Ikema Ryuichi is in the museum his mother built on Yonaguni, a tropical island fringed by coral reefs and an outpost of southwestern Japan. Large clay vessels, intricate baskets and sumptuous flower-printed textiles fill the shelves. In a display case is a well-worn book: a dictionary the woman put together to preserve her local language, known as Dunan. Mr. Ikema is one of a dwindling number of people who can still speak it.
Yonaguni is one of half a dozen indigenous languages spoken on the Ryukyu Islands. The island chain, which includes Okinawa, stretches almost from Kyushu to Taiwan and was once an independent kingdom. This precarious position has long made Ryukyus a battleground for the larger neighbors in the chain. His tongues are among their victims.
Although the Ryukyuan languages and Japanese belong to the same family, linguists believe they have about as much in common as English and German. But when Japan annexed the islands in the 1870s, it declared the Ryukyuan languages just dialects of Japanese. They were banned in schools. Students who persisted in speaking them were forced to wear degrading signs around their necks.
Ryukyuan families kept the languages alive at home. Then, after World War II, America occupied Okinawa and encouraged a return to Ryukyuan languages in an effort to alienate the islanders from the rest of Japan. By associating local languages with its unpopular occupation, however, America likely hastened their demise. “Speaking Japanese has become a tool to liberate the Ryukyus from the Americans,” explains Patrick Heinrich of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
Decades of neglect have taken their toll. In 2009 unesco declared the six Ryukyuan languages (which are almost mutually unintelligible) seriously or critically endangered. Ryukyuan activists have since made progress in revitalizing their use, especially in Okinawa. Yet languages are still at risk. And activists are not helped by Japan’s continued reluctance to recognize them as separate languages. Doing so, notes Mr. Heinrich, would require acknowledging how recently and under what circumstances the Ryukyus have been part of Japan: “It takes you into history.”
Dunan is probably the most endangered language. Only a hundred people speak it fluently. The Yonaguni government has therefore made Dunan electives available in schools. The local school board’s Muramatsu Minoru, who is originally from Honshu but learned the island’s language, led an effort to assemble new Dunan dictionaries. There is a Dunan saying that sums up the issue: “If you forget the language, you forget the island; if you forget the island, you forget your parents. Yet it is difficult to imagine such modest measures to save Dunan. Mr. Ikema has no hope. “Dunan will eventually disappear,” he said.■