Somayama

• Japanese: 杣山 (somayama)

Traditionally in the Ryûkyû Islands, certain types of forestland were shared communally between villagers of one or more villages, who communally shared rights to gathering lumber and other forest products. These forest lands were called somayama.

In 1893, reformer Jahana Noboru suggested converting some of these forest lands to farmland, to be given over as private property to individuals to provide relief to former scholar-aristocrats who were struggling after losing their support structure, following the fall of the kingdom. He pointed out that much of the land designated as somayama wasn't even useful forest, but just underbrush, and that as a result the land was going utterly unused. In his proposal to the prefectural government, he assured that no forest lands would be reclaimed such as would actually impinge upon villagers' livelihoods.

Jahana gained the support of Governor Narahara Shigeru, but faced heavy opposition from villagers who feared their somayama rights were threatened; some villages in Yanbaru went so far as to pool funds to send a delegation to Naha to petition the prefectural government themselves. The situation grew so contentious that the "Somayama problem" (somayama mondai) has become a noted item in the chronology of Okinawan history.

The standard narrative of what happened next characterizes Narahara as villainous, with little interest in helping the Okinawan aristocrats, or the peasants, and seeking instead to clear as much land as possible to sell to entrepreneurs from mainland Japan, and to the former royal family; in such accounts, Jahana is represented as a tragic figure, and a noble supporter of the peasants, who was expelled from government by Narahara for opposing his plans. However, historian Gregory Smits, citing other scholars such as Arakawa Akira, notes that as much as 2/3 of the land sales to mainlander entrepreneurs took place under Jahana's watch, and in fact declined after he was fired. He suggests that Jahana, as a young technocrat expert trained at the most elite Tokyo institutions, would have been dismissive of villagers' opposition to his well-considered plans, disparaging of their attitudes, and spiteful for their daring to question his expertise, and that all of this is indicated in his writings. Jahana's lionization by the former narrative, transforming him into one of the great heroes of Okinawan history, makes the contention over this issue all the more personal and impassioned for many Okinawan people today, and indeed the conflict between Jahana and Narahara is, for example, featured as one of only a dozen or so scenes in Okinawan history in contemporary artist Ishikawa Mao's 2014 piece Dai-Ryûkyû shashin emaki.

References

• Gregory Smits, "Jahana Noboru: Okinawan Activist and Scholar," in Anne Walthall (ed.), The Human Tradition in Modern Japan, Scholarly Resources Inc. (2002), 104-105.