Second Shō clan

The second Shō clan claims Izena Island to be its ancestral home.[1][2] Born on the small island lying off the northwestern coast of Okinawa Island, its founder Kanemaru traveled to Shuri in 1441, and became a retainer of Prince Shō Taikyū. He was appointed as the treasurer after Shō Taikyū became the king.[3] After a coup d'état in 1469, Kanemaru ascended to the throne. Assuming the clan name of Shō, he pretended to be the crown prince of Shō Toku, which resulted in his reign being accepted by the Ming Dynasty in 1471. The kingdom reached its peak during the reign of the third king Shō Shin.

With the approval of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Satsuma Domain conqured Ryūkyū in 1609. The Tokugawa shogunate decided to keep the small polity as a separate entity, with intent to make it work as a broker in the shogunate's failed attempt to establish diplomatic relations with China. After several twists and turns, Ryūkyū's position within the shogunate was finalized in 1634. Ryūkyū, with its kokudaka assessed as 123,700 koku, was officially recognized as part of the Satsuma Domain. In 1635, the Satsuma Domain appointed Ryūkyū's ruler Shō Hō as Provincial Governor of Ryūkyū (琉球国司, Ryūkyū kokushi).[4] Even in the family mausoleum Tamaudun, the rulers were referred to not with the royal suffix -ō (王) but with the non-royal nobiliary suffix -kō (公).[5] In 1712, Satsuma changed the policy and allowed the ruler to style himself King of Chūzan. Over this period, Ryūkyū's rulers regularly paid tribute to the Chinese emperors, under the title of King of Chūzan of the State of Ryūkyū, concealing its vassalage to Satsuma.[4]

In 1872, the Meiji government renamed the State of Ryūkyū to Ryūkyū Domain (琉球藩, Ryūkyū-han) and re-appointed Shō Tai as Domain King (藩王, han'ō). In 1879, the Meiji government abolished the Ryūkyū Domain, and the last king Shō Tai abdicated.

After the establishment of Japanese peerage, the last kind Shō Tai was given the rank of marquess. Shō Tai's three close relatives were given the rank of baron. The son of the last regent Ie Chōchoku, who was from a cadet branch of the Shō clan, was also given the rank of baron.

• Marquess Shō Tai (1885–1901), the last king
  • Marquess Shō Ten (1901–1920), the eldest son of Shō Tai
    • Marquess Shō Shō (1920–1923), the eldest son of Shō Ten
      • Marquess Shō Hiroshi (1923–1947), the eldest son of Shō Shō
• Baron Shō In (1896–1905), the second son of Shō Tai
  • Baron Shō Rin (1905–1947), the eldest son of Shō In
• Baron Shō Jun (1896–1945), the fourth son of Shō Tai
  • Baron Shō Sei (1945–1947), the second son of Shō Jun
• Baron Nakijin Chōfu (1890–1915), a younger brother of the last king
  • Baron Nakijin Chōei (1916–1943), a grandson of Nakijin Chōfu
    • Baron Nakijin Chōshū (1943–1945), the eldest son of Nakijin Chōei
• Baron Ie Chōei (1890–1904), the eldest son of Ie Chōchoku, the last regent
  • Baron Ie Chōshin (1905–1921), the eldest son of Ie Chōei
    • Baron Ie Chōjo (1921–1947), the eldest son of Ie Chōshin

The Chinese-style surname (sei) was used for diplomatic relations with China. The second Shō clan took the surname Shō from the first Shō clan only to disguise the coup d'état as a normal succession. Domestically, direct references to the king's personal name were avoided because they were considered rude.

The royal surname was managed in a rather Japanese-like manner. With some exceptions, only the immediate family members of the king were allowed to take the surname Shō (尚). Cadet branches used different surnames. In 1691, the king ordered all the cadet branches to assume the surname Shō (向), no matter how distant they were from the king. This new surname was pronounced the same as the king's one but had a different kanji with fewer strokes.[5]

In Ryūkyū's administrative documents and in relation to Satsuma, the Shō clan's male members except the king used Japanese-style names, which consisted of kamei (house name), ikai (rank), and nanori (given name). A kamei referred to a land in which the samurai was enfeoffed by the king. Because the Shō clan members occupied a large portion of high-ranking positions, they often changed their kamei during the course of their career. A nanori, which was given when the person reached adulthood, consisted of two kanji. The first character, called nanori-gashira, was shared by all the male members of a lineage. In other words, the "given name", not the "house name", effectively indicated the person's lineage. The king's order of 1691, mentioned above, also designated Chō (朝) as the Shō clan's nanori-gashira.[5] The character Chō (朝) was chosen to indicate an affinity to Minamoto no Tametomo (源為朝), who by that time had been considered to be the father of Shunten, the legendary king of Chūzan.[6] While the Chūzan Seikan (1650) only presented a wishful speculation that Shō En's father might have descended from a former king, Sai On's edition of the Chūzan Seifu (1725) explicitly referred to Gihon as a possible ancestor, connecting the second Shō clan to the Minamoto clan through Shunten.[7]

Under the modern Japanese naming regulation, a person has only two name components, a family name and a given name. Only the last king Shō Tai and his children chose the Chinese-style surname Shō (and accordingly, Chinese-style given names for males). The other members of the clan chose the combinations of kamei and nanori. Hence, the king's younger brother is referred to as Nakijin Chōfu, not Shō Hitsu.

A Japanese-style banner regularly displayed on the Shō clan's official ships bound for Satsuma.

The second Shō clan adopted as its mon or family crest the mitsudomoe, which is otherwise closely associated with the Shinto deity Hachiman and Hachiman shrines across Japan. It was called hidari gomon (左御紋) in Okinawa. Since it was the royal family's crest, its usage was once severely restricted in Okinawa. Because of this, Okinawans who visited mainland Japan shortly after the abolition of the domain were surprised that mitsudomoe banners were flown everywhere.[8]

Fragmentary sources suggest that the use of mitsudomoe can be traced back to the first Shō clan although not necessarily as its family crest. Together with the date of 1500, a mitsudomoe was inscribed on a wooden coffin found in the Momojana tombs in northern Okinawa. The divine name of King Shō Toku was Hachiman-aji and his half-brother was called Hachiman-ganashi. Shō Toku also founded a Hachiman shrine named Asato Hachimangū. For its close connections to the Hachiman cult, some scholars speculate that the first Shō clan had its roots in Wakō pirates worshiping Hachiman.[9][10]

Just like the king's overlord the Shimazu clan of the Satsuma Domain decorated its official ships with banners of Shimazu's maru ni jūmonji family crest, the Shō clan's official ships bound for Satsuma displayed a Japanese-style banner featuring the Shō clan's family crest. Private ships were forbidden to do so. Itai Hidenobu, an expert on pre-modern Japanese ships, conjectured that by following the mainland Japanese practice, Ryūkyū had shown allegiance to Satsuma. Since Ryūkyū was ordered to conceal from China its subjugation to Satsuma, the banner is highly unlikely to have been flown during voyages to China.[11]

An oddly colored, clockwise version of the banner of the Shō clan's ship drifted to mainland Japan in 1798. Presumably a product of miscommunication within mainland Japan. Note that the authentic family crest features counterclockwise swirls.

In late 1797, a privately-owned cargo ship chartered by the kingdom was wrecked on its way back from Satsuma and in the next year eventually drifted to Chōshi, a port in modern-day Chiba Prefecture. Since Chōshi was not far from Edo, the seat of power for the Tokugawa shogunate, this incident gathered a great deal of attention. Because it was on the kingdom's official duty, the ship displayed a standard Japanese-style banner of the family crest. However, some miscommunication within mainland Japan resulted in the creation of a highly distorted variant of it, which was erroneously labeled as a "flag of Ryūkyū" (琉玖; note the non-standard choice of the second character) in the Bankoku Hakuki Zufu (1854) and a couple of other books published in mainland Japan from the end of the Edo period to the beginning of the Meiji period.[12]

A flag created by USCAR in 1954.

Another colored variant of the mitsudomoe was created by the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) in 1954. The American military occupier used the flag unofficially and informally for a brief period of time in 1954 but never officially adopted it.[13][14] The flag was part of USCAR's effort in creating a Ryukyuan identity in order to counter the ever-intensifying reversion movement by the Okinawan people, or Ryukyuans as the occupier labeled them. At first, USCAR tried to impose the complete ban on the display of the flag of Japan but was unable to do so because the U.S. acknowledged that Japan had "residual sovereignty" over the islands. USCAR grudgingly allowed special conditions on when the occupied could fly the Japanese flag, and Okinawan people fought for an unconditional right. To counter the reversion movement, USCAR attempted to create a Ryukyuan national flag. The American occupier believed that the new flag, which was based on the family crest of the old Shō kings, would stir a Ryukyuan nationalistic spirit. USCAR displayed the flag at the Ryukyu-American Friendship Centers but was soon disappointed with the occupied's apathy toward the former royal family's symbol. Most people did not even know what the symbol stood for. The unofficial and informal experiment went largely unnoticed by Okinawans. For this reason, historian Masaaki Gabe called this flag a "ghost flag."[13][14]

This flag appeared in a historical novel titled Ryūkyū shigeki: Tomoebata no akebono (1946). The fiction was written by Yara Chōchin (1895–1957) and was mimeographed in Nara, to which he had fled the war. It remains unresolved whether USCAR referred to Yara's self-published novel.[15]

The highly-distorted banner-turned flag once circulated in mainland Japan, but not in Okinawa, has been erroneously displayed as "the flag of the Ryūkyū Kingdom" in Wikipedia for many years. In 2012, it got media coverage. In a column on the Ryūkyū Shimpō, Kina Daisaku, a part-time curator at Naha City Museum of History, pointed to the fact that Wikipedia hosted this flag with the wrong caption. He was unable to find contemporary sources in which the fake flag is used as the national flag. He argued that, as a pre-modern polity, Ryūkyū had no notion of national flag. He raised concern about the circulation of misinformation.[15]

• Genealogy of the Kings of Chūzan