Royalty and Ethnicity: Hypodescent, Hyperdescent, and the Ryukyu Kingdom, 1650–1725

The ethnicity of the sovereigns of the Ryukyu Kingdom was an issue in the first history compiled by the Ryukyuan official, Shō Shōken, in 1650. The biographies of three dynastic founders illustrate this: Shunten, Eiso, and Shō En. According to Shōken, Shunten was Ryukyu’s first historical ruler whose ethnicity was Japanese via descent from his father, while Eiso was the first historical ruler with Ryukyuan ancestry via descent from his mother, whose pedigree eclipsed that of Shunten’s Ryukyuan mother. Shō En founded the final dynasty and his descent was either from Shunten or Eiso, but Shōken admits that he was not certain which. Shōken’s patrilineal identification of Shunten as Japanese functioned as an act of hypodescent (ethnic/racial demotion) disguised as hyperdescent (ethnic/racial promotion) within the context of Japan’s domination of the Ryukyu Kingdom which began in 1609. By suggesting that the king of his present-day, a direct descendant of Shō En, was related to Eiso, whose Ryukyuan identity was matrilineal, Shōken advocated a kind of hyperdescent connected to it, but which otherwise eluded the scrutiny of the Japanese. Consequently, his royal biographies offered an alternate view of Ryukyuan ethnicity via hyperdescent that emanated from an original matrilineality against the prevailing Japanese view of hyperdescent founded on a continuous patrilineality. Shōken’s conception of hyperdescent as linked to matrilineality was an outgrowth of the prominence of matriarchical institutions within the royal government, especially the high priestesses of the Ryukyuan religion, the Chifijin, the strengthening of which was one of the hallmarks of the dynasty established by Shōken’s ancestor, and son of Shō En, King Shō Shin, during the early sixteenth century. A revised royal history appeared in 1701 (and again in 1725) which strengthened Shō En’s Ryukyuan identity and descent from Eiso, thereby reinforcing, and formally codifying, the concept of matrilineal hyperdescent.