased up on security, there was more violence. Every single time that Hamas or similar organizations were given an opportunity to say “okay, we’ll ease up on ‘occupation’ if you’ll give us peace in return,” instead there were rockets.

In the years since 2007, Hamas has spent god knows how much humanitarian aid money (and funds from Qatar, Iran, and elsewhere) not on hospitals or schools or food or water or whatever else it might be used for, to benefit Gazans, but instead on rockets, and on digging tunnels under Gaza to hide weapons and fighters. Hamas placed rocket launchers and whatever other military equipment atop hospitals and schools, built their tunnel networks under residential neighborhoods, actively and intentionally endangering their own people. And now, with Operation al-Aqsa Flood, they’ve brought utter devastation to Gaza, by once again breaking the standing ceasefire, refusing to allow peace, and instead once again launching an attack on innocent Israelis, inviting – they most certainly knew – extensive retribution. And in the days since Oct 7, Hamas is still redirecting water, fuel, humanitarian aid in other forms, away from actually helping the people and towards supporting their own fighters, their own capacity for continued violence. At least one Hamas representative, speaking on the news, has said explicitly that the safety of Palestinian civilians is not Hamas’ responsibility or priority, but that it’s the UN and Israel who are responsible for protecting them. In other words, Hamas remains a militant group, not a government; it cares only about its own fighters, and its own military capabilities.

It was Hamas, and not anyone else, who imprisoned, abused, massacred, Fatah members and other political opponents when they took over Gaza in 2005-2007. It was Hamas who violently punished anyone who spoke out against them over the past nearly 20 years. It was Hamas who beheaded or otherwise abused and executed countless gay and queer Palestinians.

How anyone can think Hamas are good people, that they are good guys, that they are liberationist resistance fighters, is beyond me. My heart is rent apart for the suffering of the Palestinian people. The people themselves – parents and children, grandparents; teachers and doctors. Millions of people who just want to live freely, to live happily, to enjoy some prosperity and wellbeing and peace in their homeland. But the people are not Hamas. It is Hamas who endangers them, who impoverishes them. It is Hamas who refuses peace, and who has now proven themselves to be such a threat to Israeli safety and well-being that they must be eliminated, to ensure that Oct 7 can never happen again. It is Hamas that the Palestinian people need to be freed from.

But. But here’s the point: Netanyahu helped prop this all up. He helped support and fund Hamas. He not only allowed this to continue for a decade and a half, but he actually encouraged it, supported it.

I am honestly not sure what to do with this information. I just feel so depressed, so angry, so upset over this. These fucking right-wing assholes. Things didn’t have to be this way. We could have gone down a different path. Israel could have been working all this time to eliminate Hamas. I don’t know how. Somehow. Whether militarily, or through some kind of power manipulations, helping to boost moderates… I don’t know the ins and outs of exactly how it would have been done. It would have been complicated, difficult. If it were easy, it would have been solved decades ago already. But by whatever means, Israel could have been working towards supporting those elements within Palestinian society who might actually agree to a two-state solution, and working towards supporting those people in weakening, marginalizing, perhaps even eliminating violent extremist elements such as Hamas. To learn that Netanyahu and his ilk have been actively working against this, actively doing the very opposite, for years… I am floored. I am so disgusted, so dismayed.

Things didn’t have to be this way. And now, here we are, with the whole of Israel traumatized and at war, having suffered such an incredible shock, such an emotionally devastating and truly inhumanly brutal attack, and half of Gaza razed to the ground. How can peace ever possibly emerge from this? We’re going to have war for generations to come. Is this what Netanyahu wanted? I know it’s what Hamas wants. The Palestinian people, and the Israeli people, don’t deserve this. No one does. We all deserve better. We all deserve freedom and peace. Prosperity and well-being. Security and self-determination.

Makes me wish I believed in Hell, so that I could believe that Netanyahu would burn for eternity for what he has caused here. Millions are suffering, have suffered, will continue to suffer, because of the evil he has propped up, and enabled.

Judicial Reform Passes in the Knesset

I’ve fallen far behind in the blog posts I’ve been meaning to write about my Israel trip earlier in the summer – specifically on the second of two of the fantastic museums we visited. I drafted much of this post weeks ago, and am not updating it based on what has happened since. I want to just take the draft, and put it out – my thoughts from that time, that I should have published at that time…

This is by no means a deeply, thoroughly, researched, expert dive into the situation; it is a single person, a layman as far as Israeli politics are concerned, doing a cursory “round-up” of a handful of things they’ve read, at a specific point in time. I hope you will take it, please, in the spirit in which it is offered. Not trying to make a point, not trying to forcefully assert some powerful political assertions. But just summarizing some of what I’ve been reading, and sharing my personal thoughts and emotions. Thank you.

^{A protest we witnessed in Tel Aviv, catching just the tail end of it, on July 9.}

In the time since I’ve been sitting on those drafts, the Knesset (the Israeli national legislature) passed a judicial reform bill that brought huge protests from people calling it a threat to democracy. Pretty much everyone I know opposed this bill, supported the protests, but even so, I feel like every time I comment on Israeli politics on social media, I not only get people calling Israel all the worst things under the sun – colonialist, imperialist, a racist state, apartheid – but I also get progressive Israelis telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about, that things are more complicated, more nuanced, than I realized. And the latter group, they’re not wrong. What do I know? But based on what I’ve read, this reform – and the fact it passed despite such massive protest, despite the White House advising against it, despite the opposition parties boycotting the vote (resulting in zero votes against it passing) after the ruling coalition refused to make certain compromises – seems to signal to me a hard “we’re going to push through our agenda no matter what” approach from what some are outright calling Israel’s most right-wing government ever.

Axios quotes Yair Lapid, head of the opposition coalition, as saying that “It is impossible to reach any understanding that will preserve Israeli democracy with this government … They want to dismantle the state. We have no way of continuing the dialogue with them. This is the most irresponsible government in the history of Israel.” Frightening stuff.

Perhaps I’m seeing things too much through the lens of American politics, or maybe the parallels are real, but I find it scary, and disconcerting, worrying, to wonder where things go from here. According to the Axios article I’ve linked above, “the director of the Israeli Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency … expressed concern that the country could deteriorate into chaos without a consensus around the bill.” What exactly does that mean? What will that look like? We already saw within just the past few days a massive number of people march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in protest against this judicial reform, ending with a protest outside the Knesset which aimed to physically block MKs (members of Knesset, i.e. members of Parliament) from entering the building to make the vote. And yet, it seems this was ineffective.

Will the right-wing government keep pushing through its pro-settler, anti-democracy, agenda? Will people’s fears that this could lead to theocracy, to a severe curtailing of women’s rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, and of the freedom to simply live a secular life not dominated by the guardrails of religious mandates, come to pass? Or will this, somehow, whether through protest or labor strikes, lead to a dramatic pendulum swing away from such extremist right-wing politics? For both Israel and the US, there’s a part of me that wants to believe in the possibility that, finally, things will progress too far, that too many lines will be crossed, that society or those in power will have their “at long last, have you no decency?” moment. That much as has happened in numerous places in numerous times across history, a political trend or phenomena reaches its peak, and, like a cresting wave or an expanding bubble, it breaks, it bursts, it collapses. A protest movement becomes a historical turning point, and things change. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was quite a bit before I was even born, but that’s the image I feel we are given of it – that after X years of protest and struggle, eventually it reached some kind of breaking point, and popular sentiment turned, political momentum shifted, and finally, the entire Jim Crow, segregation, status quo fell away. Obviously, racist inequality still exists very much so in the US, and that’s a whole other story. But, with that, as with women’s suffrage, as with the anti-communist fever of the McCarthy era, as with same-sex marriage, as with so many other things, we are taught, retrospectively, that this is what happens in history. That protests can, sometimes, eventually, lead to a turning point, where a given political trend or phenomenon ends, and its opposite becomes the new status quo. That’s what we all hoped the Oslo Accords signed 30 years ago by Yitzhak Rabin might represent, also. Or the talks between Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat, and Bill Clinton at Camp David some years later, though neither did end up being the turning point we hoped for.

What exactly will this mean for the settlements, and/or for the course of relations with or treatment of the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank? Significant portions of the IDF reservists have called for a strike, and nearly every current or retired head of IDF, Shin Bet, Mossad, have said that pushing this through, going forward with it, means a major threat to national security. The Histadrut, the largest labor union in the country, has very successfully influenced policy in the past by calling for widespread general strikes. Will that be successful this time?

I have spent a lifetime believing, and saying, that Israel is not the horror that left-wing anti-Zionists claim it is. That whatever the situation with the Palestinians may be, it’s not because Israelis are, by their nature, racists, imperialists, violent, horrible, people, or that the Israeli government is intentionally going out of its way to be cruel, to be oppressive. The narrative I was always taught, and which I so strongly want to believe, is that Israel is a good country, a free and democratic country. A country that, like the US, like the UK, like any other free and democratic country on the planet, does not always live up perfectly to its ideals; a country that could certainly afford to do better.

But now, now this new right-wing government seems determined to prove the anti-Zionists right. To make Israel into the monster that these people have always said it is. An extremely frightening and saddening prospect. And yet, at the same time, I feel scared to say anything about it on social media, for fear that saying anything negative about Israel at all only feeds into the anti-Israel sentiment, helping those people to feel they were right all along, while also inviting just the same pushback I’ve always gotten – from both left and right, from both Israelis and anti-Zionists. I’ve seen so many posts in support of the protestors, and calling for more people to speak up and just spread awareness, enhance the pushback against what the government is doing, even if only on social media for whatever that’s worth. But I’ve also seen so many posts saying that non-Israelis, and especially American Jews, shouldn’t pretend they know what they’re talking about, and should shut up and step back. And after weeks of seeing so many social media posts and news stories about the protestors, on July 24-25 I started seeing posts suggesting that perhaps there is a rather significant counter-protesting, i.e. pro-judicial-reform, movement. Which isn’t to say I agree with them, but it does indicate that perhaps this isn’t quite as a black-and-white, one-sided, “I can’t believe the government is moving forward when clearly so many people are opposed to it” sort of story as I thought it was. So, I don’t know.

I hope that strikes by the IDF reservists and Histadrut make an impact. I hope that, somehow, this rightward shift can be turned around. I feel perhaps on shakier ground than ever to say anything about “the Israel I know.” But I am terribly scared and sad for the Israel I thought I knew, the Israel I was raised to believe in.

The Yitzhak Rabin Center

Yitzhak Rabin (b. 1922) was Prime Minister of Israel from 1974 to 1977, and again from 1992 until his assassination in 1995 at the hands of a Jewish Israeli right-wing extremist who opposed the Oslo Accords.

Right: A bloodstained paper found in Rabin’s shirt pocket after his assassination, with the text of a song or poem called Shir Hashalom (A Song of Peace).

I was old enough at that time to have some understanding and appreciation of what had been developing – the peace agreements, the progress towards (maybe, just maybe?) a real, lasting, peace – and to have some appreciation of what his assassination seemed to represent. A hope cut short. I would not claim to know today, and most certainly did not have any knowledge back then, just what sort of man Rabin was: the fine details of his life and career; the nuanced, complex, ins and outs of the various cliques or movements within Israeli or Palestinian politics at the time; where exactly Rabin stood on each of various different political issues or what exactly he had or had not said, done, voted for in the past. I could not say then, and I cannot say now, the extent to which Rabin alone, or Rabin in particular, had just the right qualities to make these important steps towards peace come about, or whether the situation was moving in that direction anyway, and he just happened to be the one who happened to be Prime Minister at that time. But, the former does seem to be the standard narrative, the popular perspective: namely, that there was something special, something unique, about Rabin, that if he had lived he really might have been able to bring about peace, and that the hope of that happening died with him.

I was entirely unaware of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, a sort of combination museum / library / research center just a short walk from Tel Aviv University, until my father or brother mentioned it as a place to maybe think about visiting. And I would not blame anyone for assuming it to be skippable; I had little interest when my father and brother were first discussing it. But I am so glad that we ended up going, and frankly, I would strongly recommend it not only to anyone interested in gaining a more nuanced, complex, understanding of the history of Israeli politics, democracy, and society, from pre-1948 to today (or, until the late 1990s at least), but also to anyone interested in Museum Studies, museum design.

The Center turns out to be a pretty incredible museum. For its content: providing a more nuanced, complex, accounting of Israeli history than I’d ever been exposed to before, and in particular going deep beyond the typical black & white dichotomy of Israel and Palestine, or Jews and Arabs, to get into the Israeli left and right, the shifts in power between left and right over the decades; policies that were and were not popular; protests and demonstrations in civil society; debates and complex issues within Israeli society over religion, immigration, education, security, and a variety of other issues. Admitting and exploring wrongs committed by the Israeli government, and the shifts and changes, impacts and ramifications, and so forth connected with these. But it’s also an incredible museum for its technology – audio guide headsets that activate based on your location within the galleries, playing not just a few tens of sound recordings of curatorial narration, but rather, nearly 200 audio tracks – including diagetic music, audio for over a hundred historical video clips, and so forth, that set a mood, create an atmosphere of each time and place within the history, and explore a variety of themes, from the battlefield to cosmopolitan streets, from political speeches in the Reichstag, the Knesset, and the United Nations to television news reports, that just bring such a richness to the entire experience. And, as a museum serving visitors from a wide array of linguistic backgrounds, I thought it actually a pretty brilliant innovation, rather than having the videos play in any one language, they are silent without the audio guides – and with them, play in whichever language you select.

I wrote an earlier draft of this post that went through my notes on the exhibits, my notes on what I learned of Israeli history, year by year across the 20th century. It got rather lengthy, and my writing and thinking got into some quagmires about how to write about, how to represent, these events and these exhibits, amidst Israel’s history, and its very existence, being as fraught and controversial as it is. And all the more so amidst the current political situation, as a far-right government works to carry out reforms which many say are authoritarian, dangerous to the foundations and future of Israeli democracy, damaging to the rights of women and gender/sexual minorities, in order to enable the easier pursuit of theocratic and right-wing agendas.

But while I cannot help but to let slip my politics, my chief intention in this post is not to assert a political argument, but rather, simply from the perspective of a museum visitor, a tourist / traveler, a historian, and someone interested in Museum Studies, I primarily just wanted to share about this museum experience I had. Politics aside, I believe The Yitzhak Rabin Center exhibit galleries are a great model for how other museums could organize themselves, with their proximity-sensor-linked audio guides, and telling a narrative of national history that is nuanced and complex, open about problems and troubles in the country’s history.

^{Black panels summarizing or marking off different periods of history, each with a new clip of audio narration which plays as you step in front of each new section.}

Where other museums, books, videos, might represent the story of the modern State of Israel in wholly laudatory or villainizing terms, in the Rabin Center museum, we learn a far more complex story, of ups and downs, victories and defeats; of the ways in which Israelis built a state that is a beacon of freedom and democracy in the region, and the ways in which they fell short. We learn of struggles and tensions between religious and secular, of progress and setbacks in gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights, and of discrimination and inequalities between Jews of different ethnic or racial backgrounds, as well as of course between Jews and non-Jews. We learn of protests and demonstrations, media critiques, and social movements. We learn of political scandals, how Rabin resigned from leadership in the Labor Party and from candidacy for the position of Prime Minister in 1977, and about how popular sentiment regarding how the government and the military handled the 1973 Yom Kippur War led to dramatic shifts in Israeli politics: how Israel has never been always one thing – socialist, liberal, progressive, conservative, traditionalist – but rather, that in the late 1970s, “for the first time in history, Israel had a center-right government” with new agendas. As in any other free and democratic country, politics shifted left and right over time.

We learn about the many moves and efforts for peace, about the complexities and difficulties involved, the disagreements and debates. We learn about times when the Israeli government forced Jewish settlers to withdraw from, to abandon, settlements in areas such as the Sinai, as part of efforts to make peace with neighboring states such as Egypt, and the divides this created, revealed, or exacerbated within Israeli society, and we learn about times when such withdrawals led not to peace but only to continued or increased violence. We learn about dreadful acts committed, at times, by the Israeli government or IDF, or elements therein, and we learn about massive protests, within Israeli civil society, against them. And we learn about a diversity of views on what Israel means or represents, how the state should be and how it should behave; a diversity of views on the settlements or the “Occupation,” and on how Israel should address the challenges it faces. Beyond simply left or right, we are presented with a glimpse into the complexity of many of the issues Israel (and in many case, any country) faces.

We learn, too, about the various victories and setbacks in the pursuit of peace, about the hope for peace that the 1993 Oslo Accords represented, and about how extremists on both sides prevented peace from being achieved, not only at that time, but in preceding decades and down to today as well.

^{The final room in the galleries is this memorial-style space, with lights flickering on the surface of a pool of water, at the bottom and center of a circle, surrounded by videos of Rabin’s funeral.}

Contrary to popular narratives that all too often frame things in very black-and-white terms – for or against “Israel,” as if “Israel” is all one thing – we learn in the Yitzhak Rabin Center a lot about civil society, about protests and political tensions within Israel, and about political shifts over time. The current situation shows very clearly, I would think, that “Israel” is not just a single actor, with a single set of political aims or positions, but that this has changed over time – e.g. with the current government being decidedly more right-wing than its predecessors, with different aims, intentions, attitudes, positions – and that there are millions of Israelis who disagree strongly, powerfully, with those attitudes, positions, and agendas.

Like every other country on the planet, Israel has its problems, internal and external; the black marks on its record, the spots where it should have done, should have been, better, and the areas where it fails to live up to its ideals. The Rabin Center museum does not shy away from showing this, with vulnerability and honesty. If there is one thing I learned from this museum, perhaps above and beyond everything else, it is that Israel is a normal country. Israel exists beyond the controversies, beyond the headlines, beyond “The Conflict.” It is a country where millions of people, like people anywhere else in the world, worry about taxes and education, about jobs and unemployment, about climate change and women’s rights. It is a country where politics takes place like anywhere else, left and right, domestic and foreign, arts and culture, society and economics. It is a country that struggles to live up to its ideals, that strives to do better for its people, and that works to negotiate agreements with its neighbors.

Israelis are fighting right now to keep their democracy, to rescue their country from a dangerous rightward swing, and to set it back onto a path of trying to do better, to be better, to become better. I hope that, for the sake of all the people living there, the world can learn to see them with compassion and humanity, rather than with ire, and to recognize that they too, like everyone else in the world, deserve prosperity and happiness, self-determination, and freedom and safety from those who would see them displaced, persecuted, eradicated.

^{Protestors in Tel Aviv, June 10, 2023. Photo my own.}

A Virtual Visit to the Aleppo Synagogue

^{Photos of the Aleppo Synagogue taken in 1947, and a pair of VR headsets used to view a virtual recreation of the synagogue in 3D.}

Visiting the Israel Museum in Jerusalem recently, it was incredible to get to visit a number of synagogues from around the world, either partially recreated within the halls of the Museum, or in the case of the Aleppo Synagogue, in an incredible VR reconstruction.

Originally built sometime in the 5th to 7th centuries of heavy stone, this synagogue in Aleppo, Syria, was home to generations upon generations of a Syrian Jewish community which is no more; as of 2016, it is said there are no more Jews in Syria at all. But, beyond that, the Aleppo Synagogue holds a particularly special place in Jewish history, as the home, for many centuries, of the Aleppo Codex, a handwritten bound volume considered to be the most accurate, most authoritative version of the complete Hebrew Bible. A book which Maimonides himself consulted and relied on for producing his writings.

^{A photo of the Aleppo Codex; the original is today in the Museum’s collections, and it (or a replica?) is on display in the Shrine of the Book on the Museum’s grounds.}

By very fortunate chance, the interior of this synagogue was photographed in extensive detail – numerous perspectives, every nook and cranny – in 1947, just days before it was ransacked and burned by anti-Zionist mobs. Though restored to use sometime after that, it was destroyed again in 2016 and we are told now stands in ruins, abandoned. And, further, I would imagine, inaccessible to the potential for any sorts of arrangements to have surviving furnishings or architectural elements relocated to Israel.

It was wonderful, incredible, therefore, to get to tour the synagogue virtually, putting on a VR headset and audio headphones and being transported into that space. Because of just how extensively the 1947 photography covered every last corner of the building, experts were able to stitch together those images into a three-dimensional virtual recreation of the space that felt, unless I missed something, rather complete.

One disadvantage, of course, of viewing something virtually rather than in real life, is that I could not take photos myself of what I saw. You can get a small sense of what the VR recreation looks like, though, here:

As for the Codex, following the attack on the synagogue in 1947, roughly 3/5ths of this invaluable, priceless, treasure was saved and later brought to the Israel Museum where I was able to see it – the actual original, I believe (or perhaps a replica?) – though I was unfortunately not permitted to take photos. Such a horrid thing, to think it survived intact all the way up until just 75+ years ago, and now a sizable portion is presumably lost forever.

I cannot even imagine how much work and money went into producing this virtual reconstruction – it’s only a temporary exhibit at the moment, but I hope it can somehow become more permanently accessible.

And that the synagogue itself can, perhaps, be restored, and someday become accessible as well. I hope for peace, well-being, prosperity for the people of Syria, and I hope the region can someday become safe for all to live, and travel, more freely.

^{The Ibn Danan synagogue in Fes, Morocco. Not sure if it’s in active use today, but was restored with Moroccan government support in 1999.}

^{The UCLA Klezmer ensemble performing, in 2017, in front of the semi-restored Aron Ha-Kodesh (“ark” or cabinet for holding Torah scrolls) of the Breed Street Shul in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, which fell into disuse and disrepair in the 1980s-90s as the Jewish community moved away and the neighborhood became predominantly Chicano.}

Visiting synagogues from around the world, whether directly or in a museum, synagogues with white sand or blue tile, white marble or dark wood, medieval or modern, is a glorious experience. Even just to see the buildings themselves. Attending services there, experiencing the diverse ways that people pray, can be moving and beautiful, and I count myself so fortunate to have gotten to experience that here and there, from time to time, in places as far apart as Tokyo, Honolulu, Marrakesh, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and London.

And what an incredible and positive thing, to be able to visit recreations of synagogues from around the world all in one place, at the Israel Museum. The same, of course, is true not just for synagogues, but for all the museums around the world that could, and all of those that do, provide visitors with the opportunity to not only view individual objects but also architectural environments, whether that be a traditional Chinese house, a Japanese Buddhist temple, or historical rooms of various other times and places.

The Israel Museum houses four such synagogue recreation rooms, for synagogues from Germany, Italy, India, and Suriname, plus the Aleppo Synagogue temporary exhibit which I very much hope can be made permanent somehow, and a small room with a video of Yom Kippur services at the al-Franj synagogue in Damascus in 2007. (Incidentally, I am glad to read, it seems this synagogue has survived the recent civil war intact, and at least some Syrian Jews have been able to visit from the US with no problems.)

_{Furnishings from the Kadavumbagum Synagogue in Cochin, India.}

One of the four synagogues featured in the museum is one from Cochin, India. The Jewish community in India, sometimes known as the Bene Israel, or “children of Israel,” claim descent from Jews shipwrecked in India nearly 2,000 years ago. In other words, even as people in most parts of the world – including Jews – might stereotypically assume the stereotypical Jew to be Eastern European, or secondarily perhaps Middle Eastern, in fact Jews have been living in India, Ethiopia, and elsewhere around the world for, in some cases, thousands of years. Wikipedia tells me there are still over 5,000 Jews in India today, though a great many more Indian Jews have moved to Israel. If I ever find myself in the right parts of India, it would be amazing to see their synagogues and attend their services. What is on display at the Israel Museum is gorgeous; a distinctively Indian style, and yet still very much recognizable as a synagogue.

^{A reconstruction of the Tzedek ve Shalom synagogue from Paramaribo, Suriname.}

The other non-European synagogue featured at the museum is the Tzedek ve Shalom synagogue originally founded in 1736 in Paramaribo, today the capital of Suriname. A truly beautiful space, very light, sunny, airy, with its white railings, pillars, and ceiling. Reminds me of the congregation I attended from time to time (and sorely regret not attending more frequently) in Honolulu; the sunniness and airiness made my heart, my spirit, light. Put a smile on my face, made it feel like a good, happy, easy, summery day as we said our prayers.

Tzedek ve Shalom also reminds me of what in the United States we call “colonial” architecture – particular stylistic features and overall aesthetics that I suppose must have been popular, or standard, in various parts of the 18th century Dutch/English New World. The Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the only synagogue building in the US still standing from pre-1776, though built in heavy white stone rather than wood, bears some strong similarities in appearance – certainly in color scheme – to Tzedek ve Shalom.

And I suppose it makes sense that there would be links and similarities here. While I know embarrassingly little about Caribbean or South American history, I know that contrary perhaps to our stereotypical image of 19th-20th century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, the first Jewish communities in what’s now the United States were, in fact, Sephardic Jews from the Dutch Caribbean. The founders of the Touro Synagogue, and of Shearith Israel (est. 1654 in New Amsterdam, now New York), were precisely that. I love the design and feel of Tzedek ve Shalom. I hope it’s not chauvinistic, US-centric, of me to say so, but just as an individual from New York, who grew up around certain styles and aesthetics, it feels very American to me. Feels like a marriage of the Dutch/English colonial styles I know from New York and New England and, Judaism, and a space with a beautiful historical, traditional, style that connects you to history and tradition, and not just to our modern world.

One particularly distinctive feature of Caribbean synagogues like Tzedek ve Shalom, reproduced here in the Israel Museum, is that the floors are lined with white sand. I was surprised to see, even the raised bimah or tevah area is covered in sand. I have heard it is much the same at some synagogues in Cuba or elsewhere in the Caribbean. As the gallery labels explain, there are several possible explanations for this. Folk explanations say that the sand is a symbol of diaspora, of metaphorically “wandering in the desert,” as we remain removed from Zion, from the land of Israel; and at the same time, a connection to that desert land. In practical terms, the sand may have helped to protect wooden floors from the wooden clogs historically worn by the Dutch; it may also be related to the Sephardic history of a need to practice Judaism in secrecy – the sand muffling people’s footsteps. I wonder if people daven (pray, worship) barefoot here. What a wonderful feeling underfoot it might be, to daven in soft white sand.

Wikipedia tells me there are a number of historic synagogues still in use in South America and the Caribbean. I would love to visit some of them someday. In the meantime, it is wonderful to get to see this beautiful space, this beautiful architecture, here in Israel.

That said, though, there is something very sad about the idea that these places we’ve heard of, and maybe want to visit someday, are in some cases – as in the Paramaribo case – no longer there to be visited. Moved to a museum. Even if I were to find myself in Suriname, I wonder if there’d be anything to see at all.

^{The main sanctuary at the Oceanside Jewish Center in Oceanside, New York. Soon to be no more. Photo by Stuart Talkofsky, from OJC’s Facebook page.}

The synagogue I grew up in will soon be no more, as well. The congregation has shrunk dramatically over the past several decades, and ultimately the board decided to sell the land and, as a community, to either merge with another congregation in the area or to disperse. Though I have not lived there for a long time, nor been actively practicing or attending any synagogue – I suppose I am myself part of the problem – it is still terribly sad to think of this physical space that I knew and loved so dearly, that was such a big part of my childhood, disappearing from existence. Not only for the sake of myself and my memories, but the sadness that an entire phenomenon, the history of that community, all the people who came through there, and the very reality of that particular community – even as its membership may have changed, as of course all things change – having a present and a future. I surprised myself with how emotional I have been over this, and continue to be.

Some communities, and their synagogues, are destroyed by persecution and violence, as in Aleppo. Others die out due to cultural and societal shifts, families moving away for various reasons, or families no longer raising their children to be actively engaged in Jewish religious life and community in the same way. Change is inevitable, and sadly, we live in a world where war and persecution persist as well. It is glorious that some spaces are able to be preserved, reconstructed, restored, whether in their original locations (as in Fes, Morocco, even if the congregation is no longer active), in museums, or virtually. But, of course, it is still also terribly sad to think of the vibrancy, the lively, active, cultural activity and community that disappears.

^{Sanctuary at Neve Schechter, in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood of Tel Aviv. Photo from the synagogue’s official website.}

That said, vibrant, active, engaging Jewish communities do also still exist all around the world, and one can hope that even amongst these shifts and declines, various sorts of Revival movements may yet have some success. My family and I, while traveling here in Israel, attended a wonderful Shabbat morning service in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood of Tel Aviv; warm, welcoming, energetic, filled with a sort of light, summery, energy. I have not been a regular, active, participant in Jewish practice in my own life in a long time, but these services at Neve Schechter reminded me, as services at Sof Ma’arav in Honolulu, the JCJ in Tokyo, and Santa Barbara Hillel have in the past, of just what I’m missing, and what I would love to have in my life again, if only I could convince myself to get out of bed on a Saturday morning (or out to the synagogue on a Friday evening), on any regular basis at all.

Except where indicated otherwise, all photos are my own.

Twenty Years Ago Today

^{Sakura along the imperial canal near Ichigaya / Iidabashi, 1 April 2003.}

I’m not 100% positive on the precise date, but I believe today marks the 20th anniversary of my first ever arrival in Japan. Unbelievable. How.

As a college student, I felt that study abroad might be my one and only chance to visit and experience life in a place like Japan, before returning to the US and settling in to a life in New York or New England. My whole family – aunts, uncles – all live in and around New York City, and at that point in my life I think I had only ever left the Northeast US a handful of times, including if I am remembering correctly only one overseas trip ever yet in my life. My parents had traveled a little bit in their 20s, I knew, backpacking across Europe or spending X months on a volunteer program before returning to New York, having their first child (me) around age 30, settling down and only very rarely ever making such big trips ever again. The idea of traveling more regularly, to more diverse places, was certainly very enticing and exciting for me, but I don’t know that I imagined that I would ever actually do so, let alone live overseas, let alone live in a non-Western, predominantly non-English-speaking place like Japan.

It just seemed so obvious to me at that point in my life that I would finish college, move back to New York, and end up making my life there, as in fact a great many of my high school era friends have, and good for them – absolutely nothing wrong with that, and in fact I envy some considerable aspects of that lifepath as well, as someone who never ending up having that experience of living in Brooklyn or elsewhere in NYC in your 20s or 30s, or of remaining in one city for years and years, developing the kinds of friendships and personal networks, community membership or belonging, familiarity with the city, that one only can over the course of many years.

So, I wanted to take this opportunity and make the most of it – not that London or Sydney or certain other English-speaking / Western destinations couldn’t have been amazing, but if study abroad was going to be the avenue for me to have this once in a lifetime chance to give this a try. Those four short months in 2003 were an absolute blast. The most fun, the most intense exciting, enjoyable, pleasant, adventure – everything was so new, and so exciting. Tokyo, the land of robots and video games and anime and Harajuku fashion, of J-pop and ukiyo-e and kabuki, and all these things.

^{Akihabara at night. August, 2003.}

Of course, my relationship with Tokyo, with Japan, has changed so much since then. I have been fortunate, in ways that 20-year-old me could never imagine, to come back here so many times, to travel and explore and experience so much of Japan. I quickly fell away from being nearly as interested in anime, manga, video games, as I once was – or once expected I would become. And whether I want to blame it on graduate school / academia leading me towards refining into an ever-more-narrow focus in terms of my research interests, or whether to say more broadly this is just how life is, I also quickly came to realize that there are not enough hours in the day, enough days in the year, enough years in a lifetime to ever explore and experience all the things I expected I might one day become familiar with. As an example, not only have I consumed astonishingly little anime, manga, or video games in the last twenty years, but even as my Japanese reading ability has become nearly fluent, and even after now living here for the past 3.5 years, I still have never found or made the time, or gotten into the habit, of reading almost any magazines – it was easy for me to imagine at age 20 that someday I might come to read Casa Brutus or Bijutsu techо̄ every month, or otherwise come to become deeply familiar with Japanese visual culture, fashion, travel, in a certain kind of local knowledge, cultural capital, immersed in the local culture kind of way. And that hasn’t happened. But, I have, actually, in the last year or so since things opened up a bit more after the first years of the pandemic, begun to feel that I have started to actually get to know a community, and certain corners of Tokyo life in that sort of way. Even as I continue to not actually have that many Japanese friends (which is a whole other topic about foreigner life, etc etc), I have in just the last few months started to get to know so many more drag queens, designers and fashion people, stand-up comedians… Though I still do not go to art museums or theatre nearly as regularly as I might have imagined, still know next to nothing about the art gallery scene here, still am very much on the outside of many communities here – e.g. arts, theatre – I feel like developing those networks is within reach in a way it never did before.

But, I suppose I am drifting off topic. This 20 year anniversary just so happens to coincide with me leaving Tokyo after 3.5 years, and moving to Kyoto where I expect to stay another three to five years. So, I’ve got a lot to reflect upon and think about, and it all sort of merges together.

^{Clothes shopping in Harajuku with a friend, M.K. Haven’t been in touch since then, so I’ve added this little bar for privacy. I wonder how she’s doing, where she’s living and what she’s up to these days.}

In any case, what more can I say? It is wonderful to be still in touch, still in communication with a few friends from that time – thanks to the wonders of social media and the internet, but even with that, it really is just such an incredible thing to still be in touch with these folks at all, and so mind-boggling to reconnect with one another and to actually think that it’s been twenty years, when in some respects I feel like we haven’t changed that much as people. I mean, of course we have, but we’re also not total strangers. That said, the majority of people I met at that time, with whom I developed such intense, close friendships over those four months, I have since fallen out of touch with entirely. It would be wonderful to see them again – see how people are doing, learn what direction life has taken for them these past twenty years.

Meanwhile, so many of the places where I spent so much time during study abroad, which might be sites of nostalgia had I not lived here again, have become so familiar – the experiences of that time have been overwritten with so many more times that any particular nostalgia from 2003 has dissipated, or disappeared. Which is, in a sense, rather sad I think, that I no longer remember almost anything about those days, let alone the feeling, the emotion, of shopping in Harajuku or of daily commuting transfers through Ikebukuro. I am grateful to still have photos. But, of course, in another sense it’s also very cool, to think that Ikebukuro, Harajuku, Shibuya, have become so familiar to me. They may have lost a certain magic – and, the demolition of the old Harajuku Station building *fistshake*, and other physical changes to these neighborhoods, has certainly contributed to the loss of an ability to feel nostalgic feelings of being in that same place or seeing those same buildings. But at the same time, possessing a deep familiarity with these neighborhoods, the kind of familiarity that comes from not just visiting but from living here for X years, is a very cool feeling to have.

^{The old main building of Harajuku Station, built 1924, demolished 2020. (Photo, June 2013.) An absolute landmark, a source of great nostalgia for me every time I visited, until it was disappeared.}

One thing that has, for some reason, remained very nostalgic for me, though, is the chimes or tunes that are played at each station of the JR Yamanote line as trains arrive and depart. I am not sure why this in particular, so much more so than anything else, still to this day reminds me of spring/summery feelings, feelings of a youthful time in my life when despite being on study abroad and having classes to attend and homework to do I nevertheless felt so free, and just excitedly soaking it all up, as we explored and experienced Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku, and other parts of the city.

I do sorely wish I’d had more confidence, less anxiety or being self-conscious, at that time; this is getting into a whole other topic that I could write at extensive length about, but, I have always found, on all my visits to Japan, that this feels like a very freeing place (for someone of my particular package of white foreign privilege, etc.) to get to try out different fashions, different ways of expressing yourself. And I never really embraced it until a couple of years ago. But, wow, if only I had done so at age 20, while on study abroad. What a thing that could have been. Not that I had the money – that’s always been another major impediment to such things. But, to explore, embrace, leap head-on into, or at the very least try Harajuku fashions at age 20, rather than at age 40… I could have had twenty years of young adult life enjoying such fashions. Oh well.

In any case, every spring & summer in Japan reminds me of those times again. That sunny, airy, free and open feeling that I get from so many anime & live action films about high schoolers. The excitement of going out in the city, to explore new areas or to enjoy cafes and shopping in vibrant places like Harajuku and Shibuya.

The cherry blossoms are I think just past full bloom right now. Spring is here, and as oppressively hot and humid as summer in Japan can be, I eagerly look forward to the reliable warmth – no need for a cardigan or back-up jacket – of the next X months. And to this adventure continuing – this next stage of my relationship with Japan, a place that 20 years ago I thought was a one-time luxury, a once in a lifetime experience. I feel so fortunate, so grateful, and still frankly so amazed, that things have turned out so differently, have turned out the way they have.

Shurijō Akewatashi 首里城明渡し – The Turning Over of the Sui royal palace

Went to the new NahART なはーと arts center today and saw “Shurijō akewatashi” 首里城明渡し, a 1933 play by Yamazato Eikichi 山里永吉, relating the 1879 events of the Empire of Japan forcing King Shō Tai of Lūchū to turn over Sui gusuku (Shuri castle), the royal palace, and move to Tokyo. It was beautiful to get to see it performed. Beautiful costumes, beautiful sets. I had not anticipated that it would be in Uchinaaguchi – the Okinawan language – rather than Japanese. Which was wonderful for helping it feel and sound right – Though it did mean I spent most of the play trying to read along in the Japanese translation, with the little light that was coming from the stage. (No house lights.)

The play begins with two top court officials, Giwan peechin and Kamekawa ueekata, talking about the circumstances of the times – whether to lean towards Japan or to believe that China will send help… (it’s more complicated than that, but… in essence.)

The last two scenes were, I thought, particularly beautiful, and moving. In a hall at Sui gusuku, painted/lacquered lavishly in red, the top officials in their stark black court robes and young princes in stunning golden robes, argue with Japanese gov’t official Matsuda Michiyuki about what is to happen to Lūchū. Michiyuki, in Western-style formal dress, and backed up by several riflemen, reads out the imperial edict declaring Ryūkyū Domain (est a few years earlier with the unilateral declared abolition of the “kingdom”) to now be abolished, Okinawa prefecture established, and the king and several princes made Japanese aristocrats and forced to relocate to Tokyo.

Still screenshotted from the trailer for the play, showing Imperial official Matsuda Michiyuki reading out the imperial edict to Prince Nakijin and other members of the royal court.

This is not just part of the play. Hearing it recited out felt to me, and I presume to at least some of the Okinawan audience, as a direct reminder of what happened at that time. This is not a personal drama, merely set against the backdrop of a historical time: it is very much so a play reenacting for audiences the historical events themselves, so they might understand and feel the emotional impact of what happened. The political violence committed against Lūchū, and presented in a way that highlights the patronizing self-important attitude and unilateral action of the Meiji state. Michiyuki stands, while the Luchuans all sit, the power differential symbolized and felt in the difference in height. King Shō Tai comes out and says something to the effect of, “perhaps this is happening because I am lacking in virtue. But, whatever happens to me, Lūchū will continue.”

In the next and last scene, the officials are gathered at Naha Port along with the Chifijin (Kikoe-ogimi, the chief priestess of the kingdom) and several other priestesses, as Michiyuki declares it is time for Shō Tai and the princes to board the ship to Tokyo. I was certainly moved as he departs, and everyone who is left behind sobs and cries out, knowing this might be the last they see of him.

I would be very curious, and eager, to produce a translation of the play (it’s less than 30 pages, and in fact only about half that, since each page of the program is half Okinawan and half Japanese translation), and more than that, to try to see what I can do about placing it in context, trying to see what I can say meaningfully about the politics of the time in 1933 (the context in which Yamazato wrote it), and what might be said about why it ends how it does, why it includes and excludes the scenes that it does, why it phrases things in a particular way.

What might Okinawan audiences have thought of it at that time (maybe I can even find reviews!) and what might be said about the choice to perform it again today – in 2022, 150th anniversary of the kingdom being made a Domain, and 50th anniversary of Okinawa’s post-Occupation Reversion to Japan, but not the 150th anniversary of the 1879 events of the play. And, performed right now (late Oct 2022) to coincide with Uchinanchu Taikai (a major event in which thousands of people of Okinawan descent come to Okinawa once every 5-6 years as a sort of diaspora reunion) and with the Kobikishiki 木曳式 for Sui gusuku – the Main Hall of the palace is not by any means done being rebuilt yet, but this week marks a formal ground-breaking ceremony (kikôshiki 起工式) and a ceremony presenting lumber for the reconstruction from the Yanbaru forests up north…

Yamazato is an intriguing figure himself. I don’t know much about him, but once I became aware of his name, it popped up again and again. He was not only the author of this 1933 play, which was performed a number of times down through the postwar era, including as part of a 1980-something benefit event raising funds for the rebuilding of the palace (which was destroyed in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa), but also the author of a series of newspaper opinion pieces in the late 1960s opposing Reversion to Japan, which were republished in English as a booklet entitled “Japan is Not Our Fatherland.” He also wrote a number of essays I have come across about Sui gusuku and other related topics of revival of Okinawan traditional culture and heritage.

I have to finish revising my dissertation into a book manuscript first, but, I feel like this could be really interesting to look into as a next project, dealing with contemporary heritage politics, intersecting with issues of colonialism and imperialism, how the arts relate to the complexities of Okinawan politics in the 1870s, 1930s, 1960s, 1980s…

1872: The Beginning of the End of the Kingdom of Lūchū (Ryūkyū)

This year has seen numerous events commemorating or marking or otherwise being held in connection with the 50th anniversary of Okinawa’s “reversion” to Japan in 1972, after 27 years of US/Allied Occupation. And rightfully so. It’s an event worth marking; the Occupation period is not only fascinating, but extremely impactful and significant for understanding Okinawan politics today. I’ve certainly learned a lot from these exhibits and other events, and feel very fortunate and grateful to have been able to be in Tokyo throughout this year (even if I wasn’t in Okinawa for any of the events held there); I am eagerly looking forward to seeing some exhibits in connection with this event, when I go back to Okinawa later this month.

The 1872 edict, reproduced in a book entitled Dajōkan nisshi 太政官日誌。

But, what has gotten far less attention for some reason is the fact that 2022 also marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of what’s come to be known as the Ryūkyū Shobun 琉球処分 – often mistranslated as the “disposal” or “disposition” of Ryukyu, but really meaning something more like “dealing with Ryukyu” – in short, the beginning of a seven-year process of abolishing the Okinawan kingdom of Lūchū (known as Ryūkyū in Japanese) and annexing it to Japan. This began 150 years ago today, on 16 Oct 1872 (the 14th day of the 9th month of the 5th year of the Meiji era on the Japanese calendar), when the Japanese imperial court presented Prince Ie Shō Ken Chōchoku 伊江王子尚健朝直, a royal prince of Lūchū, with an imperial edict declaring that the Ryūkyū Kingdom 琉球王国 was now to be “Ryūkyū domain” 琉球藩. The following year, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs transferred jurisdiction over Ryūkyū to the Ministry of the Interior. After various other changes and developments over the course of the ensuing years, in 1879, Tokyo finally effected a fuller takeover of the governance and administration of the islands, abolishing the “domain” (i.e. the former kingdom) entirely as an entity and renaming the jurisdiction “Okinawa prefecture.”

The dismantling and annexation of the Kingdom of Lūchū was a long and complex process, taking place over seven years, from 1872 to 1879. But today is the 150th anniversary of the first key moment beginning that process, and so in this post I’d like to focus on the events of that day (and some of the immediately preceding days).

After a number of discussions and back-and-forths both within Tokyo and between the new imperial government and the royal government in Lūchū, on 15 Aug 1872 (7/12 on the Japanese calendar), the Meiji government officially requested that Ryūkyū send a formal embassy to pay respects to the Meiji Emperor and congratulate him on acceding to the throne (in 1867) and on the restoration of imperial power and the establishment of a new, imperial, government (in 1868). I have not yet found anything explicitly discussing what the Lūchūan government thought of this, whether they knew it was going to be markedly different from previous embassies merely acknowledging new Shoguns and reaffirming the status quo of Lūchū’s largely autonomous relationship under samurai authority, or not.

Model of the Saga domain steamship Ryōfūmaru, potentially similar in style to the Hōzuimaru 豊瑞丸 and Sanpō-maru 三邦丸 which transported the 1872 Luchuan embassy.

But, one way or another, they organized an embassy, led by Prince Ie (uncle to King Shō Tai), with top-ranking court official Giwan ueekata Chōhō 宜湾親方朝保 as his deputy envoy, and about 34 others. On 7/25 (Aug 28), they departed the Luchuan port city of Naha aboard the steamship Hōzui-maru 鳳瑞丸, sailing to Kagoshima in southern Kyushu and then from there to Tokyo aboard the steamship Sanpō-maru 三邦丸. Ie Tomoo 伊江朝雄 (15th head of the Ie house of which Prince Ie was the 11th head)¹ writes that this was perhaps the first time that anyone from Lūchū (or any court officials?) had ever ridden on a steamship, but I have no idea if that’s accurate or not. An evocative point of trivia if true.

After arriving in Tokyo on 9/2 (Oct 4), the envoys stayed overnight at Shinagawa and then were taken by horse-drawn carriage and rickshaw (both very new things in Meiji Japan) to their lodgings in the Atago (Shiba) neighborhood of Tokyo. Not the mansions of the Shimazu family, former lords of Satsuma (Kagoshima) domain, who had exercised authority over Lūchū for more than 250 years from 1609 until the abolition of the domains the preceding year (1871), but for whatever reason, the former mansion of the Mōri family, lords of Saeki domain in Bungo province (today, О̄ita prefecture).

The Luchuans reportedly recorded that the Japanese food didn’t suit them あーらんやっさー（合わない）, and complained there weren’t enough oily or fried foods あんだむん (揚げ物). But they brought their own abura-miso あんだんすー, and their own salted pork すーちかー. They also brought, as souvenirs/gifts for Foreign Minister Soejima Taneomi, some rock candy 氷砂糖, sugared dried citrus fruits きっぱん、and winter melon しぶい・冬瓜（とうがん）, as well as salted pork.

“Opening of the First Railway in Japan: Arrival of the Mikado,” Illustrated London News 21 Dec 1872.
Note the Japanese officials (and the emperor himself? I’m not sure) in traditional Japanese court costume to the left, and foreign dignitaries in Western-style formal outfits on the right. And between them, a bearded figure in a slightly floppy white hat, depicted in Luchuan-style robes.

A week after their arrival, on 9/9 (Oct 11), telegraph lines connecting Tokyo and Kyoto were completed. And then, on 9/12 (Oct 14), the Luchuans participated in grand opening ceremonies for the new Shinbashi train station, and for the train line connecting Shinbashi (Tokyo) with Yokohama (today, Sakuragichō Station). I don’t know why, but I feel like there’s just some kind of あこがれ, some kind of attraction or intriguing appeal, to the early history of Japanese railroads; if I had all the time in the world, I’d love to look more deeply into the precise details of this event. But, suffice it to say, interesting enough for me is that

(1) these Luchuan envoys happened to be there at all; I don’t know if we want to call it a “coincidence,” but it’s certainly some kind of chance co-incidence. This was, I can only presume, the first time for a Japanese emperor to ride a train, the first time for almost any of the top-level Japanese officials involved (excepting those, I suppose, who had previously traveled in the West), and surely the first time that any Luchuan royal or scholar-aristocrat had ever ridden a train. I wonder if there are any surviving diaries that describe their feelings and thoughts on the experience.

(2) These Luchuan ambassadors participated in these events alongside not only Japanese imperial government officials and diplomatic representatives from various Western countries, but also alongside Qing envoys. Lūchū at this time was still a loyal tributary to the Qing, and their king received investiture from the Qing in 1866, only a few years earlier. During the investiture ceremonies, all the Lūchū court officials, as well as the king himself, kowtowed to the Qing envoys as representatives of the Qing Emperor. A decidedly, powerfully, unequal hierarchical relationship. And, yet, now, here is a Luchuan royal prince and his entourage, participating in the opening for a train station & train line, and then riding that train, in close proximity to Qing envoys. What interactions did they have, if any? What words were exchanged?

(3) Whether in anticipation of the edict the Meiji government had already drafted (or was already drafting), or in light of Lūchū’s already less than fully autonomous status within the Japanese order, the Luchuan envoys were not treated like foreign diplomats, but as a sort of ambiguous or in-between status unto themselves. Records of the ceremony list all the foreign diplomats as 公使 (envoys, diplomats, ministers), and Prince Ie as 公子 (a noble), and list him as parading / processing to the station not amongst the diplomats, but at the end of a long line of Japanese officials and the like.

Gishiki roku, Meiji 5, 9/12: Procession to Train Station 儀式録明治五年巻之四中：九月十二日鉄道館へ臨幸　行列
Collection of Imperial Household Agency Archives & Mausolea Dept. 宮内庁書陵部所蔵

In any case, the Luchuans rode in the same train car as a number of former daimyō, including Shimazu Tadayoshi (Mochihisa), who up until the previous year (1871; or maybe only up until 1868?) would have been their lord, claiming and exerting a position of authority above (over) the Luchuan king. After arriving in Yokohama, the train returned to Tokyo, where a grand banquet was held at the Hama Rikyū Gardens 浜離宮 – a former shogunal palace, now [in 1872] home to the Enryōkan 延遼館, the first Western-style guesthouse built in Japan for Western dignitaries. Some 100,000 regular Tokyo citizens were apparently in attendance to witness the fireworks and other festivities. One wonders how much of a glimpse of the Westerners, Chinese, or Luchuans they got, or if there was any actual direct interaction. Then again, by 1872, perhaps direct interaction with foreigners wasn’t the rarity it had been previously.

A digital rendering of the view from the lower level 下段 of the Great Audience Hall (О̄hiroma 大広間) of the Honmaru Palace, gazing “up” towards the Shogun’s seat in the upper level 上段. Probably not too different from how the Great Audience Hall of the Nishinomaru Palace, i.e. the Imperial Palace of 1872, would have looked.

Two days later, Prince Ie, deputy envoy Giwan Chōhō, and mission secretary Kyan Chōfu 喜屋武朝扶 (and others?) went to the Imperial Palace for their formal audience (meeting) with the Meiji Emperor. Nearly every discussion of these events I’ve read – and, indeed, of most other imperial audiences and the like around this time – say simply “the imperial palace,” without making it clear just what sort of place we’re talking about. The Imperial Palace that was built for the Meiji Emperor, for the new modern / Western imperial country, was not completed until 1889. It took far more digging than it should have for me to determine that when the Luchuans visited “the imperial palace” in 1872, they were not received in a reception hall that was in any way Western-style, or newly-built, but rather in the О̄hiroma 大広間 of the Nishi-no-maru 西の丸 (Western Bailey) of what had been the Shogun’s castle until just four years earlier. This О̄hiroma audience hall was exactly the same one in which Luchuan envoys in previous generations (in 1850, 1842, 1832, 1806, the 1790s, and on back) had met with shogunal heirs and the like after their formal audiences with the Shoguns in the О̄hiroma of the Honmaru 本丸 (Main/Central Bailey) of the castle. The Honmaru burned down in 1863 and was never rebuilt. The Shogun, and then the Emperor, made the Nishinomaru Palace the new “central” or “main” portion of the palace, and even today, the Imperial Palace remains centered on that location. As much as I would love to see the Honmaru Palace rebuilt as a historical site, so that we as visitors can see firsthand what the space would have looked like, I am sadly not aware of any efforts or initiatives to even think about doing that – instead, the former site of the Honmaru Palace remains today just empty grassy area (the East Gardens 皇居東御苑).

A Luchuan royal prince in Ming-style court robes.
「江戸上り使者並びに道具の図」 (detail).
Ink and colors on paper, handscroll.
Date unknown.
Lost in 2019 Shuri castle fire.

So, the Luchuans were received by the Meiji Emperor in a tatami-lined room with fusuma walls, presumably I imagine painted with images of birds and flowers or something like that on gold foil backgrounds, and perhaps with one or more sides of the room being plain white shōji paper screens. The emperor, I presume, would have sat in a section of the room where the floor was raised just a few inches higher than where the Luchuans sat – again, a nearly identical situation to how they were received by shogunal heirs and the like in generations past. All the Japanese officials wore traditional Japanese court costume, in tune with the traditional space; as far as I gather from the surprisingly scarce records I’ve read, none were wearing Western-style garments. The Luchuans typically would have appeared before the Shogun or others in replicas of Ming court costume bestowed upon them by the Ming or Qing Empires, as a symbol of Lūchū’s close ties to the source and center of High Confucian Civilization, and a symbol of their kingdom’s sovereignty, granted to them and recognized by the Ming & Qing Emperors. But on this day, they were told by Foreign Minister Soejima to appear, instead, in Luchuan court robes. As these were not Japanese robes, they still marked them as foreign (i.e. as culturally different), and as high-status (expensive, lavish, formal royal court robes), but they did not have those symbolic resonances of Luchuan sovereignty.

I have been frustrated to not find records detailing precisely how the audience ceremony went; I know it sounds extremely in-the-weeds, but shogunate + Shimazu records show in fine detail where the Luchuan envoys sat relative to the shoguns and to everyone else, how many times they bowed, and so forth – all details that could be really meaningful to try to compare how this imperial audience treated them as greater or lesser or same or different as when they were ritually reaffirming their status quo relationship to the Shoguns.

But, in any case, we know that Prince Ie presented the Emperor with a formal letter from his king, and with gifts of Luchuan products – including textiles, aamui 泡盛 liquor in jugs made in distinctive Luchuan styles of pottery, some lacquerware items, and a few sets of inkstones, calligraphy brushes, and hanging scroll works of calligraphy or painting. The Emperor reciprocated, presenting the envoys with Japanese brocade textiles, some hunting guns, one or more sets of saddle & stirrups, some sake cups, lacquerware boxes, and 30,000 yen to circulate in the islands, thus incorporating the Ryūkyū Islands monetarily into the same currency as was now being used in modern Japan.

And then there was the edict. Much ink has been spilled talking about the political implications and significance of this. The basic gist of it being, to my understanding, two fold:

(1) that the Empire of Japan was unilaterally declaring that Ryūkyū was to no longer be a kingdom, but now a domain, ruled by a “domain king.” This is weird, given that all the samurai domains were abolished a year earlier – all of Japan is now divided into prefectures, and all the daimyō have been replaced by Governors, very few if any of whom are the same person as had previously been daimyō (lord) over those lands. And yet, despite these radical changes to the political geography and regional administration of (mainland) Japan, the Ryūkyū Islands were now being incorporated not yet as a prefecture, but as a domain? And with Shō Tai being declared “domain king” 藩王, a title which has never existed before in Japanese history, and which is abolished seven years later in 1879, to never exist again? Weird. But then again, maybe not weird insofar as the very new, very young, Meiji government was still in the midst of trying to figure out what its norms and structures and standards would be. But then again, definitely weird.

(2) that this was the first time any Japanese authority (shogun, emperor, or otherwise) had ever formally “invested” 冊封 a Lūchūan ruler. In the past, kings of Lūchū got their legitimacy from the Ming / Qing emperors, and from domestic Luchuan sources of legitimacy. The Shimazu lords of Kagoshima (Satsuma) and the Tokugawa shoguns recognized or acknowledged each royal succession in Lūchū, but they did not claim that Luchuan kings’ legitimacy or authority was granted to them by the Japanese in any way. Now, the Meiji government is asserting exactly that: that they have created the title of “domain king,” and are in some sense, to some extent, in some way, claiming all of Ryūkyū as Japanese territory which they are then granting to Shō Tai to govern/administer as “king” of that domain. A big difference.

If you’d like to read more about this, Marco Tinello and others have written at length about these political changes.

For the purposes of this already rather lengthy and detailed blog post, which I should have taken the time to prepare ahead of time so that I could simply hit “Publish” on the correct day of the anniversary rather than sitting down to write it all out on the day of, I would like to instead move on.

Exhibition poster for Ishikawa Mao’s “Dai Ryukyu shashin emaki” (Photo Scroll of Great Ryukyu), showing a detail from the photo scroll. An imagined reenactment of the reaction of the Luchuan officials (here, in Luchuan style court robes) as they hear the imperial edict read out.

I cannot imagine the emotion in that moment, as Prince Ie and his compatriots were presented with this edict, to bring home to Lūchū. Were they surprised by this? Did they expect that this ceremonial meeting with the emperor would go like so many meetings with shoguns had gone in the past, marking little or no political change? Or did they see it coming? Discussions within the Lūchū royal court, or between the court and the imperial government, in the months and years leading up to this, are well beyond my research focus, and I have never happened to read almost anything of that content, so I am not sure.

But I think this imagined representation of it by contemporary photography artist Ishikawa Mao 石川真生 (b. 1953) conveys one strong possibility. I am not even sure the words to use to describe the expressions on these men’s faces. Distress. Sadness. Anger and frustration at the Japanese government doing this, and at their powerlessness in the moment. The difference in height between the standing Japanese official and the seated Luchuans certainly gives an impression of the power differential, of the hopelessness or powerlessness of the Luchuans, to have to deal with this declaration that is going to overturn their world.

There is surely a lot more to be said here, but as I don’t have access to what anyone involved actually thought or felt at the time, I am just going to finish up by moving on and saying a little more about the events and activities of the embassy following this profound event.

A photo of the chief members of the embassy. Front row, from left: Giwan Choho, Prince Ie, Kyan Chofu. Back row: Yamasato peechin, a Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official. I am unclear if this is the photo taken in Asakusa, but it’s the only photo of the group I’ve seen, so I presume it is.

Prior to leaving Tokyo, the embassy had formal photos taken at a photo studio in Asakusa, by photographers Shimooka Renjō 下岡蓮杖 and Uchida Kuichi 内田九一.² I wonder whether this was the first time any members of the royal court were photographed. The first photo ever taken by a Japanese photographer was about 15 years earlier, in 1857, by a Kagoshima domain retainer (and of Shimazu Nariakira, lord of Kagoshima domain), so I feel like there’s a possibility that Luchuans visiting Kagoshima might have had their picture taken at some point, but I’m unaware of any concrete examples. Incidentally, Uchida was the only photographer to ever photograph the Meiji Emperor – so, this wasn’t just some random commercial studio.

The Luchuan envoys were also shown around the naval yards at Yokosuka and the foreign settlement in Yokohama. Another set of interactions I’d be curious to read more about, if there are any sources surviving. Lūchū had seen its share of British, French, American, and other foreign visitors beginning in the 1840s, and top-level officials like Prince Ie and Giwan ueekata may have had some interactions with those figures; but unless I’m overlooking something, I imagine that visiting the foreign settlement in Yokohama – by this point, well-established for nearly 20 years, with a sizable population and numerous Western-style buildings, etc. – would have been quite the experience.

The envoys were then provided a steamship to take them back to Okinawa. After departing Tokyo on 10/5 (Nov 5), they were caught in a typhoon and were castaway or shipwrecked on Kikaijima 喜界島, reportedly cutting their long hair and burning some of it as part of prayers to the sea deities for a safe return. They finally returned to Naha on 2/5 of the following year (March 3, 1873),³ and then, to Shuri, to report to the royal court.

I imagine that 2029, the 150th anniversary of the abolition of Ryukyu Domain and the establishment of Okinawa prefecture, will see more events marking or commemorating that anniversary. It will be interesting to see how celebratory vs. solemn/respectful they will be – celebrating the establishment of Okinawa prefecture? Or commemorating the loss of the kingdom? But, that process started here, in 1872, 150 years ago today.

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1. 伊江朝雄、「琉球慶賀使節：維新後間もない東京での足跡」、沖縄学 7 (2004).

2. Ie Tomoo writes Shimoda Renjō 下田蓮杖, but I’m presuming this is a typo.

3. The 3rd day of the 12th month of the 5th year of the Meiji era coincided with Jan 1, 1873 on the Gregorian calendar, and it was on this day that Japan formally adopted the Gregorian calendar for all official purposes, doing away with official use of the lunar calendar. So March 3, 1873 is also 3/3 on the Japanese calendar, but I am not sure when Lūchū formally made this switch.

Kumi udui in Yokohama: Wunna munu gurui

Got to go see some Kumi udui this weekend, and.. it was wonderful as always.

Kumi udui / Kumi wudui 組踊 (or, Kumi odori in Japanese) is an Okinawan form of dance-drama originated in the Luchuan (Ryukyuan) royal court in 1719. It bears many similarities to Japanese Noh or Kabuki, and I suppose perhaps to Chinese theatre forms such as kunqu or jingju as well. You can read a bit more about it at the Samurai-Archives Wiki or on the National Theatre Okinawa’s website.

While Kumi udui is now regularly performed at the National Theatre Okinawa (est. in Urasoe in 2004), among other venues in Okinawa, this weekend’s performance at the Yokohama Noh Theatre was a wonderfully rare opportunity to see it performed here in the Tokyo/Yokohama area.

I am embarrassed to admit, I struggled to focus during the performance of Nidu tichiuchi 二童敵討, a play about two brothers who scheme to get the lord Amaohe and his men drunk, and distract them with dance, in order to get the upper hand on him and kill him in revenge for Amaohe having killed their father. One of the five plays written by Udui bujо̄ (Magistrate of Dance) Tamagusuku Chо̄kun 踊奉行玉城朝薫 and performed in that first ever kumi udui performance in 1719, this remains one of the most frequently performed plays in the small classical repertoire.

I’ve enjoyed the privilege of seeing it performed two or three times before, and unfortunately, embarrassingly, found it difficult to get engrossed, especially during the first half, which is slower, lower energy, consisting chiefly of dialogue. But the costumes were gorgeous as always, and the second half, in which the brothers dance lively dances and execute their plan, that was lively and always fun. 

But the second play of today’s program was a new one for me, and I had far less difficulty paying attention – my mind not wandering – and just getting absorbed into the story and the aesthetics. 

Based on what very little I thought I knew of the play Wunna munu gurui 女物狂 (J: Onna mono kurui), I assumed it would be essentially a variation on the Noh play Sumidagawa, in which a mother in search of her son, kidnapped by slavers, is mad with grief, and eventually learns her son has died. 

But as it turns out, the play has only some few basic similarities. I don’t believe there’s video of the performance I saw, but here is a recording of one from the National Theatre Okinawa:

 

The kumi udui play begins, not with the mother, but with the slaver, who introduces himself to the audience, and then comes across the boy, Kamimachi 亀松. The kid playing this role, Tomishima Kanon* 富島花音, was incredible. Not that I would know precisely what all the marks and movements should be, but as far as I could tell, they certainly seemed very restrained, professional, their movements very controlled and rehearsed, not loose or imperfect at all. I’ve seen a lot of kids in Noh and Kabuki (albeit often perhaps a good few years younger) who were clearly doing their best, but were fidgety, too loud or too high-pitched, more shouting their lines than chanting them properly. And they had much smaller roles than Kamimachi, who has quite a few lines and who is on-stage for a sizable portion of the play. This kid was so impressive. And adorable in their yellow bingata robe, oshiroi makeup, and wig and hair ornaments. Beautiful. 

The boy dances with a pinwheel, and is then captured by the slaver, who takes him to a temple. While the slaver is asleep, the boy tells the monks about the kidnapping, and the monks concoct a fake “wanted” order, describing the man as wanted by the authorities. It was wonderful to see how a 300 year
old play, performed in highly stylized traditional forms and in a language few if any in the audience understand (the Okinawan language is a distinct language from, not a dialect of, Japanese), could still inspire laughs – as the man tries to make himself look shorter, or to wipe or scrunch his face in different
ways to try to avoid matching the description. 

After the slaver is taken away (or flees? it is unclear), a bunch of other kids appear, in adorable red robes, also with lavish hairdos and ornaments. I didn’t quite understand, in terms of the plot, who they were supposed to be. But their performances were excellent too. 

The mother then appears, in gorgeous bingata robes, dragging a willow branch. I know willow features in Sumidagawa too, as a symbol somehow of the grief and madness, though I don’t really know the history or symbolism of why. She dances briefly, recites some lines, and collapses on the ground. 

Then, finally, the monks reunite her with her son. A happy ending, compared to Sumidagawa. 

Wish I knew what exactly to say further, except that visually, aurally, it was a real pleasure. Tomishima-san was incredible, and of course the adult actors were as well. I would love to see this again. Though I am also now all the more curious and excited to eventually see Mikarushii 銘苅子, a kumi udui play with similarities to the Noh play Hagoromo (“The Feather Mantle”); the costume for the heavenly spirit in this play looks absolutely incredible. While the costume for the shite character in Hagoromo – a celestial maiden – looks like a fancy Noh costume, that for Mikarushii is rainbow-colored, like some of the most brilliant Japanese paintings of phoenixes, ethereal in multiple gossamer layers, and includes a long train which flows behind the figure like a trailing train or clouds. Well. In any case, hopefully someday I’ll get to see this. In the meantime, Wunna munu gurui was a pleasure, and I look forward to seeing this performed again someday as well.

*I am unfortunately unsure of the reading of the actor’s name.