Ryukyu investiture crown

• Other Names: 玉冠 (O: tamanchaabui)
• Japanese/Chinese: 皮弁冠 (hibenkan / pi bian guan)

The kings of the Ryûkyû Kingdom received formal investiture from envoys sent by the Chinese Court; the investiture ceremonies involved the use of special ritual garments called hibenfuku, including a Chinese-style crown called alternatively hibenkan, or tamanchaabui. One such crown, dating to the 18th or 19th century, is today in the collection of the Naha City Museum of History, and has been designated a National Treasure.

The crown is only on display twice a year, for limited periods, for conservation reasons. It is a black woven hat with twelve thin strips of gold running in parallel vertically along the front of the crown; each strip is further decorated with 24 jewels or small orbs of gold, silver, jasper, quartz, coral, or the like, for a total of 288. A large golden hairpin (kanzashi) with a dragon design on the head of the pin was also worn with the crown.

This crown is one which had been brought by the royal family to Tokyo when the kingdom was abolished in 1879; another crown, which had remained in Okinawa, is believed to have been stolen or destroyed in 1945. Kept in the Nakagusuku Palace from the 1870s until that time, along with a collection of other royal treasures and records not taken to Tokyo, it was hidden during the Battle of Okinawa, along with a number of other precious royal treasures in a drainage ditch near the palace. When the royal stewards, headed by Maehira Bokei, returned after the battle ended, however, they found all the objects from the ditch missing. A precious copy of the Omoro sôshi, which had been among the items hidden in that same ditch, surfaced in Boston; it was among a number of objects which had been taken by intelligence officer Comdr. Carl W. Sternfelt, who then brought them to the Harvard Art Museums to be appraised. This copy of the Omoro sôshi, along with a number of other objects, were returned to Okinawa in 1953. Kishaba Shizuo of the Ryukyu America Historical Society spent much of the remainder of the 20th century convinced that Sternfelt had taken the crown as well, and actively seeking to find and recover it; Sternfelt's family insists they have never seen it, and it remains unknown today if this second crown still survives.

References

• Gallery labels at Naha City Museum of History, August 2013.
• William Honan, "Hunt for Royal Treasure Leads Okinawan to a House in Massachusetts," New York Times, 13 July 1997.