Archiving the “Voices” of Okinawan Shamans

An archive concerning Okinawan female shamans known as yuta primarily consists of documents produced by European missionaries, Japanese colonial officials, folklorists, and Okinawan intellectuals in the decades following Japan’s annexation of Okinawa in 1879. These observers usually cast yuta either as symbols of a valuable indigenous Ryukyuan culture or remnants of a tradition that threatened assimilationist Japanese policies. Archival records of these women thus tend to reflect the anxieties of colonial rulers and elite intellectuals concerned with nation- and empire-building, rather than the complexities of the lives of female shamans.

This paper presents a methodology by which to understand the political and social impact of the rituals, acts, and words of yuta and their mostly female clientele. Using local news reports of police persecution of yuta for spreading “rumors” about the cause of citywide fires and engaging in “vulgar” religious practices from the 1910s to 1930s, I examine the “voices” of yuta that aroused distress among government officials. I analyze “voices” not as a means of direct access to the women’s thoughts and experiences, but as an object of historicization within the contexts of Ryukuan religious and rhetorical cultures. For the “voices” of yuta through which “rumors” were spread belonged to a longstanding politico-religious culture in which female priestesses had been the sole performers of rituals of state. The “voices” of yuta exercised unique powers in everyday life as well, prompting housewives in the early twentieth century to pay considerable sums for services ranging from communion with the dead or healing illness. Their “voices” can thus be understood within the contexts of commercial exchange and female sociality, too. Identifying such multi-layered contexts helps shift the focus from state persecution of yuta to the influence and significance of their “voices” within their local and national communities.