A Study on the True Orientation of Shuri Castleʼs Dairyuchu, or Dragon Pillars, and the Sunpouki Drawings －Why the Face-to-Face Theory Misinterprets the Evidence Drawings－

This paper examines the true orientation of the dragon pillars of Shuri Castle located in the city of Naha, Okinawa Prefecture.　Dairyuchu, as the two pillars are called, flank the stone steps ascending to the front entrance of the castleʼs Seiden, or main building. The pillars, reconstructed after World War II, were destroyed in 2019 by fire and are now being rebuilt. This latest　Reiwa-era reconstruction project has decided, albeit provisionally, to place the pillars facing each other, even though at the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom, in 1877, each pillar stood facing front. This paper establishes that the pillarsʼ correct orientation is face front by showing how the theory that Dairyuchu stood facing each other, or the face-to-face theory, misinterprets the evidence　supporting it.　The former palace of the Ryukyu Kingdom, currently known as Shuri Castle, was seized during the kingdomʼ annexation by the Japanese government in 1879. The castle, ravaged during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa between the forces of Japan and the United States, was temporarily used as the Ryukyu University site after the war. It later underwent another reconstruction （the Heisei reconstruction project） and, in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Okinawaʼs ‶return" to Japan, was opened to the public section by section, starting with Seiden in 1992. The resurrection of the entire palace was completed in 2019, but in the same year nine of its facilities were burned down on October 31 by an early-morning fire that broke out from Seiden.　The Heisei reconstruction project placed the pillars facing each other, which drew strong objections from the start that they should in fact face front. The face-to-face configuration was based on the 1768 drawings of Momoura soeudon fushinnitsuki miezu narabini ozaimoku sunpouki （‶Sunpouki"）held by the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts and on the Momoura soe gofushin ezucho（‶Gofushin ezucho"） illustration in the 1846 Sho family document owned by the city of Naha. The Reiwa reconstruction project also claims to have referred to drawings such as Sunpouki. However, the photographs taken in 1877 by Jules Joseph Gabriel Revertegat, discovered after the 2019 fire, proves that the pillars actually stood face front in the final years of the Ryukyu Kingdom. In spite of this, the governmentʼs Technical Review Committee for the Reconstruction of Shuri Castle, a committee responsible for guiding the Reiwa reconstruction project, chaired by Kurayoshi Takara, announced in December 2021 its provisional decision to set the pillars facing each other.　In 1877, near the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom, Dairyuchu stood face front. This means the faceto-face theory, based on the 1768 Sunpouki and 1846 Gofushin Ezucho drawings, holds true only if the pillars were rotated to face front at some point between the years 1846 and 1877. Yet there is no evidence to suggest this happened. If the pillars were never rotated, then the interpretation of the Sunpouki drawings, and the face-to-face theory predicated on this interpretation, must be wrong. With this premise in mind, this paper reevaluated the Sunpouki drawings used to support the face-to-face theory.　The face-to-face theory claims the Sunpouki drawings accurately depict the pillarsʼ orientation. But close scrutiny of the 24 drawings reveals they are not to scale and each is made to fit a distinct　objective. The two drawings used as the theoryʼs basis, in particular, were not created based on data obtained through physically measuring the pillars ; they are merely sketches representative of neither measurements nor scale. Sketches as such cannot be considered as sufficient grounds for determining the precise features of an object. This paper confirms that the drawings　in question were not made with the aim of accurately depicting Dairyuchu.　The Sunpouki illustrations fail as evidence that the pillars stood facing each other in 1768. In other words, Dairyuchu portrayed in Sunpouki in 1768 had in r