The Police Persecution of Female Shamans in Okinawa, 1910s–30s

In the wake of Japan’s annexation of Okinawa in 1879, colonial and local officials, intellectuals, and elite reformers launched campaigns to reform what they deemed “traditional” customs that allegedly hampered the civilizational and capitalist development of Okinawa. One such custom was the reliance on the spiritual and economic authority of women. Priestesses, for instance, had long been the sole performers of state rituals and village-level religious ceremonies for centuries, often granted official lands and stipends. But in the early twentieth century, calls for reform transformed into full-fledged police persecution of female spiritual workers. From the 1910s to 1930s, female shamans known as yuta were disproportionately subjected to criticism, hostility, and even arrest. The police apprehended yuta for spreading superstitions, offering dubious medical advice, and taking advantage of impoverished families. Yuta were even put on public trial for inciting social unrest.

This paper focuses on the state persecution of yuta in Naha City in the early twentieth century, exploring why the police were deployed and how the women responded. It shows how the women’s behaviors and words, as recorded in sites of police and juridical interrogation, troubled the foundational epistemologies of the modern legal system that the Japanese state was attempting to institutionalize across its empire. The female shamans lay bare, in other words, the limits and nature of such legal concepts as proof, evidence, testimony, and witness. Could the seemingly nonsensical words that the yuta uttered while in a trance count as credible testimony? How could one police the boundary between superstition and non-superstition in a courtroom? What kinds of norms of intelligibility and reliability were created during the public trials of female shamans? As much as state agents attempted to subordinate the yuta, the shamans exposed the chasms and incommensurabilites between competing forms of spiritual, juridical, and political power.