Takamine Ueekata Tokumei (高嶺 親方 徳明, February 15, 1653 – 1738) was an Okinawan interpreter (Chinese-Okinawan).
The four representatives of the Ryūkyū Kingdom at Fuzhou ordered Tokumei to learn surgery because of his Chinese and his skill.
Earlier, a secretary named Oomine Sen-yu (大嶺詮雄, birth and death unknown)[1] was ordered to learn surgery but he was unsuccessful.
[2] It was Matsuki Akitomo, the professor of anesthesiology, Hirosaki University who reported about this surgery first in the medical world.
He wrote that a half century has passed since K. Higaonna, a historian from Okinawa, first reported that in 1689 Tokumei Takamine (1653–1738) had performed successfully a hare-lip operation under general anesthesia with mafutsu-san for a royal grandchild Shō Eki of the Second Shō Dynasty in the Ryukyus, now known as Okinawa.