The photo below is titled “Samurai
Town” (士族街)
from a photo book titled “Travel Souvenir” (1901). The “Samurai Town” refers to
Shuri, the capital of the Ryukyu Kingdom.
From “Travel Souvenir” (1901), published by Mitsumura Photograph Company. Source: Okinawa Prefectural Archives
As shown in the photo above, Shuri used to be an aristocratic town lined with samurai residences (士族屋敷). Each residence was surrounded by a high stone wall. The residences shown in the photo above are the most magnificent, and were probably the residences of royalty and nobility, called udun (lit. palace) and tunchi (lit. residence). The exact location is unknown, but it may be Tounokura, Akahira, or Gibo.
In Okinawa, masonry technology was
more developed than in mainland Japan, thanks to the abundance of limestone,
which is easy to process. If you go to Okinawa, you will probably see
magnificent stone walls remaining at the ruins of old castles and other places.
Samurai residences were also surrounded by high stone walls, as shown in the
photo.
If you were to be attacked by
enemies while walking in such a place, it would be very difficult to escape. You
would have to climb over a stone wall. In fact, Motobu Udundi had a practice to
climb over a stone wall. Uehara Seikichi’s “Martial Dance” (1992) describes the
following:
Pole vaulting
As a way of escaping when surrounded by enemies, I trained to use a bamboo pole
to jump from stone wall to stone wall, or to jump onto a tiled roof or the roof
of a turtleback tomb. (p. 59)
If one did not see the photo of
Shuri above, one might not believe that ancient karate practitioners practiced
pole vaulting. They studied not only how
to fight, but also how to escape. To understand the old martial arts, we also need to
understand the old streets.
The original
Japanese article was posted on April 1, 2020 on Ameblo.
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