Ryūka: poetry heard in song and read in collections

The common four-part pattern does not describe every form called ryūka. In a verse attributed to Onna Nabī, the speaker imagines pushing Mount Onna aside and drawing a lover’s village closer. The Onna Village Tourism Association presents it as four phrases in an eight–eight–eight–six pattern: 恩納岳あがた／里が生まれ島／もりもおしのけて／こがたなさな. The sound count follows the local language, rather than a modern Japanese reading of the written characters. A sung setting also shapes breathing and duration.

Ryūka circulated among court nobles, other elites and local communities, with women among its creators. Poems could be sung at gatherings or used in dance, as well as expressing personal feelings. Japan Arts Council teaching material places its emergence no later than the early seventeenth century while acknowledging uncertainty about its origins. Court and elite sanshin-song culture, melodies and later kunkunshī notation provided settings for transmission. Kumiodori theatre also uses songs and their melodies to express characters’ feelings. The development of notation is not a single birth date for the poetry.

Ryūka Hyakukō is a manuscript collection organised by classical sanshin melodies. Its compilation history includes the dates 1795, 1798 and 1802; its compiler is unidentified. Those dates concern the compilation, rather than necessarily dating the surviving copy.

Thematic printed collections

A 1911 printed Kokin Ryūkashū groups poems under seasons, love, nakafū and miscellaneous subjects. Nakafū combines opening phrases influenced by Japanese waka with an eight–six ending. This thematic arrangement offers a reading order different from classification by melody. Print, education and performance changed circulation after the Meiji period; contemporary composition and singing continue in several settings.

Modern societies and newspapers

After the kingdom’s abolition in 1879, Japanese-language schooling changed the environment for Ryukyuan literature. New associations also supported composition. Records at the University of the Ryukyus document the Boshin Ryūka Society, founded in 1908, and its publication of poems in two Okinawan newspapers in 1909–1912. Meeting records and accounts reveal an organised literary circle.

Migration and postwar composition

Circulation extended overseas. A University of Hawaiʻi handbook describes poems published in the mid-1950s in a Hawaiʻi Japanese-language newspaper about returning to a war-damaged homeland. The Hawaiʻi Ryūka Society, established in 1979, published collections and helped stimulate poetry submissions in Okinawa. Migration, newspapers and associations thus supported renewal, while declining language use and ageing writers posed difficulties.