Dynastic History | Okinawa Prefectural Museum, Omoromachi — The Kings' Portraits Came Back in Colour

Until 2024 the ogoe 御後絵 — the posthumous portraits painted of the kings of Ryukyu — were known almost entirely in black and white. Kamakura Yoshitarō 鎌倉芳太郎 photographed them in the 1920s. The paintings themselves left Okinawa in the wreckage of 1945, and the loss was entered on the FBI's National Stolen Art File in 2001.

In January 2023 a family in Massachusetts, going through the effects of a dead relative who had served in the Second World War but never in the Pacific, found painted scrolls and a hand-drawn nineteenth-century map of Okinawa in the attic, and reported them. The match was made against that file. Twenty-two objects — six scrolls, the map, ceramics — were formally handed to Japan on 15 March 2024; the prefecture said they had reached Okinawa the day before.

The portraits among them have been identified as the fourth king Shō Sei, the thirteenth Shō Kei, the eighteenth Shō Iku, and one king not yet named. Their reds, golds and blues had never been recorded. Too fragile to hang, they were shown as reproduction panels over three days, 8 to 10 May 2024, in the special exhibition room at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum, with sixteen of the returned objects beside them. Conservation continues.

The museum opened in November 2007, in the Omoromachi district north of central Naha. What its Ryukyu galleries hold is what survived 1945 — and now a little of what did not.

📸 Cover: The museum's exterior and entrance signage, Omoromachi, 663highland, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons