Possibly 16th-century Okinawan lacquer bowl, Habsburg collection, Austria; 16th/17th century look-out tower

in-person lecture

Early Western Imaginings of Ryūkyū, 1511 - 1620

date & time

tuesday, April 29, 2025
7PM-8:30PM (PST)

ADMISSion is Free, registration required 

Click here to Register

The islands known as Ryūkyū (modern-day Okinawa) have a long history as a cluster of statelets scattered over some 500 miles. From 1500, it became a largely unitary kingdom. Material assets were poor, but the people amassed wealth as middle-men traders. Just a decade after this consolidation, southeast Asia's great entrepôt of Malacca fell to Portuguese aggression. This brought to Europeans their first news of Ryūkyū, and tales were fabulous. But not until a whole century later did any Europeans land there and leave first-hand comments. This talk will look at the early fantasies and the later realities, while connecting these matters to Ryūkyūan history, and to the history of its large and powerful neighbour, Japan. 

This lecture is presented in partnership with the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities. 

About Lecturer:

Timon Screech   

Timon Screech taught the history of Japanese art at SOAS, University of London, for 30 years, before moving to a chair at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto, in 2021. He has also been guest professor at numerous institutions in the EU, Japan and USA.

Screech is the author of some dozen books and many articles on the visual culture of the Japan’s early-modern Edo period. His PhD was published as The Lens Within the Heart and remains in print in a second, paperback edition. Perhaps best-known is his Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820, which is also available in Chinese, Japanese and Polish translations. His field-defining study, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan was published in 2012.

In 2020 he published two further books, The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art and Money in the English Quest for Japan and Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (also available in Chinese). He has just completed a major monograph on the deification and cult of Tokugawa Ieyasu (due out in fall 2025), and concurrently working a book on early European contacts with the Kingdom of Lūchū (J: Ryūkyū), modern Okinawa. 

Screech is a Freeman of the City of London, and Fellow of the British Academy. In 2022 he was awarded both the Yamagata Bantō Prize, and the Fukuoka Culture Prize, and in 2024 received the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation.