Exploratory Project: “Pictograms and Knot-Ropes: Administrative Records in the Borderlands of Early Modern Ryukyu.”

Ongoing research project.

 

Under the early modern Ryukyu Kingdom, an island state ambiguously affiliated with both Tokugawa Japan and Qing China, the peasants of outlying islands were subject to heavy taxation. After the subjection of Ryukyu by Satsuma, several levels of administration made claims to the archipelago’s resources. In the Yaeyama Islands off Taiwan, head taxation gave birth to a system of record keeping in the formerly scrip-less community. The vernacular system of knot ropes and pictograms I term ‘Yaeyaman script’ was created locally to share collective tax duties, making the land legible for local administration. Administration within the village, however, remained distinct from the Japanese-language bureaucracy of the outsider state.

This paper explores the potential of Yaeyaman script sources to narrate the borderland society’s experience with early modern state institutions. Responding to the problem of subalternity, historians have recently come to explore new archives that account for local agency in pre-literate societies. Writing the deep history of a subaltern periphery necessitates alternative sources to expand the scope of ‘history’ beyond bureaucratic cultures. In virtual absence of written accounts representing local society, analyses of Yaeyaman script and its uses can shed light on how mechanisms of state power were negotiated in a maritime borderland.