UW Washin Kai Lecture "Ryukuan Landscapes and Identity in the Omoro Soshi (1531-1623)" with Davinder Bhowmik

Conference/Presentation

In Person / Virtual

University of Washington, Kane Hall 210 or Online

Seattle, Washington, United States of America

Date: April 8, 2025

Time: 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.

2025 Wasin Kai Spring Lecture

Ryukyuan Landscapes and Identity in the Omoro Soshi (1531-1623)

Speaker: Prof. Davinder Bhowmik, Department of Asian Languages & Literature, University of Washington

*Admission is free and open to the public (Registration is required)

*Registration page will be available soon on this Washin Kai event page: https://bit.ly/WKlectures

The Omoro Soshi is an indigenous compilation of 1500 songs, poems, and prayers that extoll the golden age of the Ryukyu Islands. It offers insights absent from official histories that focus on great heroes. The collection sheds light on the Ryukyu's semitropical flora and fauna, and by extension, the everyday life of the common people.

This presentation will introduce the main features of the Omoro Soshi and pay paticular attention to key aspects of the landscape that shaped traditional communal formations. Its aim is to consider whether the compilation reflects a history of the region as top down (Yamato) or bottom up (Ryukyu).

Davinder Bhowmik is an Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. She teaches on and researches modern Japanese literature, with a specialization in prose fiction from Okinawa, where she was born and lived until the age of 18. Other scholarly interests include regional fiction, the atomic bombings, and Japanese film. Her publications include Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa (co-edited with Steve Rabson, 2016); Writing Okinawa: Narratives of Identity and Resistance (2008); and "Temporal Discontinuity in the Atomic Bomb Ficiton of Hayashi Kyoko (in Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, 1999). She is currently writing a manuscript on military basetown fiction in Japan.

Washin Kai - Friends of Classical Japanese is a volunteer group dedicated to the promotion of classical Japanese Studies at the University of Washington. See more informaiton at www.washinkai.info