Names of Okinawa
[1] Detached from the native populations' perception, the Western usage became mainstream in multiple disciplines of natural sciences although there remains a non-negligible disagreement over the exact extent of the un-Ryukyuan term.
[2] The first known possible reference to Okinawa can be found in the Tō Dai-wajō Tōsei-den (779), a biography of Chinese Buddhist monk Jianzhen written by Ōmi no Mifune.
However, this identification is not without a problem as the biography suggested that Jianzhen's ship had spent only one day to travel from A-ko-na-ha to Yakushima, which is about 500 km away from Okinawa Island.
[3] Before the famous voyage, the Japanese imperial court had dispatched several expeditions to the Southern Islands but for unknown reasons, the name of Okinawa was absent from the records.
A Muromachi-period document dated 1404 mentioned an Okinau ship (をきなう船), which was dispatched by the Okinawa-based kingdom of Ryūkyū to pay tribute to the Ashikaga shogunate.
[3] The small polity used a predominantly kana writing style before switching to conventional sōrō-style Written Japanese as a result of the conquest by Satsuma Domain in 1609.
The raising of the vowel /o/ to /u/ was a pan-Ryukyuan areal phenomenon while the palatalization of /k/ to /c/ [tɕ] before /i/ was a relatively recent change with a much geographically limited distribution.
[8] Adopting Western practices, the Japanese government started naming large groups of islands in the early Meiji period.
The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI), a subsidiary agency of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, provides administratively-oriented names.
Both contemporary and modern scholars speculate that the Meiji government disfavored the name of Ryūkyū for its Chinese origin because it remained cautious about China's territorial ambitions in Okinawa.
The fragmentary and apparently inconsistent description in the Book of Sui is the source of a never-ending scholarly debate over what was referred to by Liuqiu: Taiwan, Okinawa Island or both.
In few centuries, the Chinese ceased the use of Little Liuqiu, replacing it with Dongfan, Beigang, and Keelung before Taiwan became the standard name for the much larger island.
[23] The early Chinese narratives on Liuqiu, such as that in the Book of Sui, shaped the Japanese perception of Ryūkyū that lasted for a long time.
[35] The Kitab al-Fawa'id fi Usul 'Ilm al-Bahr wa 'l-Qawa'id (circa 1490) by the Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Mājid is the first known source outside the Sinosphere that mentions Ryūkyū.
In the Minhaj al-Fahir, Ibn Majid's student Sulayman al-Mahri made a similar reference to jazīrat Likyū (literally, Ryūkyū Island) as an alias of al-Ghūr.
The Arabic term al-Ghūr appears to point to Chinese Luoji (落漈), an imaginary area in the sea east of China.
[36] Through contact with Muslim merchants, the Portuguese learned that people called Gores visited Southeast Asian ports for trade.
In Portuguese (and in English), a definite article plus the plural form of a toponym can refer to a group of islands, a construction that has no equivalent in East Asian languages.
[36] Adopting Western practices, Japanese technocrats and academicians chose the Sino-Japanese term shotō (諸島) to explicitly mark the plurality of islands.
The U.S. Armed Forces harbored the divide-and-rule policy during the war while the State Department maintained that the Ryukyu Islands shall remain under the sovereignty of Japan.
[1] Okinawa's northern neighbor, the Amami Islands, resisted much more strongly against the U.S. military's move to sever their centuries-old ties to mainland Japan and to annex them to what the Americans called the Ryukyus.
[9] Some disciplines of natural sciences such as biology and geology have developed a distinctive notion of Ryukyu that does not align well with administrative or ethnolinguistic boundaries.
After examining inconsistent and mutually conflicting uses of Ryukyu-related geographical names in the literature, Toyama (2014) proposed the following guidelines for natural sciences: Watase's Line, the boundary between the Northern and Central Ryukyus, is drawn between Akusekijima and Kodakarajima of the Tokara Islands.
In humanities, the label Ryukyuan is used as a conventional umbrella term for an ethnolinguistic supergroup who occupies the Amami, Okinawa, Miyako, and Yaeyama Islands.
People on the island chain rarely voice their opinions about academic activities as they are quite remote from the discourse and knowledge of daily life.
Shimabukuro Gen'ichirō (1885–1942), an educator from Northern Okinawa, took a key role as a tour guide for mainland Japanese intelligentsia while simultaneously enlightening fellow Okinawans.
On the other hand, Shimabukuro urged mainland tourists not to use Ryūkyū because people felt insulted to be referred to by the exonym of Chinese origin.
Because soldiers from across mainland Japan perished on Okinawa Island, bereaved family members had accounted for a substantial portion of Japanese tourists.
Dentsu also urged to raise awareness about the positive view of Okinawan history and culture among people of Okinawa Prefecture because it worried about possible discord between the tourism sector and the rest of the population.
However, the association with Ulleung Island was soon forgotten because the reference to Goryeo (anachronistically called Silla by Kintō) was dropped when his poem was recorded in the Senzai Wakashū (1188).
