Gusuku
Gusuku (グスク, 御城, Okinawan: gushiku)[1] often refers to castles or fortresses in the Ryukyu Islands that feature stone walls.
In later ryūka and kumi odori, the reading shiro is also used for the same Chinese character, in addition to also using 城内 (shiro-uchi; inside the castle).
Kanazawa Shōzaburō also segmented gusuku into gu and suku but considered that the latter half was cognate with Old Japanese shiki, in which ki was a loan from Old Korean.
His theory was backed by decades of field work that was not limited to the Okinawa Islands but that extended to Amami, Miyako and Yaeyama.
[10] Archaeologist Tōma Shiichi hypothesized that a gusuku was the residence of an aji (local ruler or warlord) and his family.
Among archaeologists, however, Kokubu Naoichi supported Nakamatsu's theory considering poor living conditions of gusuku.
[9] Asato Susumu expressed concern about the association of gusuku with class society because the emergence of political rulers was not well attested by archaeological findings but mostly based on literature that was written centuries later.
Separately of this, local communities handed down mountain cult, which shared roots with that of Yakushima and by extension Japan.
He also noted a bias of Okinawan archaeologists, who he thought were preoccupied with questions of how the Okinawa-centered kingdom of Ryukyu was formed.
Naka Shōhachirō and Chinen Isamu, a historian and an archaeologist from Okinawa dated them to the late 12th to early 13th centuries and claimed that they were predecessors of gusuku with stone walls.
Archaeologist Ono Masatoshi raised concern about the naïve application of the Okinawan gusuku-as-fortifications framework and urged that scholars should not turn a blind eye to the diversified nature of archaeological sites with stone walls in these islands.
[14] Few gusuku sites can be attributed to the fact that the Sakishima Islands were over a hundred years behind Okinawa socially and technologically.
The primary gusuku site in Yaeyama is Furusutobaru Castle, residence of Oyake Akahachi, which was attacked by Nakasone Toyomiya of Miyako shortly before the invasion by Ryukyu.
[18] According to Ono Masatoshi, gusuku has various meanings, depending on dialects of Yaeyama, including a partition of a mansion and stone walls surrounding an agricultural field.
What are common to these villages are that they were located on top of cliffs, divided by inhomogeneous cell blocks and lacked roads.
[20][better source needed] In the archaeology of Yaeyama, human settlements prior to the conquest by Ryukyu are called "Suku Villages" because the names of these ruins have the suffix -suku.
[20] Formal studies of gusuku in the Amami Islands group in southern Kagoshima Prefecture were started by Nakamatsu Yashū in the 1960s and 70s.
[11] In the 1980s and 90s, Miki Yasushi, an expert of medieval mountain fortifications of Japan, extended his research to the Amami Islands, largely independently of Okinawan archaeology.
A major difference from those in the Okinawa Islands was that gusuku in Amami (except those in Okinoerabu and Yoron) nearly completely lacked stone walls.
As a historian from Japan, Miki took much notice of the religious nature of gusuku in Amami, which is completely absent from Japanese fortresses.
[citation needed] Naka Shōhachiro investigated some gusuku in Amami Ōshima and discovered kuruwa and dry moats there.
[11] By contrast, Miki conjectured that the construction of these fortifications was triggered by repeated invasion by the Ryukyu Kingdom in the 15th and 16th centuries.
"[12] Earlier studies pointed to the similarity between gusuku in Amami, northern Okinawa Island and medieval mountain fortifications of Japan.
He considered the possibility that there were gaps in time among (1) the beginning of the archaeological sites, (2) the construction of defensive structures and (3) the applications of the name of gusuku.
He re-evaluated Nakamatsu's sacredness theory and presented a working hypothesis that gusuku in Amami were of secondary origin, possibly related to the introduction of the noro priestess system by the Ryukyu Kingdom.
