386 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1947 



It got rid of extra mouths to feed, and remittances sent home by 

 prospering relatives abroad helped offset the unfavorable balance of 

 trade recently characteristic of Ryukyu economy. 



THE CULTURE 

 The Food Economt 



The earliest inhabitants of the Ryukyus were probably scattered 

 bands of hunters and fishermen, totaling only a very few thousand. 

 Later, the introduction of agriculture, perhaps by the early Japanese, 

 set the stage for a dense population. The intensive exploitation of 

 arable land is as basic as the heavy Chinese and Japanese influences 

 in the establishment of the complex feudalistic pattern of Ryukyu 

 culture. Other factors which greatly influenced the local food econ- 

 omy were the seventeenth-century introduction of the sweetpotato, 

 and the twentieth-century contributions by the Japanese toward more 

 scientific farming. 



The physical nature of the islands themselves has largely deter- 

 mined the limits of Ryukyu food production. In the Central and 

 South Ryukyus, about one-quarter of the total land area was culti- 

 vated in 1989, with a smaller proportion under cultivation in the North 

 Ryukyus. The total cultivated area perhaps could be increased 50 

 percent by farming potentially arable but untouched land, especially 

 in the relatively undeveloped southern islands. 



Almost three-quarters of the Ryukyu households engage in inten- 

 sive subsistence farming, with many of them growing sugarcane as a 

 cash crop. The prime food crop was the hardy sweetpotato, although 

 just before World War II rice was becoming more of a dietary main- 

 stay (see p. 384) . In the late 1930's almost half of the cultivated land 

 was devoted to raising sweetpotatoes. The small family plots of land, 

 usually on the less fertile plateaus and gentle hill slopes, often pro- 

 duced two crops a year. As with all Ryukyu farming, cultivation 

 was almost entirely done by hoe, although single horse or ox plows 

 were occasionally used. Since sweetpotatoes are likely to rot in 

 storage, it was customary to grate and then dry the surplus for future 

 consumption. Lacking the knowledge of how to preserve part of 

 the crop against a "rainy day," the sweetpotato never would have 

 become a year-round staple food. 



Rice was second in importance as a food crop, and was mostly grown 

 in irrigated paddies in the shallow valleys and alluvial plains. Irri- 

 gated fields total about 10 percent of all the cultivated land in the 

 Central and South Ryulcyus, with a higher figure for the North 

 Ryukyus where more rice was grown. In the North, there was one 

 crop a year; in the Central and South, two were raised. Although 

 about 40 percent of the farms in the two-crop area had rice paddies. 



