
Museums to try ancestors’ sail from Taiwan to Okinawa - rocky1138
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0003553716
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Dunan
Reading about this reminds me of my favorite folktale from Yonaguni, which
shows off how ingenious these embattled islanders were:

"It is said that from the top of the hills on Yonakuni, one can see Formosa
and sometimes can even notice the lights on that island at night, so that one
would think there would have been much intercourse with Formosa during the
history of the islands. The commercial route is modern, however, and there has
been little communication between Formosa and Yonakuni in former times. It is
said that long ago the fierce natives of Formosa came and took captive some
men and women on Yonakuni Island and ate them. The inhabitants of the island
were, therefore, very much afraid of the Formosans and did not even date to
light a fire at night lest the Formosans should see it and visit them again.
There is a story that when the wind blew in the right direction, the natives
of Yonakuni took long sandals of a length of two feet and threw them into the
sea. When they drifted to Formosa, the [Yonagunians] thought that the
Formosans, seeing them, would imagine from the size of the feet that there
were very big men in that region and would refrain from exploring their
country!"

(From Charles Leavenworth's account of his 1905 visit to Okinawa, "The Loochoo
Islands".)

The Taiwanese cannibals never came back, so I'd say the Yonagunians' gambit
worked!

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jpatokal
This is actually rather less impressive than it sounds: Yonaguni is only about
100 km away from Taiwan. The major difficulty would be actually _finding_
Yonaguni, as it's comparatively a very small island.

[https://www.google.com.au/maps/dir/Yonaguni/taipei/@24.50853...](https://www.google.com.au/maps/dir/Yonaguni/taipei/@24.5085305,121.8467353,9.09z/data=!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x34674de19cdcab25:0xabd5fdc669e9f772!2m2!1d123.0085106!2d24.4616586!1m5!1m1!1s0x3442ac72bce20a99:0x3f6a35cedd0ac2e0!2m2!1d121.5654177!2d25.0329694?hl=en)

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titanix2
> "The project is aimed at examining what kind of boats Japanese ancestors
> used when they crossed the sea to travel from Taiwan"

While the topic is interesting, the wording of the article is problematic:
given that formal annexion of the Ryūkyū date from 1879 and that the local
people go through a process of Japanization[1] since this date, speaking of
ancestors of Japanese people is more of a political statement than a
scientific one.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanization)

~~~
Dunan
Right; I wouldn't call them "Japanese ancestors". The Okinawans of today are
descended mostly from migrants from the mainland, and even these people are
not necessarily the same ones who came to the islands from Taiwan many
millennia ago.

(Those underwater ruins that Yonaguni is famous for almost certainly stem from
those people and not from today's Okinawans. While some of them look like a
city of some kind, it is just as plausible that rock was cut out of the ground
to build things. I would love to know the truth behind that amazing place!)

