Dugongs have played an important role for fishing villages around the Ryukyu Archipelago not only as a food resource, but also as an iconic figure featuring in myths, tales and songs. In some of them, dugongs are referred to as messengers of the sea deities visiting the human world from nirai kanai, the world of the gods situated beyond the sea. Promising never-ending youth and longevity, its meat was offered to the royalty of the Ryukyu Kingdom and served to ambassadors from China and Japan at diplomatic banquettes.

With the incorporation of the Ryukyu Kingdom into the Japanese Empire at the end of the 19th century and the introduction of modern fishing techniques as well as the spread of new conceptualisations of the sea the dugong population in the archipelago dropped significantly. In the 20th century, the Battle of Okinawa, dynamite fishing, bycatch and habitat destruction lead to a further decline in dugong numbers, making them a rare sight in modern Okinawa Prefecture. Today the Okinawan dugong stand on the verge of extinction.

However, this critical situation has given new meaning to the dugong. As a symbol of protest against the construction of a new military base in the waters of Henoko, Okinawa Main Island, people not only use it to reconnect with the sea, it also helps them to bring past and present together forming important cultural capital to oppose the base. Furthermore, the dugong functions besides its Ryukyu specific cultural meaning also as an anchoring point for environmental and anti-militarist activists from mainland Japan. As a natural monument protected by Japanese law, it enables non-local protesters to connect to a geographical space to which they normally would not have access to.

In my presentation, I will focus on the (re-)establishment of the dugong as a cultural reference point in Okinawa and how it contributes to a modern Okinawan identity, linked to the past of the Ryukyu Kingdom. I will look at the dugong as a marine mammal conveying new massages of environmental protection and cultural uniqueness, which are embedded in a continuous struggle against assimilation politics by the Japanese central government.

Keywords: Okinawa, Japan, dugong, environmentalism, protest

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Marius Palz is a member of the ERC-funded “Whales of Power” research project and a PhD candidate at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) at the University of Oslo. After having worked with members of the Ainu community in Hokkaidō and Tōkyō for his Masters, he is currently writing his dissertation on “Human-Dugong Relations and Environmental Activism in the Ryūkyū Archipelago.” As an anthropologist of Japan, he is not only interested in minority-state relations, but also multispecies and extinction studies.