Among the eight French missionaries who stayed in the Kingdom of Ryukyus in the middle of the nineteenth century, Louis Théodore Furet passed 6 years 3 months of the longest time. Although the circumstances of the time did not allow the missionaries to pursue their real mission, they worked hard to learn languages to prepare for their future mission in Japan. In addition to it, Father Furet had activities in various academic fields. This article aims to overview, firstly, Furet’s academic documents in the meteorology, the seismology, the ethnography, etc. On the other hand, Furet’s letters will also help to clarify his strategy to keep a good relationship with the Ryukyuan authority.

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Population studies on the history of Ryukyu have customarily pointed to a decline in the population of total population since the late 18th century and a steady increase in the urban population. In contrast, this paper offers a critical reexamination of data in the historical materials on which these studies were based. Population in Ryukyu since the late 18th century has been on an increasing trend in total population, and the urban population has also not been on a steady increase. While there was a large population increase on Okinawa Island, there was a marked population decline or stagnation in remote islands. In this way, population in Ryukyu in early modern times shifted according to a variety of regional characteristics.

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This paper analyzed infectious disease epidemics and hygiene measures in Okinawa in the late Meiji era (1890-1910s). The main materials are newspaper materials and records of hygiene inspections by Matsushita Teiji (Professor, Kyoto University). In Okinawa in the Meiji era, old customs and patient concealment against infectious disease epidemics were deep-rooted. On the other hand, in the latter half of the Meiji era, acceptance of basic epidemic prevention measures (cleanliness and isolation) can be seen. The background to this is Okinawa’s assimilation policy, which began after the Sino-Japanese War, and the dissemination of information through newspapers. In addition, the movement of people to Taiwan, which became a colony of modern Japan, became active, which greatly affected the epidemic of infectious diseases in Okinawa.

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This paper aims at discussing the relationships between sea route network and tourism demand with network analysis technique in Nagasaki prefecture which have a lot of island regions in Japan. Although tourism is one of key sector for regional economy in these regions, accessibility is a significant agenda for their development. At first, this paper shows the spatial structure of sea route network by measuring the centrality. The high centrality value is obtained in Fukue, Nakadori and Ojika islands while Sasebo city also acquired the highest value in urban region in the sea route network. Then correlation analysis between the value of centrality and tourism demand is carried out. The analyzing shows the medium correlations between them. From these, the linkage of outer islands would be significant view for tourism development in island regions of Nagasaki, as well as single development in one island.

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This exploratory qualitative study examines the language ideology, attitudes and practices displayed by research participants in the Arakawa and Ishigaki districts of Ishigaki City, Okinawa Prefecture. It will examine how native speakers and learners of the indigenous Yaeyama language (an endangered Southern Ryukyuan language) respond to, and adapt, the Master-Apprentice language learning model – a novel model for endangered language revitalization pioneered by Dr. Leanne Hinton of University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with the NGO Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS) in the 1990s. The findings from this community-level grassroots initiative are presented in a participatory action research (PAR) framework. PAR was selected as the framework because it emphasizes the cooperative nature of social science research, in which researchers are “practitioners” or “catalysts” and participants are “stakeholders” (Stringer 2014). The findings will have implications for language revitalization in other communities around the world in contexts of minority language endangerment which are similar to the Yaeyama Islands, and to the Ryukyu Islands at large.

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This paper describes and analyzes the linguistic ideologies that have influenced the language repertoires of individuals who have experienced the process of language shift from Ryukyuan languages to standard Japanese. As the participants being the speakers of Ryukyuan languages born and raised on “remote islands” in the Ryukyu archipelago and moving from one place to another in their lives, it became clear that they use the languages based on “community norm” and “social norm” while confronting standard language ideologies such as “center and periphery” and “language hierarchy”. Since the Ryukyuan languages, which are characterized by linguistic diversity, paying attention to the linguistic experiences of individuals and describing them in detail will be a key to unraveling the process of language attrition and will help the efforts to maintain and pass on the languages for the future.

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This paper aims to describe the nature of the nominals (a cover term for nouns, pronouns, and quantifiers) and two word classes which modify nominals (namely, adjectival nouns and adnominals) in the Northern Okinawan Kin dialect. Each word class is identified by the criteria of its syntactic distribution and function. Contra the prevailing view in the Ryukyuan linguistics in which the adjectival nouns are labeled as “secondary adjectives,” I will argue that adjectives and adjectival nouns do not have any morphosyntactic features in common so that adjectival nouns should not be treated as a subclass of adjectives. Chapter 5 presents an overview of the system of demonstratives and interrogatives. Chapter 6 explores the nominal morphology. Topics there include: two kinds of plural markers (an affix, on the one hand, and a clitic, on the other), other affixes, nominalization, compounding, reduplication.

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This paper reconstructs the forms of “house” and “indoor” in Atayalic languages (Atayal and Seediq) based on data collected in the early 20th century. It turns out that the forms in Proto-Atayal were not cognates with the forms in Proto-Seediq. In Atayal, four formsare seen as the words for “house.”: ŋasal, saliʔ, imuu, and muyaw. Of these, ŋasal is found to be the genuine form for “house,” and sal-iʔ is derived from it by attaching the fossilized infix *-iq (ŋasal > ŋasal-iq > sal-iq > sal-iʔ). For imuu, it is proposed that the Tfuya Tsou form for “house” emoo is borrowed into the villages around Gawng Ma’aw, where the contact with Tfuya Tsou has been documented. The original meaning of muyaw is “indoor.” In Proto-Seediq, “house” is reconstructed as *sapah and “indoor” as ruan. In connection with “house” and “indoor,” tə-ruma in Seediq means “to be inside.” The root ruma could reflect the Proto-Austronesian *Rumaq “house,” because in some Formosan languages, such as Bunun, Tsou, Saaora, Paiwan, and Amis, the words for “indoor/inside” are derived by attaching affixes to roots that are reflexes of *Rumaq. This pattern is the same as tə-ruma in Seediq.

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I currently conduct a project called MAI-Ryukyus to support new speakers of Ryukyuan languages based on Hinton’s Master/Mentor-Apprentice Language Learning Program as part of my PhD research. Research questions are what drive new speakers to speak Ryukyuan languages, how to acquire Ryukyuan languages without compromising their diversity, and what the Ryukyuan (research) paradigm will look like. Based on the interim findings, I discuss psychological traumas of Ryukyuan language speakers, how to develop language competence and maintain the diversity of Ryukyuan languages, and the impact of the current Japanese government's administration on the Ryukyuan (research) paradigm and Ryukyuan languages.

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