are a set of
pictogram
A pictogram (also pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto) is a graphical symbol that conveys meaning through its visual resemblance to a physical object. Pictograms are used in systems of writing and visual communication. A pictography is a wri ...
s once used in the
Yaeyama Islands of southwestern
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
. The word ''kaidā'' was taken from
Yonaguni, and most studies on the pictographs focused on
Yonaguni Island. However, there is evidence for their use in Yaeyama's other islands, most notably on
Taketomi Island.
They were used primarily for tax notices, thus were closely associated with the
poll tax
A poll tax, also known as head tax or capitation, is a tax levied as a fixed sum on every liable individual (typically every adult), without reference to income or resources. ''Poll'' is an archaic term for "head" or "top of the head". The sen ...
imposed on Yaeyama by
Ryūkyū on
Okinawa Island
, officially , is the largest of the Okinawa Islands and the Ryukyu Islands, Ryukyu (''Nansei'') Islands of Japan in the Kyushu region. It is the smallest and least populated of the five Japanese archipelago, main islands of Japan. The island is ...
, which was in turn dominated by
Satsuma Domain on Southern Kyushu.
Etymology
Sudō (1944) hypothesized that the etymology of ''kaidā'' was , which meant "government office" in Satsuma Domain. This term was borrowed by Ryūkyū on Okinawa and also by the bureaucrats of Yaeyama (''karja:'' in Modern Ishigaki). Standard Japanese /j/ regularly corresponds to /d/ in
Yonaguni, and /r/ is often dropped when surrounded by vowels. This theory is in line with the primary impetus for Kaidā glyphs, taxation.
History
Immediately after conquering Ryūkyū, Satsuma conducted a land survey in Okinawa in 1609 and in Yaeyama in 1611. By doing so, Satsuma decided the amount of tribute to be paid annually by Ryūkyū. Following that, Ryūkyū imposed a poll tax on Yaeyama in 1640. A fixed quota was allocated to each island and then was broken up into each community. Finally, quotas were set for the individual islanders, adjusted only by age and gender. Community leaders were notified of quotas in the government office on Ishigaki. They checked the calculation using ''
warazan'' (''barazan'' in Yaeyama), a straw-based method of calculation and recording numerals that was reminiscent of
Incan Quipu. After that, the quota for each household was written on a wooden plate called . That was where Kaidā glyphs were used. Although ''sōrō''-style Written Japanese had the status of administrative language, the remote islands had to rely on pictograms to notify illiterate peasants. According to a 19th-century document cited by the ''Yaeyama rekishi'' (1954), an official named Ōhama Seiki designed "perfect ideographs" for ''itafuda'' in the early 19th century although it suggests the existence of earlier, "imperfect" ideographs.
Sudō (1944) recorded an oral history on Yonaguni: 9 generations ago, an ancestor of the Kedagusuku lineage named Mase taught Kaidā glyphs and ''warazan'' to the public. Sudō dated the event to the second half of the 17th century.
According to Ikema (1959), Kaidā glyphs and ''warazan'' were evidently accurate enough to make corrections to official announcements. The poll tax was finally abolished in 1903. They were used until the introduction of the nationwide primary education system rapidly lowered the illiteracy rate during the
Meiji period
The was an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868, to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonizatio ...
.
They are currently used on Yonaguni and Taketomi for folk art, T-shirts, and other products, more for their artistic value than as a record-keeping system.
Repertoire
Kaidā glyphs consist of
*references to animals, plants and their byproducts, such as rice, millet, bean, bull, sheep, goat, fish and textile, and
*numerals, or basic units, such as a bag of rice (俵), a bag of millet, a dipper of rice (斗), a box of rice (升), half a bag of rice, and
*household symbols called ''dāhan''.
As for numerals, similar systems called ''sūchūma'' can be found in
Okinawa and
Miyako and appear to have their roots in the
Suzhou numerals.
Research history
The first non-Yaeyama author to comment on kaidā glyphs was
Gisuke Sasamori, who left copies of many short kaidā texts in his ''Nantō Tanken'' (南島探検, ''Exploration of the Southern Islands''), a record of his 1893 visit to
Okinawa Prefecture
is the southernmost and westernmost prefecture of Japan. It consists of three main island groups—the Okinawa Islands, the Sakishima Islands, and the Daitō Islands—spread across a maritime zone approximately 1,000 kilometers east to west an ...
which also mentions the hard labor imposed on the islanders by the regime.
Yasusada Tashiro collected various numeral systems found in Okinawa and Miyako and donated them to the
Tokyo National Museum in 1887. A paper on ''sūchūma'' by British Japanologist
Basil Chamberlain (1898)
appears to have been based on Tashiro's collection.
In 1915 the mathematics teacher Kiichi Yamuro (矢袋喜一) included many more examples of kaidā glyphs, ''barazan'' knotted counting ropes, and local number words (along with a reproduction of Sasamori's records) in his book on Old Ryukyuan Mathematics (琉球古来の数学). Although Yamuro did not visit Yonaguni by himself, his records suggest that kaidā glyphs were still in daily use in the 1880s. Anthropologist
Tadao Kawamura, who made his anthropological study of the islands in the 1930s, noted "they were in use until recently." He showed how kaidā glyphs were used in sending packages.
Sudō (1944) showed how business transactions were recorded on leaves using kaidā glyphs. He also proposed an etymology for kaidā.
References
See also
*
Writing in the Ryukyu Kingdom
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kaida glyphs
Japanese writing system
Mathematical notation
Pictograms
Yaeyama culture