This is the lion dog of Okinawa.
And in today's video, I want you to tell me who is allowed to build one.
This is a stone lion.
It's a mainstay of East Asian culture for thousands of years running.
Virtually every nation here has it as a part of their society.
Whether they call it a shishi, a shisa, singha, simha, haetae, gang-seng-ge,
they’re all really meant to mean the same thing.
It's just they are most certainly not the same thing.
They’re similar, but thousands of years of change and adaptation have produced slightly different versions,
which are all molded by the many varied environments that have taken them as their own.
And those adaptations are what I’m here to talk about today.
If you see a shishi in China, it tends to look like a lion.
A real lion.
One you could see in a zoo.
At the very least you can tell that at some point somewhere down the line, somebody saw a lion
and this was their attempt to recreate it.
But that’s not the case in Okinawa, where they call it a shisa.
Looking at these deformed little figures, it is immediately clear that nobody here had ever seen
anything remotely close to a lion.
At best, they might have seen an Iriomote bobcat, but since they’re called lion dogs
when directly translated, I think it’s more than likely that they’re meant to be a dog.
Because while at some point China may have told them about lions, Okinawa,
and for that matter even their colonial overlords in Japan, only had dogs.
Yet despite representing an animal that never existed based on an animal they’d never seen
the shisa are one of the Ryukyu kingdom’s most treasured customs.
Other East Asian societies may have taken to these protective figures in their own way,
but nobody has done it like here.
Virtually every house, every business, every government office on this island chain features
a pair of these unmistakable creatures.
They are here to ward off evil spirits.
They keep in the luck.
These are the creatures that fought against the dragons from the sea.
These are the creatures that kept the forest monsters at bay.
Why wouldn't you have them? Even if you don't believe they're going to do it why risk it,
why not put them up?
But unfortunately for the kingdom of Ryukyu, they were doomed regardless of their lawn ornament.
And because they were too small to survive their neighbours,
Japanese lords vassalized the kingdom in the early 1600s and after injecting a large swath of their culture
onto the local people, properly colonized them in the mid-19th century.
Okinawans are second class citizens in Japanese society, and at times have faced brutal treatment.
In the eyes of their colonial overlords, they were, and to an extent still are, a lesser people.
Marrying an Okinawan was considered a stain on your family line, and was to be avoided at all costs.
It kinda still is.
During world war two, the local people were killed en masse by a suicidal imperial army
espousing mainland loyalty propaganda.
And almost a quarter of the island’s pre-war population lost their lives.
In the aftermath, with American colonization in full force, the remaining locals were convinced
to take a Japanese identity simply as a means of holding back the American one.
By the 1970s, everything was in disarray.
What hundreds of years of Japanese colonialism had attempted, the fear of Americans
achieved in a single generation.
People took to it, because they thought it was better than the alternative.
The languages of Okinawa, varied across the island chain, all dwindled and were replaced by Japanese.
The indigenous spiritual history virtually died out completely, and religious festivals
mimicking those of mainland Japanese society came to take their place.
Much of what is known today about Okinawa is only done so through Japanese texts,
with all the biases that come with them.
In 1972, America returned these islands to Japan, but their soldiers have stuck around.
They maintain bases here to this day with tens of thousands of people from all across their own empire.
Soldiers that display the wide array of culture and racial differences that have come to define
the American melting pot.
And subsequently, Okinawa today is one of the most multicultural parts of Japan.
This is the only part of the country where I know more people with foreign backgrounds than local.
I know people here who are Taiwanese women, Persian-Canadian men, ancestrally Japanese
who have been here for six generations, Native Americans, and even once in a while,
a true Okinawan.
But yet they’re all representative of this new Okinawa.
An island where ancestral culture has very little bearing on modern action.
The ability to separate what came before with what is coming now is virtually impossible.
There are no native Okinawans living as they once did, and the idea
that there ever will be again is a fairly clear impossibility.
This is the new world.
The world they inhabit.
We inhabit.
And nobody is pretending it got this way through kindness or sympathy.
But that doesn’t change what it is.
So my question here is, who gets to build the Okinawan shisa?
Is it offensive if I had one on my deck?
It’s very easy to look at a white Canadian in a feathered headdress and say that’s wrong.
You can feel the history of the abuse in the action, and so it's therefore not the action
that's causing the offence but the history behind it.
The clothes aren’t offensive, it’s the nuance of what's being brought up by you wearing them.
But I suspect a lot of that is merely because I understand that specific problem by being a part of it.
I’m so directly connected to both the cause and effect that I feel it there
where I don't in Okinawa.
And certainly while it's not the case for me in Okinawa, it is for many people I know.
So I want to look at them.
If my Taiwanese friend wants to ward her home from evil spirits, is it imperative that she do so
with the Taiwanese version of the lion or can she use the Okinawan one?
After all, Taiwan never conquered Okinawa.
They're not an oppressive force.
But if she’s ok, what about her American husband?
What about their household?
It's mixed.
It’s even more complicated for someone who is Japanese.
Because are the mainlanders expected to use stone as they do in their homeland,
or can they use coral as is often the case in the local custom of the land they’ve conquered and inhabited?
Are children born in Okinawa with Japanese heritage allowed to make it out of coral
or only if they contain Okinawan blood?
So if you’re still with me, let’s take that one step further, okay?
What happens when they start to sell them?
Because of course tourists want souvenirs, and few things sell better than the lion
you see on every wall.
Almost no tourist site here fails to include small shisa figurines,
and very few tourist sites are owned by Okinawans.
Even to this day, the systemic oppression of their people means that they have far less access
to the economic wealth that allows them to run businesses like mainland imports.
So, who controls the shisa?
Well, it seems like everybody.
You cannot turn back the past.
The cat(-dog) is out of the bag.
Love it or hate it, Okinawan history is being used to sell German soft drinks by Japanese importers
to American soldiers.
But it could be worse.
They could be ground to dust.
They could be destroyed.
Their memory could be wiped away.
Yes, culture is a spoil of war.
Yes, the powerful will always control the weak.
But you can't turn back history.
It always moves forward, and culture has always been whatever we do with it.
Modern Okinawans, be they from Taiwan or Nepal or Japan or America, love their little stone pets.
Even if they never saw the animals that they are truly meant to represent.
This is Rare Earth.