The Pine the Ryukyu Ships Steered By

Its name says it was the mark the Ryukyu ships steered by. Ryukyusen no mejirushi matsu stands on the coast road north of Gionnosu, facing out across Kinko Bay, and the name is a claim about four centuries of shipping. Satsuma took the Ryukyu kingdom in 1609 and ran its trade with China through this bay for the next two and a half centuries, so ships coming up from Okinawa made their landfall along this shore, and a conspicuous tree at the water's edge is exactly what a pilot steers on. The species is the strange part. It is recorded as Pinus luchuensis, the Ryukyu pine, whose natural range is Okinawa and the Amami islands, several hundred kilometres south of here. Whether that is coincidence, or whether somebody put a southern pine here on purpose as a mark for southern ships, we cannot tell you. Everything beyond the species and the position comes from the name itself. It appears on no Japanese page we can find, in no register, and in no history we have read: the only record of it is a survey note left on the map in June 2025. Nobody has dated it either. If you know the story behind the name, or there is a board at the foot of it, we would like to hear.