Yamazato Eikichi 山里永吉 (1902-1989) was a playwright, novelist, avant-garde artist, painter, essayist on Ryukyuan history and culture, anti-Reversion activist, and prominent cultural official whose career spanned nearly the entire 20th century.

When researching the postwar history of Sui gusuku, aka Shuri castle, the former royal palace of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, which was restored in 1992 from being destroyed in the war, and is today being restored again following a 2019 fire, the name Yamazato Eikichi kept coming up. Magazines published in the wake of the 2019 fire reprinted articles from across the 20th century, some written by Yamazato about the palace, and some written by others about Yamazato’s play, “Shurijō akewatashi” (first staged 1930), which presents the events of King Shō Tai, the last king of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, turning over the palace and the kingdom to officials of the Empire of Japan in 1879.

I saw the play in November 2022, but by that point had already been curious about the playwright for some time. Who was this Yamazato Eikichi, who both wrote and staged this play in 1930 and who was also apparently a fairly prominent figure in Okinawan arts & culture many decades later in the postwar period? At first, I was looking into him in the hopes of finding some quotes, or fuller writings, which I could use in a paper about the meaning of Sui gusuku for Okinawan people, or its significance for the revival and continuation of traditional Okinawan arts.

However, I then found that he had published a series of newspaper columns, or perhaps a pamphlet, of which an English translation had been published in Hong Kong in 1969 under the title “Japan is Not Our Fatherland.” I suppose it should not be surprising that the same person who wrote a 1930 play melodramatically reenacting the last key stages in the fall of the kingdom, and numerous essays on Ryūkyū Kingdom history and traditional Okinawan culture, should also write a pamphlet emphasizing that the Okinawan people are not Japanese, but Okinawan / Ryukyuan, with their own independent history, independent culture, and arguing that Okinawa should not “naturally” “revert” to being under Japanese rule but rather should be allowed autonomy as Okinawa for the Okinawans. Still, unsurprising though it may have been, I then became all the more interested in finding out more about Yamazato, and about how he articulated his politics through discussions of arts, culture, and heritage.

Though very little discussed in English-language scholarship, Yamazato served for many years as head of the Government of the Ryukyu Islands Museum, head of the Cultural Properties Protection Section, and head of several societies or associations for Okinawan traditional arts & culture, during and after the period of the US Occupation of Okinawa (1945-1972). And he oversaw or otherwise played a prominent role in numerous major cultural events of the postwar period, including the restoration of important historical/cultural sites such as the Shureimon palace gate, the stone gate to Sonohyan utaki (a sacred site on the palace grounds), and the royal mausolea at Tamaudun and Urasoe yōdore; as well as working with institutions such as the Smithsonian and the Bishop Museum to organize what I assume were the first major exhibitions of Okinawan artifacts in the United States. He was also a member of the “Association to Build Okinawa for the Okinawans” (沖縄人の沖縄をつくる会), which opposed or sought to delay the 1972 “reversion” of Okinawa to inclusion in the Japanese state, in the hopes that something could be worked out that would grant the Okinawan people greater autonomy.

I am now working with Dr. Eriko Tomizawa-Kay (University of East Anglia) on a collaborative project, looking at how Gima Hiroshi, an Okinawan artist in Osaka, outside of Occupied Okinawa, and Yamazato, a cultural official in the Occupation government in Okinawa, compared in their rhetoric and activities regarding the anti-Reversion / Okinawan independence movement.

This collaborative project is supported by the Ritsumeikan University International Collaborative Research Promotion Program 国際共同研究促進プログラム.