#ryukyufun — Public Fediverse posts

#ryukyufun we are at the 「maybe we should ask this researcher? 」「yeah, i drink with him next week, i'll ask」point of the conversation 😁
the meeting is over !

#ryukyufun apparently, there was in taiwan an habit of writing 「mon」(gate) on the zushi for the soul to go in and out, so that the holes were not necessary. but no jar with 「mon」on it was found in this sutdy. maybe the habit of using jars in yaeyama did not come from okinawa but taiwan, so no holes, but the 「mon」 was lost in the borrowing process.

#ryukyufun close to sacred places, some sacred places are said to have been tombs before.
some families have different tombs for men and women. children are not put to decompose in the main tomb but in a side one (same here in okinawa).
there is no shiimii, the tombs are cleaned for obon only.

#ryukyufun starting in the 18th c. the funerary practices start to look like the ones in okinawa, with the development of family tombs, but individual tombs still exist. as in okinawa, caves are preferred to make funerary grounds, but there are examples of tombs in other location, built with stone walls in the middle of fields. cave tombs are only partly closed, you can see the bones (that's very common in okinawa too, but she seems quite shocked). some tombs are built close to houses or

#ryukyufun 「put funerary steles on tombs」→people did not.
recent (beginning of 20th c. ) funerary practices can also be known from newspapers. 「the coffin for this village is too old and broken, what can we do」→ there were common coffins.
since there is no Buddhist priest on the island, sacred sentences are written down on cloth during the funeral instead of being chanted by a priest.
there are practices for people who died abroad and are brought back as bones.

#ryukyufun 3rd comm about the funerary practices in yaeyama. the speaker is from kanagawa university. she wrote the reading for her name below the kanji, i like her.
it might be difficult to summarize the funerary practices in the whole yaeyama : many islands, many social classes…
most of the studies are on yonaguni and hateruma.
it is possible to know the old practices through what was forbidden by law 「stop sacrificing cows」→ pefple used to sacrifice cows.

#ryukyufun one of the most interesting things found through this study is the mention of the mata-senkotsu. lots of opinions in the assistance about what it could be.

#ryukyufun meaning the date is for the lunar calendar. some inscriptions have both the chinese and japanese dates. some jars are of people from shuri, not clear if they died in yaeyama and were buried here or if descendants, emigrating to yaeyama, brought their ancestors with them. some inscriptions mention people who went to japan, taiwan…

#ryukyufun there is something called 「mjta-senkotsu」(second bone washing) that may be the date when the bones have been placed in a new jar date of death →date of senkotsu (bones put in a jar)→date of mata-senkotsu (for whatever reason, change of jar)
some jars have dates, jobs, but ＊not＊ the name of the deceased.
some have 「yaeyama island」written.
in the second part of the 20th c. the numbers in the inscriptions start to be arabic numbers, the word 「old」is written before the date.

#ryukyufun 2nd comm : 359 jars had meekachi, most of them from yaeyama tombs (mostly nobility) but some from okinawa (shuri). the oldest meekachi are from the 18th c. but the vast majority are from the beginning of the 20th c.
the inscriptions are different from the ones in okinawa : the name of the job of the deceased is written. for the women, they do not write the name of the husband but the name of the father.

#ryukyufun many pieces in the museum have been brought from okinawa island, and there is no records, so it is not clear if a certain part of the population used the okinawan funerary practices, or if the jars that are similar to the okinawan ones have been brought to the museum from okinawa and are not from tombs in yaeyama.

#ryukyufun it is possible the funerary practices differed from okinawa. first, absence of windows : even when urns are imported from okinawa, the windows are closed with mortar.
51 jars made locally with dated inscriptions could be studied, the oldest from 1739, the most recent from 1909.
in the 18th c. / beginning of 19th, most jars do not have decorative patterns. decoration appears during the 19th c.
it is not sure all the jars in the museum are from Yaeyama :

#ryukyufun several of them do not have 「windows」(holes, there are generally 3
of them), generally locally made but some without windows have with no doubt been made in tsuboya → special order to fit a funerary habit particular to Yaeyama ?
panari-yaki jars have been found in okinawa island as well, dated of the 17-18th century. probably entered the island as container for trade products and then re-used.

#ryukyufun 1st comm. several archaeologists went and studied the corpus of zushis of the Yaeyama Museum, for a total of 516 urns. most of them are kame-shapes (jar-shape), and a quarter of them are panari-yaki (local production).
the panari-yaki are pottery (not stoneware) but the shapes are similar to the stoneware ones made in tsuboya in okinawa island. we have some starting in the 18th century. some of the ones in stoneware are thought to have been made locally.

#ryukyufun the first comm will be by Hiroki Miyagi and Yoshinori Awa on the funerary urns (zushis) in the Yaeyama Museum, the 2nd comm by Yu Suzuki on the inscriptions (meekachi) on the funerary urns, the 3rd comm by Yoko Koyano on the funerary practices in Yaeyama. Then there will be a general discussion.
i'll try to live-toot as well as i can, remember that i'm french, listening in japanese and writing in english.

in #okinawa international university for the 15th meeting of the #Ryukyu Funerary Practices Research Group. This time we will talk about funerary practices in the #Yaeyama.
the hashtag will be #ryukyufun