Trapped in Text

Abstract

This article situates the discourses produced during an anti-yuta shaman campaign in 1913 within a longer trajectory of the changing position of Okinawa's female ritualists following Japan's formal colonization of Okinawa. Women have historically dominated Okinawa's ritual world as its practitioners but their power and position were less certain by the 1940s. Examining the arguments produced in newspaper articles and by the prominent Okinawan intellectual Iha Fuyū in 1913, this article argues that the campaign contributed to the erosion of these women's position by introducing new ways of thinking that called their relevance to Okinawan society into question.