The landscape of distinct cemeteries found in contemporary Okinawa, the islands of southern Japan, is closely connected with the monchu sytem, which is a patrilineal group social formation and functions as a social norm. Although it has generally been considered that this system was established by the ruling samurai class since the late period of seventeenth century monchu as observed currently should be distinguished from the historical one: it is an “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm, 1983) of the modern period. To interprete the dynamic relation between monchu as invented tradition and the cemetery as a cultural landscape, “cemetery” in this research note is grasped as not only a substantial artifact but also a “place”.
I would like to consider “place”, not as a position within an objective cordinate system or depository of meaning, but rather as what lies between them as the two extremes of a spectrum and as an unstable and competitive domain, where various relations- are interwoven. Such a point of view is similar to that of Sack (1980), Entrikin (1991), and Daniels (1992). This perspective enables us to take up both consciousness of the subject in question and the “reality” constituting it. It also leads to an analysis of social process at work in the changing context of possible interaction between the subject and the place. Since we regard this constitutional aspect of place as important, the naive conceptualization of place-for instance, that it has a given essence or an authenticity-is denied.
For fully exploring the cemetery as a place, it is necessary to take into account that the cemetery is a locus of memory of the dead for the living and that the memory is socially constructed. In this case, memory can be grouped into the two types: paradigmatic form, constrained by synchronicity, and syntagmatic form, which converges contingent paradigms to contiguous unity in a syntactic way with a certain grammar. Given the possibility of the interpretation that while the former form represents a burial place, the latter, a cemetery, we now identify the latter in the monchu system.
A part of the relation between the subject and the cemetry can be shown by sense of place, which is formed by arbitrarily delimiting relations concerned with the place under consideration. In our case, it is notable that the norm of monchu allows such a delimitation. According to Tuan (1980), who set out a binary opposition of rootedness and sense of place, we in the modern world cannot experience rootedness. Therefore, rootedness itself cannot be an sich. Thus it is only a für sick set of representation which necessarily has sense of place as an oppositional term. This development of reflection leads us to the viewpoint that in the context of the rootedness-oriented monchu system, a cemetery is a locus, where a sense of place is experienced through common feeling of “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) based on genealogical relations over time and space. It may be suggested that, like nationalism, the constitution of intention, in which a long arrow of time can become a motiva-tion of authorization, is no doubt a dynamism of the “modern period”; such a dynamism goes outward beyond the life-world over time and space.
