Kumemura

• Other Names: 唐栄、唐営 (Touei)
• Japanese/Okinawan: 久米村 (Kumemura / Kuninda)

Kumemura was a walled district of Naha, the chief port city of the Kingdom of Ryûkyû. Located on the island of Ukishima, it was a community of members of the scholar-bureaucrat class, and the chief center of Confucian learning in the kingdom. The vast majority of government administrators and officials came from the families of Kumemura.

The community was said to have been founded in 1393 by thirty-six families from China, and the Ryukyuans (as well as the Chinese and Koreans) who lived there were, to some extent, continually thought of as "Chinese," or at least as coming from different stock than other Ryukyuans, even after many generations passed (and after much intermarrying had occurred). Many scholars today suggest that the number "thirty-six" is really meant to simply indicate "many," and that while conventional wisdom has it that these families came chiefly or exclusively from Fuzhou, in fact some at least are believed to have come from Zhangzhou, Taizhou, and Quanzhou.

By the mid-15th century, the community was surrounded by earthen walls, and contained around a hundred homes. The main thoroughfare, Kume Ôdôri, cut across the district from northwest to southeast. The Taoist temple Tensonbyô lay to the north of the road, while two Tenpigû temples to the sea goddess Matsu (aka Tenpi) lay to the south.

The community began to decline in the 16th century, and declined even further after the 1609 invasion of Ryûkyû. But the royal government worked to restore tributary and investiture relations with China, and so the Kume community revived. Though Kumemura would retain its distinct identity and societal/political/cultural role up until the fall of the kingdom in the 1870s, by the 17th century the walls around the district had gone, and the community was somewhat more integrated with the other districts of the city.

As experts in scholarship, languages, and diplomacy, members of the Kumemura community served as translators and official government representatives not only in interactions with China, but when the time came with Westerners as well.

References

• 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.
• Gallery labels, "Kuninda - Ryûkyû to Chûgoku no kakehashi," special exhibit, Okinawa Prefectural Museum, Sept 2014.