Ryukyuan music

These studies were done under the heavy influence of folklorists Yanagita Kunio and Orikuchi Shinobu, who searched for the origin of Japanese culture in the Southern Islands.

Under Tajima's influence, Iha Fuyū, who is known as the father of Okinawaology, conducted extensive research on a wide range of music genres of Okinawa, primarily by analyzing texts.

Although he paid attention to Miyako and Yaeyama, his studies on these subfields remained in a preliminary stage, partly due to the limited availability of documented sources.

Hokama Shuzen, a successor to Iha Fuyū, worked on integrating separate subjects by comparative methods while he himself conducted field studies that covered the whole island chain.

[3] Musical traditions of the Southern Islands are so diversified that their connections are scarcely recognizable to unaccustomed eyes, but Hokama managed to organize them by cross-island group categories.

For epic songs, Okinawa's kwēna narrates fishing, rice farming, rainmaking, sailing, shipbuilding, house-building, weaving, and other kinds of work in a local community.

Lyric songs include Amami's shima-uta, Okinawa's ryūka, and Miyako's tōgani, which all have short, fixed verse forms.

[1] Since Ryūkyū was conquered by Satsuma Domain in the early 17th century, the samurai class in Shuri embraced the high culture of mainland Japan.