Names of Okinawa
is a name with multiple referents. The endonym refers to Okinawa Island in southwestern Japan. Today it can cover some surrounding islands and, more importantly, can refer to Okinawa Prefecture, a much larger administrative division of Japan, although the people from the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands still feel a strong sense of otherness to Okinawa.
A related term,, also has multiple semantic domains. It was a name for an Okinawa-centered kingdom before it was replaced with Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. Ryūkyū was an exonym for Okinawa Island and remained largely alien to the native populations. Westerners have used the word for a larger chain of islands, for which the native populations have no folkloristic term. Detached from the native populations' perception, the Western usage became mainstream in multiple disciplines of natural sciences although there remains a non-negligible disagreement over the exact extent of the un-Ryukyuan term.
''Okinawa''
Okinawa Island
The first known possible reference to Okinawa can be found in the Tō Dai-wajō Tōsei-den, a biography of Chinese Buddhist monk Jianzhen written by Ōmi no Mifune. Jianzhen and a Japanese embassy to Tang China accidentally stopped over the Southern Islands during their travel to Japan in 753. One of the islands mentioned in the book was A-ko-na-ha, which the book stated was located southwest of Tanegashima. A-ko-na-ha is usually identified as Okinawa Island. However, this identification is not without a problem as the biography suggested that Jianzhen's ship had spent only one day to travel from A-ko-na-ha to Yakushima, which is about 500 km away from Okinawa Island. Before the famous voyage, the Japanese imperial court had dispatched several expeditions to the Southern Islands but for unknown reasons, the name of Okinawa was absent from the records.The hiragana spelling おきなは was first attested in the Nagato Manuscript of the Tale of the Heike. A Muromachi-period document dated 1404 mentioned an Okinau ship, which was dispatched by the Okinawa-based kingdom of Ryūkyū to pay tribute to the Ashikaga shogunate.
The Okinawa-based kingdom of Ryūkyū referred to their island as Okinawa for numerous occasions. The Yarazamori Gusuku Inscription associates Okinawa with the earth under the king. The Omoro Sōshi, a compilation of archaic ritual songs, contains a dozen of songs referring to Okinawa. The small polity used a predominantly kana writing style before switching to conventional sōrō-style Written Japanese as a result of the conquest by Satsuma Domain in 1609.
Kanji logographs assigned to Okinawa have changed over time. Following the conquest in 1609, Satsuma conducted land surveys, gradually standardizing Kanji assigned to Okinawan toponyms. A common spelling before and immediately after the conquest was the inauspicious-looking 悪鬼納, but Satsuma started using the current spelling 沖縄 as early as the 1620s. This spelling was popularized in mainland Japan by the Nantōshi. Its author Arai Hakuseki was likely to have consulted a map of Okinawa Island submitted to the Tokugawa Shogunate by Satsuma Domain in 1702.
The Shuri-Naha Okinawan form of Okinawa is ʔucinaa. The raising of the vowel /o/ to /u/ was a pan-Ryukyuan areal phenomenon while the palatalization of /k/ to /c/ before /i/ was a relatively recent change with a much geographically limited distribution. Most Northern Okinawan varieties resist this change. Even among South-Central varieties, Itoman, Komesu, Ōyama, and Tsuken Island varieties remain unaffected. For its conservativeness, the Standard Japanese form is effectively undoing historical sound changes.
Okinawa Islands
Adopting Western practices, the Japanese government started naming large groups of islands in the early Meiji period. The Nantō Suiro-shi, the first coast pilot of the Nansei Islands published by the Hydrographic Office of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is credited for coining the name Okinawa Shotō. Its author, Captain Yanagi Narayoshi, initially consulted the British China Pilot forth edition. Dissatisfied with a mixture of European, Chinese, and Japanese names in the European charts, he decided to give Japanese names to Japanese islands. According to Yanagi's classification, the Okinawa Shotō had smaller geographical extents than the modern Okinawa Islands as the Okinawa Shotō, the Kerama Shotō, and the Iheya Shotō constituted the Ryūkyū Guntō. The name of Ryūkyū Guntō was replaced by Okinawa Guntō in 1883, and thereafter, the name of Okinawa Guntō has been used without interruption by the Hydrographic Office of the Imperial Japanese Navy and its successor, the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Department of the Japan Coast Guard.The Hydrographic and Oceanographic Department of the Japan Coast Guard is not the sole government organ that defines official geographical names of Japan. The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, a subsidiary agency of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, provides administratively-oriented names. A geographical area that roughly corresponds to the Okinawa Guntō is referred to as Okinawa Shotō by the GSI. The two government organs are working on standardizing the names for large geographical entities and their extents.
The geographical extent of the Okinawa Islands coincides with those of some taxonomic units proposed in a variety of humanities disciplines. For example, Okinawan is a subgroup of Northern Ryukyuan languages, with the other subgroup being Amami. The speakers of the Okinawan subgroup concentrate in the Okinawa Islands if modern emigrants are not counted. While some propose a hypothetical subgrouping of Southern Amami–Northern Okinawan and thereby reject the unity of Okinawan, Pellard re-evaluates the traditional two-way division from a novel phylogenetic point of view. To complicate matters, the third edition of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Extinction unilaterally gave the name of Okinawan to a dialect cluster occupying the "central and southern parts of Okinawa Island and neighbouring islands". In the linguistic literature, however, this subgroup is commonly known as Central Okinawan, South–Central Okinawan, or South Okinawan.
These abstract geographical entities were recognized independently of the local populations. In fact, people of Kume Island, which is part of the Okinawa Islands, maintain a strong notion that they are not Okinawans.
Okinawa Prefecture
The geographical extent of Okinawa was expanded in a similar manner when the Japanese Empire annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom and established Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. The Meiji government generally avoided retaining the names of old provinces and instead named new first-class administrative divisions after cities or districts where the administration offices were located. For some reason, however, the southwesternmost prefecture of the empire was named after an island. Both contemporary and modern scholars speculate that the Meiji government disfavored the name of Ryūkyū for its Chinese origin because it remained cautious about China's territorial ambitions in Okinawa.With the modern prefecture, the semantic domain of Okinawa has extended to Okinawa's southern neighbors, the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands, which are collectively referred to by the Okinawa-centric name of the Sakishima Islands. There is an asymmetry in the process of embracing this new notion in daily life. On the one hand, people on Okinawa Island, younger generations in particular, tend to take it for granted that Okinawa covers the Yaeyamas. On the other hand, people on Ishigaki Island of the Yaeyama Islands maintains the traditional dichotomy of Okinawa and Yaeyama, and therefore feel a clear sense of otherness to Okinawa. The same holds true for the Miyako Islands. Nevertheless, Okinawa Prefecture has been there for generations, and young people in the Yaeyamas are developing the notion that they belong to Okinawa although it remains completely natural to say "go to Okinawa" when they fly from Ishigaki to Naha.
''Ryūkyū''
The un-Ryukyuan nature of ''Ryūkyū''
Ryūkyū is a rare word, if any, in Ryukyuan languages. In fact, it is not uncommon that a dictionary or glossary of a Ryukyuan language has no entry for Ryūkyū. Even for the male samurai register of Shuri Okinawan, Shimabukuro Seibin explained the word ruucuu in the Okinawa-go Jiten as follows:Ironically, Ryūkyū sounds very un-Ryukyuan. The prohibition of word-initial /r/ is an areal feature that is not limited to Ryukyuan but to Altaic languages, which cover wide areas of Eurasia. In fact, Ryūkyū is an exonym recorded by the Chinese. The fact that the Chinese characters assigned to Liuqiu have changed over time indicates that it was borrowed in turn from some non-Chinese language. Because Ryukyuan is unlikely to be the donor of the un-Ryukyuan word, most scholars seek its etymological root in Austronesian languages of Taiwan.
It was only an accident of history that Ryūkyū came to point to Okinawa Island. Chinese Liuqiu was first attested in the Book of Sui, which stated that Sui China had sent expeditions to what it called Liuqiu three times in 607 and 608. The fragmentary and apparently inconsistent description in the Book of Sui is the source of a never-ending scholarly debate over what was referred to by Liuqiu: Taiwan, Okinawa Island or both. Chinese records written during the Mongol Yuan dynasty suggested that Liuqiu was Taiwan. For example, the Wenxian Tongkao stated that Liuqiu was located to the east of Quanzhou, a port city facing the Taiwan Strait, and was visible from the Penghu Islands in the middle of the strait. Similarly, the History of Yuan, which was compiled by the succeeding Ming dynasty, reinforces the identification of Liuqiu as Taiwan. According to the book, the Mongol Empire tried in vain to subjugate what it called Liuqiu twice in 1292 and 1297. The Penghu Islands and Liuqiu faced each other and the envoys of 1292 visited Penghu en route to Liuqiu.
In 1372, the newly established Ming China sent an envoy to Okinawa Island. Satto, one of the local rulers of the island, was given the title of King of Chūzan of the State of Ryūkyū. Historian Ikeya Machiko speculates that receiving tributes from Liuqiu was of great symbolic significance in Ming Chinese domestic politics because Liuqiu was known to have repelled the Mongol khans' attempts of subjugation. In reality, however, Ming China appears to have been aware of the fact that what it called Liuqiu was different from what the Mongol khans failed to conquer. Thereafter the Chinese distinguished Okinawa Island from Taiwan by referring to the former by Great Liuqiu, as opposed to Little Liuqiu. In few centuries, the Chinese ceased the use of Little Liuqiu, replacing it with Dongfan, Beigang, and Keelung before Taiwan became the standard name for the much larger island.
The early Chinese narratives on Liuqiu, such as that in the Book of Sui, shaped the Japanese perception of Ryūkyū that lasted for a long time. Ryūkyū was considered to be a land of man-eating demons and thus one of the greatest fears of Japanese Buddhist monks sailing to China. The first known Japanese use of the word was of 803, when Buddhist monk Kūkai sent a letter to a Chinese official. Kūkai stated that during a voyage to China, Kūkai and others "had lost their courage at the thought of the tiger-like nature of Ryūkyū". Similarly, Enchin drifted to what he believed to be Ryūkyū during his voyage to Tang China in 853. He later described Ryūkyū as the land of cannibals. Even as late as 1244, the Buddhist monk Keisei recorded the same perception in the Hyōtō Ryūkyū-koku ki.