Unearthing Similarities: Okinawan Religion’s Entanglements in Japanese Rule, 1878-1945
Thursday, February 13th, 2024 from 4:00-5:00 pm ET
In-Person and Virtual Event via Zoom
About the event:
For the communities across the islands of the Ryukyu archipelago that today constitute Japan’s southernmost prefecture, Okinawa, ritual life was historically anchored in an indigenous religion centering on uganju sacred sites and overseen by assemblages of female ritualists. These islands’ formal annexation by Japan in 1879 brought them into direct contact with, and under the direct control of, a Japanese state that was in the process of crafting Shinto into a tool of government. For Okinawa, one result of this encounter was the conversion of uganju sites across the prefecture into Shinto shrines, underpinned by claims of similarity between Okinawan religion and Japanese Shinto. Dr. Tze Loo will examine the emergence and implications of this claim of similarity as part of an exploration of this little-known history.
About the Speaker
Dr. Tze Loo is an Associate Professor of History and Global Studies at the University of Richmond. Her research is concerned with the colonial dimensions of the modern Japanese nation state, in both its prewar and wartime imperial expansion and also in how colonialism functioned in the making of modern Japan itself. Loo is interested in how the Japanese state reproduces itself and its power, and pays attention to two technologies of government in particular. The first is how the Japanese state power makes itself felt through objects of material culture and cultural heritage; the second is the prewar Japanese state’s efforts to discipline the country’s religious landscape through the construction and deployment of State Shinto. Loo also traces how subjects of the Japanese state resist or contest these same technologies.
Loo’s book, Heritage Politics: Shuri Castle and Okinawa’s Incorporation into Modern Japan, 1879-2000, examines how Japan, America during its 27-year rule of the islands, and Okinawan people use Okinawa’s cultural heritage – particularly its iconic Shuri Castle – to negotiate and articulate the islands’ relationship to the Japanese mainland. While Japanese and the U.S. attempted to use the islands’ cultural heritage to discipline Okinawans according to their political agendas, Okinawans used representations of their cultural heritage as a powerful way to act against these larger powers and to negotiate a more equitable position for themselves within the Japanese national imaginary. Loo is currently working on a new project that traces the Japanese state’s attempt to transpose Okinawa’s indigenous utaki-centered religion into the universe of State Shinto in the prewar period.
