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Chapter 4: Herodotus in the China Sea
I n May 1 9 8 3 , after a stay in Tokyo, I was given the opportunity to accompany two Japanese colleagues who were pursuing their research in Okinawa and in the neighboring islands of Iheya, Izena, and Kudaka.
Since I have no knowledge of the language or a fortiori of the local dialect, I will not claim that my
observations add anything whatever to the many studies on Ryukyu culture that have been conducted
for nearly a century by Japanese, American, and European scholars (including a Frenchman, Patrick Beillevaire, who is in attendance today). I took part in my colleagues’ investigation as a spectator, from time to time venturing a question, which they were kind enough to translate for me, along with the informant’s response. The pages that follow have no other ambition, therefore, than to serve as a backdrop to an incident—the only one, of all those I noted down, that may have some originality—which it does not seem out of place to include in a miscellany in honor of a Hellenist.
The incredible population density of the coastal zones leaves anyone visiting Japan for the first time dumbstruck. That is not at all the case in the Ryukyu Islands: with its subtropical vegetation,limited in height by typhoons and reduced near the sea to a very dense thicket of pandanus, no human presence can be detected for one or sometimes two kilometers.
Even there, however, evidence abounds, largely imperceptible to the untrained eye, of a highly
original culture, one that, amazingly, is recognizable as that described by the first observers in their
time.
A main street, running north to south, still divides each village into halves. These moieties continue to supply the two teams that face off every year in a tug-of- war (two ropes are used, each folded back on itself and hitched one inside the other by their loops), each trying to make the other side lose its footing.
Depending on the village, one may expect the success either of the east team, which incarnates the masculine principle, or of the west team, incarnating the feminine principle, inferior to the first but guarantor of human fertility and the prosperity of the fields.
