Second Shō clan


The second Shō clan ruled the Ryukyu Kingdom from 1470 to 1879, under the title of the King of Chūzan. This clan took the clan name from the earlier rulers of the kingdom, the first Shō clan, even though the new royal family has no blood relation to the previous one. Until the abolition of Japanese peerage in 1947, the head of the family was given the rank of marquess while several cadet branches held the title of baron.

History

The second Shō clan claims Izena Island to be their ancestral home. 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. 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, 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 Satsuma Domain. In 1635, Satsuma Domain appointed Ryūkyū's ruler Shō Hō as Provincial Governor of Ryūkyū. Even in the family mausoleum Tamaudun, the rulers were referred to not with the royal suffix -ō but with the non-royal nobiliary suffix -kō. 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 the King of Chūzan of the State of Ryūkyū, concealing its vassalage to Satsuma.
In 1872, the Meiji government renamed the State of Ryūkyū to Ryūkyū Domain and re-appointed Shō Tai as Domain King. In 1879, the Meiji government abolished Ryūkyū Domain, and the last king Shō Tai abdicated.

Peerage

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.
The Chinese-style surname 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. Cadet branches used different surnames. In 1691, the king ordered all the cadet branches to assume the surname Shō, 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.
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, ikai, and nanori. 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 as the Shō clan's nanori-gashira. The character Chō was chosen to indicate an affinity to Minamoto no Tametomo, who by that time had been considered to be the father of Shunten, the legendary king of Chūzan. While the Chūzan Seikan 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 explicitly refered to Gihon as a possible ancestor, connecting the second Shō clan to the Minamoto clan through Shunten.
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. 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.

Family crest

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 accross Japan. It was called 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 abolishment of the domain were surprised that mitsudomoe banners were flown everywhere.
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.
Just like the king's overlord the Shimazu clan of 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.
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" in the Bankoku Hakuki Zufu and a couple of other books published in mainland Japan from the end of the Edo period to the beginning of the Meiji period.
Another colored variant of the mitsudomoe was created by the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands 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. 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."
This flag appeared in a historical novel titled Ryūkyū shigeki: Tomoebata no akebono. The fiction was written by Yara Chōchin and was mimeographed in Nara, to which he had fled the war. It remains unresolved whether USCAR referred to Yara's self-published novel.
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.

Family tree