Thread by @toranosukev

Wow. Beautiful. Look at how legible this is!!

Notes of an Interview with Napoleon Bonaparte at St Helena on 13 August 1817, written by Captain Basil Hall, Royal Navy

A key doc in the myth that Ryukyu was fundamentally peaceful & maintained no weapons.

collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc…

"Having settled where Loochoo was, he went on to enquire about the people ... On telling him that they had no arms, he said 'no arms - you mean no cannon, but they have muskets.' I said not only have they no cannon, they have no swords nor spears ... No, I replied, we never saw

any kind of warlike weapon. ... I stated to him they they had no wars, upon which he shook his head, as if the supposition were monstrous and unnatural."

Basil Hall was a British Royal Navy captain who visited Okinawa in 1816. He met with Napoleon the following year.

I won't try to summarize the key points about this myth of Ryukyuan pacifism, for fear of misrepresenting things (and bc I should get to work) but you can read more here: apjjf.org/-Gregory-Smits…

Hrm. I guess I should say *something* before anyone gets the wrong idea. There are strong and very valid reasons, of course, for people today to want to portray Okinawa as a land of peace -

(1) bc of the suffering and destruction visited upon Okinawa by Japanese militarism, "sacrificing" Okinawa in 1945 in an effort to protect "mainland" Japan from invasion, and the ongoing damage from the American military presence.

(2) bc of Okinawa being in real and profoundly valid ways an innocent victim of Japanese aggression, expansionism, colonialism, in different ways in 1609-1879 and in 1879-present ... So, a place of peace in that sense as well.

But, as Smits explains, King Sho Shin in the 15th-16th c. didn't eliminate weapons, and certainly not out of a desire to promote peace (in a general sense, as a value). He sought to create peace in the Ryukyus by forcibly subduing all his rivals.

He forced other lords to give up their weapons and their standing armies, consolidating military power unto himself (the king) so that others could not rise up against him. Sho Shin and his predecessors also invaded and annexed most of the rest of the Ryukyu Islands -

Smits calls this "Ryukyu Empire," and increasingly Okinawan and Japanese scholars are using this term as well.

chaari.wordpress.com/2021/04/15/ryu…

It's not an attack on Okinawan character or anything, but just to point out the truth, that Ryukyu, like most countries in history, had a military, and used it. Like most kingdoms in history, it was expansionist in its way.

Later, after the 1609 invasion of Ryukyu by samurai forces from Kagoshima, although I don't know the details, I'd imagine Kagoshima forced Ryukyu to disarm to some extent. Perhaps the development of karate ("empty hand" fighting) was tied to this,

but not to some fundamental culture of "peace."

PS Karate 空手 ("empty hand") was originally known as Karate or Tôte 唐手 ("Chinese hand"), so... that's a whole story unto itself.

Anyway, I hope I haven't made a mess of this, but that's just a peek into such things. The key point is (1) isn't it interesting how something like Basil Hall's record of his meeting with Napoleon can spiral into a wider set of orientalist mistaken beliefs, and

(2) every country has its own history of violence, and that's okay. That's just part of reality. Kamehameha united Hawaiʻi by violence, and Tibet had its own history of military battles too. That's okay. It doesn't invalidate a culture of peace today. 💜🌺