Urasoe Yōdore: Evening Calm Beside Hacksaw Ridge

Small stone houses

The chamber holds stone coffins. They were made for bones, and carved from stone brought from China.

The coffins are shaped like small houses. The lid is a roof, with rows of tiles running down to the eaves. The walls are panels of carving.

Two kings

The first king here is said to be Eiso, who reigned from 1260 to 1299; the tomb is thought to have been built for him in the thirteenth century. According to Urasoe’s own tourism guide, his mother dreamed that the sun flew into her bosom before he was born, and people called him Eso no Tedako: Eiso, the one who is the sun.

The same guide says that on the winter solstice, when the sun was thought to be reborn, the rising sun shines straight in through the tomb’s arched gate, and that it was built that way on purpose, to draw in the sun’s power. A tomb named for the evening, then, arranged for a sunrise.

The second king arrived more than three centuries later. Shō Nei took the throne in 1589. In 1609 the Satsuma domain of southern Japan invaded Ryukyu, and he surrendered. He was taken to Japan, where he met Tokugawa Ieyasu at Sunpu and the shogun Hidetada in Edo, and he was allowed home in 1611. In 1620 he renovated this tomb, and in the same year he was buried in it.

The kings of his dynasty were buried at Tamaudun, the royal mausoleum in Shuri. Shō Nei was not. For a long time, the explanation was shame: having lost to Satsuma, he could not face his ancestors.

Urasoe tells it differently. Shō Nei came from a branch of the royal family that had lived around Urasoe Castle. The inscription at Tamaudun does not list that branch; it had never been meant to lie there at all. For his family, he seems to have decided, the proper tomb was this one.

The king who had lost the war had not hidden himself away. He had gone home.

His queen, according to the same account, waited for him while he was in Japan and is said to have composed a verse about the north wind bringing the king home. She was buried elsewhere at first. In 1759 her bones were moved here, to join his.

The cliff next door

Afterwards I went out to the real thing. High walls curve along the foot of the cliff.

Two doors

The courtyard is quiet now. Two chambers are cut into the cliff, their fronts white under the overhanging rock. According to the sign, the west chamber, on the right, is Eiso’s. The east chamber, on the left, holds Shō Nei and his family. Between them, a stone tablet stands against the rock. A fence keeps visitors back.