The Kingdom of Ryukyu was situated in an ambiguous position in international relations with China and Japan in early modern period. Therefore, Ryukyuans were always subject to judgment or evaluation by their larger neighbors. In this situation, not only Ryukyuan themselves but also Chinese and Japanese people believed that the appearances of Ryukyuans were important for their relations.
In this article, I will try to examine a shift in the historical representations of Ryukyuans from the beginning to the end of the kingdom, focusing not only on how Ryukyuans depicted themselves, but also on the ways in which Chinese perceived, imagined, and represented Ryukyuans. I will use these representations as a way to discuss changes in Ryukyu’s ambiguous position situated in between China and Japan.
In conclusion, I will demonstrate two crucial stages in the development of the representations of Ryukyuans from the late Ming to the late Qing period. In the late Ming period, it became an important issue to distinguish Ryukyuan from Japanese because of the international situations, particularly Hideyoshi’s war against China and Korea. However the people coming from Ryukyu and its neighboring areas to China were hardly aware of the importance of how they would be regarded in China or the risk of those days to be identified as Japanese in China.
During the Qing period, the “Ryukyuans” looks were clearly fixed externally and internally because of complicated international webs involving Ryukyu, Japan and Qing. Ryukyuan were quite careful to manage and control their surface when confronting China. Though their efforts were in order to maintain peaceful relations with both China and Japan, they contributed to the calm coexistence of two political centers in East Asia—Japan and China. However, in contrast with Ming court and regardless of Ryukyu’s anxiety, the Qing government basically paid little attention to Ryukyu-Japanese relations. These situations went on at least until Meiji Japan annexed the kingdom in 1879.
