Okinawa Rekishi Minzoku Shiryôkan

Now that I’ve posted about that really fantastic last day in Okinawa, let me jump back to our Saturday of field trips. Between the Ryukyumura theme park, and Ocean Expo Park, we stopped for lunch at a rest stop sort of place on the side of the highway. Run by the Okinawan chain of souvenir sweets shops called Okashi Goten (“Sweets Palace”), the place included a lunch buffet restaurant, and large souvenir shop. Though the official field trip schedule gave us a woefully limited time at each actual stop, they gave us a whole hour and a half for lunch. I noticed signs indicating some kind of museum across the street, so when I finished eating I went and took a look.

Feels a bit bizarre to find a museum of any sort just on the side of the highway in the middle of, well, not exactly nowhere, but… Yet, as it turns out, there is some sense to it after all. The Okinawa rekishi minzoku shiryôkan, or Okinawa Museum of History and Folklore, which just opened in summer 2013, is a private venture showing off the personal collection of the CEO of Okashi Goten. So, if you want to see the museum, you’re going to end up at the rest stop for lunch and/or souvenirs; and, if you’re stopping at the rest stop as we were as part of a bus tour, you just might take a moment to check out the museum, as I did.

Sadly, the museum doesn’t allow any photos inside, but boy was it incredible. I’m not sure if there’s any one item, to be honest, which is all that photo-worthy, but I wish I even just had a picture of the rooms themselves, filled with objects. The sheer number of things came as quite a surprise, as I walked into this small random building on the side of the highway way out in Yanbaru. The collection includes quite a number of ceramics, lacquerwares, farming and fishing implements, and other “folklife” and “folk craft”/decorative arts sort of objects. Plus, a whole set of displays of papier-mache figures, each meticulously dressed in garments made from real bingata and the like, and made up otherwise – hair, props, etc., depicting various aspects of Okinawan history and folk life, from royal processions to sacred rituals.

Generally, you can walk around the place freely, on your own. But one of the staff was kind enough to chat with me, and walk me through the exhibits. She explained that all of this is the personal collections of the Okashi Goten CEO, who established the museum and decided to share his collection with the public out of concern that the younger generation simply isn’t taught enough, and thus doesn’t know enough, about their own history. The Okinawan language (“hôgen“), so harshly suppressed in the early 20th century, was apparently strongly discouraged within the classroom even as late as the early 1970s, under the US Occupation, and as a result, few still speak it well; further, Okinawan history, art history, etc. simply aren’t taught in the public schools. My tour guide, probably in her 60s or so, born and raised in Yanbaru going back many generations, expressed her own deep personal concerns for these things, and her own personal embarrassment that she herself knew so little about any of this before working at the museum.

She eagerly pointed out notable works of ceramics, lacquerware, and the like, and explained that many of the works in the collection are by Living National Treasures such as Kinjô Jirô (金城次郎) or otherwise famous or prominent Okinawan artists such as Kobashigawa Genkei (小橋川源慶), Seiji (小橋川清次), and Isamu (小橋川勇), and Ômine Jissei (大嶺實清), and that the collection in fact includes more numerous or better works of various types than even the Prefectural Museum. If you’re into Okinawan ceramics, lacquerware, and the like, I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

An Okinawan lacquerware stand, displayed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2009. I wonder how light this is; I wonder what wood it’s made from.

I also learned that traditional Okinawan lacquerware, being made from the wood of the deigo tree, rather than other woods used in Japan, is amazingly lightweight. All lacquerware is surprisingly lightweight, if you’re not used to it, but this stuff especially so. This is the first I’ve heard of deigo wood being used for anything; since so much of Okinawan arts tends to seem, at least initially, on the surface, to be simply variations on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Southeast Asian forms, I quite like that they should use something like deigo wood, adding considerably to the distinctiveness of the art, and the object. It reminds me of how all sorts of things are made from koa wood in Hawaii, infusing them with a distinctively Hawaiian character even if the form may not be. Much of the furnishings of ʻIolani Palace, though made in Germany in purely European styles, is made of koa, making the palace itself – its floors, its staircase bannisters – something that feels decidedly distinctively Hawaiian. Similarly, with the Okinawan lacquerwares. Sadly, though I didn’t quite catch the reason why, in more recent times (I can’t remember if she said since the fall of the kingdom in the 1870s, or if she said since 1945), they don’t use deigo anymore, and instead use banyan tree wood (gajumaru), which at least is also a distinctively Okinawan material.

I know this doesn’t make for the most informative blog post… but, you can see more about this small museum at their blog. Visiting such a place really makes one wonder what other treasures, collections, museums might exist, tucked away in remote parts. Even within Okinawa alone, I just came across the website for yet another similar architecture + folkcrafts museum / theme park, Ryukyu Kingdom Castletown (Ryûkyû ôkoku jôkamachi), in Nanjô City. Time to add that to my list of places to visit next time I’m in Okinawa…

All photos my own.