Names of Okinawa
Archipelago of Japanese islands / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Okinawa (沖縄) is a name with multiple referents. The endonym refers to Okinawa Island in southwestern Japan. Today it can cover some surrounding islands (i.e., Okinawa Islands) and, more importantly, can refer to Okinawa Prefecture, a much larger administrative division of Japan, although the people from the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands still feel a strong sense of otherness to Okinawa.[1]
A related term, Ryūkyū (琉球), also has multiple semantic domains. It was a name for an Okinawa-centered kingdom before it was replaced with Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. Ryūkyū was an exonym for Okinawa Island and remained largely alien to the native populations. Westerners have used the word for a larger chain of islands (the Ryukyu Islands, or the Ryukyus), for which the native populations have no folkloristic term.[1] Detached from the native populations' perception, the Western usage became mainstream in multiple disciplines of natural sciences although there remains a non-negligible disagreement over the exact extent of the un-Ryukyuan term.[2]