Naha

• Japanese/Okinawan: 那覇 (Naha / Naafa)

Naha was the chief port city in the Kingdom of Ryûkyû, and the center of much mercantile and diplomatic activity; the city also contained within it the community of Kumemura, from which the scholar-bureaucrat class was drawn. Today, having absorbed the former royal capital of Shuri and a number of other municipalities into its borders, Naha is the capital of Okinawa prefecture.

History & Geography

It is not fully known at what time Naha emerged as a settlement and a port, but it is presumed to have formed as a matter of course in the late 14th century when Chinese and Japanese ships (among others) found the site a convenient waystation. The port was already burgeoning by the 1420s, when Shô Hashi united Okinawa Island, founding the Kingdom of Ryûkyû and establishing the first Shô dynasty. In the previous century, increased piracy activity around Korea, along with revolts by Fang Guozhen and Zhang Shicheng, caused Japanese merchants to take a different route to China, passing through the Ryukyus and making their way to Fuzhou, rather than traveling to Ningpo via Hakata, a more direct route.

In addition to serving as the chief port for the kingdom, Naha was a major transshipment port, one of the most major trading hubs in the entire Southeast & East Asia region, during its height in the 15th-16th centuries. Many Japanese merchants operating within the shuinsen system made port here or even maintained homes and families in Naha. The port served as a transshipment point for a great many goods, including metals, aromatic woods, silks, porcelains, ivory, and the like, as well as for silver. Though the kingdom itself did not send its own trading ships anywhere in Southeast Asia after 1570 (the final trading mission to Siam), the government did hire or contract Japanese merchants (and presumably others) to perform both mercantile and diplomatic duties on behalf of the kingdom. To name just two examples, Taira Nobushige of Hakata traveled to Korea in 1471 as an envoy of the Kingdom of Ryûkyû, and Kawasaki Rihee of Sakai set sail for Southeast Asia in 1598 to engage in trade on behalf of the kingdom.

Trade declined dramatically in the 17th century, due to heavy restrictions imposed by Satsuma, the imposition of maritime restrictions (kaikin) in Japan (which brought a severe decline in Japanese maritime activity), and a variety of factors concerning trade relations with Southeast Asia. But Naha remained the chief port city, and along with Shuri, the chief economic, cultural, and political center in the Ryukyus, from that time through today. Major efforts to dredge the harbor and revitalize the port were undertaken in 1717. It is said 70,000 men were involved in the effort, and a stone still stands today in honor and memory of the event.

Following the fall of the kingdom in the 1870s and its annexation as Okinawa prefecture, Naha absorbed Shuri and became the prefectural capital. The city suffered considerably in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, but was rebuilt during the American Occupation, its port facilities not only restored, but modernized as well.

Geography

Throughout most of the time of the Kingdom, Naha consisted of six neighborhoods or districts, all but two of them located on a small island called Ukishima, which sat in the harbor, separated by only a very short distance from the "mainland" of Okinawa Island. Kumemura was located in the southern part of this island, closest to the "mainland," facing the neighborhood of Izumisaki across the harbor, while the neighborhoods of Higashi and Nishi were located to the west. Wakasamachi, occupied the northern or northeastern section of the island, and finally, the port of Tomari was located just across the way, to the east of Ukishima, on the Okinawan "mainland." The Chôkôtei, a narrow, kilometer-long earthen embankment built in 1452, connected Tomari and Ukishima.

The body of water separating Ukishima from the Okinawan "mainland" was at some point filled in, uniting the city more fully into a single section of land.

Ukishima

Main Article: Kumemura

Kumemura was the chief center of Confucian learning in the kingdom, and was home to a number of Chinese-style Confucian and Taoist temples. Government officials and administrators were almost exclusively drawn from the residents of Kumemura, and small numbers of the top students/scholars from Kumemura enjoyed the opportunity to study in Fuzhou and Beijing. Though the community was quite walled off initially, by the 17th century, the embankments or walls between Kumemura and the other districts of Naha had disappeared.

While Chinese (and some Koreans) formed distinctly separate neighborhoods for themselves, including, most prominently, the walled-in district of Kumemura, Japanese lived alongside Ryukyuans throughout the other four districts. The majority of Japanese coming to Ryûkyû in the 16th century are believed to have come from the Kansai region, especially the port city of Sakai, including many monks or lay monks associated with Daitokuji. Japanese coming to Ryûkyû in the 17th century were chiefly, as might be expected, from Satsuma han.

Main article: Tomari

Traders and those coming to give tribute from Yaeyama, Miyako, Amami and other outlying islands within the Ryûkyû Kingdom generally made port in Tomari, and lodged there.

A number of important economic and diplomatic institutions were located in the main port areas of Higashi and Nishi. The Oyamise (O: weemishi) was the chief governmental trading center, and later came to serve as a kind of city hall or municipal affairs office as well. Markets were often held in the open space before the Oyamise, which was quite close to the temples, and to the Tenshikan, a mansion for visiting Chinese investiture envoys which is said to have rivaled Shuri Castle itself.

Wakasamachi, which according to oral tradition was founded by Japanese, lay to the north of Kumemura. Here were located temples to Ebisu and Jizô, established by Japanese monks, and the Naminoue Shrine. Zen monks from Japan also founded the temple Kôganji, which was the site of the chief Japanese cemetery in the city. Wakasamachi Ôdôri ran through the district from northeast to southwest, intersecting with Kume Ôdôri near the center of Ukishima, and connecting directly into the Chôkôtei on its eastern end. While Chinese envoys stayed in residences set aside for them in Higashi/Nishi, Wakasa was home to a residence set aside for those from the Tokara Islands.

Port & Harbor

The entrance to the port, to the west of Ukishima, was guarded by a pair of fortresses built in the early 1550s on spits of land extending out towards the sea. These two fortresses, Mie gusuku and Yarazamori gusuku, had a large chain strung out between them across the water, which could rather effectively block ships from entering the harbor. The fortresses were quite successful in repelling wakô raids on several occasions, but proved ultimately useless against the 1609 invasion of Ryûkyû by forces from Satsuma han, who simply made landfall elsewhere and approached Shuri by land.

Beyond these fortresses lay numerous small islands in a body of water - all but completely filled in today - which stretched as far south as Madanbashi. Many of these tiny islands were home to either government buildings, such as the warehouses Omono gusuku (O: umun gushiku) and Iô gusuku (O: yuuwa gusuku), or sacred spaces, such as the shrines or utaki of Gânâmui, Rinkai-ji & Oki Shrine (Oki-gû or Oki-no-tera, O: Uchi nu tira), Watanji, Sumiyoshi Shrine, Chinpe, and Ibinume.

The construction of the Chôkôtei and inter-island roads connecting Mie-gusuku to Rinkai-ji & Oki Shrine, and Yarazamui-gusuku to Ibinume and Sumiyoshi, along with other structures, altered the flow of the waters in the area, and the port began to silt up. By around 1700, Lake Man (Manko) had shrunk considerably, and many of the small islands grew to intersect with one another, joining into larger (though still quite tiny) islands within Naha Harbor. For example, where Iô gusuku and Watanji had previously occupied separate islands, their two islands had now joined into one. By 1868, Onoyama, the largest of these small islands, had grown considerably. Public works landfill projects began in earnest in the Meiji period, continuing through the pre-war and early post-war periods, filling in this section of the harbor and transforming these many small islands into fewer, larger islands, and eventually connecting them to the "mainland" of Okinawa Island completely. Today, Onoyama Park encompasses much of the area that used to be tiny islands or the water separating them; Omonogusuku stands apart as one of the few of these sites still surrounded mostly by water, though it too is now connected to the "mainland" by a spit of land, rather than sitting on its own separate island.

References

• Plaques at Onoyama Park.
• Uezato Takashi. "The Formation of the Port City of Naha in Ryukyu and the World of Maritime Asia: From the Perspective of a Japanese Network." Acta Asiatica 95 (2008). pp57-77.