“To Embrace and Protect”: Managing Wind, Water, and Trees in the Ryukyu Kingdom

Abstract

The last centuries of the Ryukyu Kingdom (?–1879; modern-day Okinawa, Japan) were a crucial era in the political ecology of the islands, during which the court instituted new bureaucratic offices to manage agricultural land, forests, and craft production. This essay examines the knowledge practices that underpinned the land redistribution and afforestation projects of the eighteenth century: Confucian statecraft and fengshui (lit. “wind” “water”), or Chinese geomancy. Contrary to its modern depiction as superstition or pseudo-science, fengshui constituted a systematic body of knowledge about the natural world, which shaped landscape and resource management. Forest recovery efforts were aimed at increasing the general productivity of the islands, but in a manner that was consistent with the fengshui view of human–environment relations, as well as the ideals of Confucian statecraft. Focusing on forest management, this essay explores how eighteenth-century Ryukyu bureaucrats adapted fengshui techniques to managing the land and to governing the kingdom.