My Okinawan Grandmother’s Family
Ushi Furugen Izumigawa
I don’t have much information on my grandmother’s family in Okinawa. She had some family in Hawaii and two brothers that died during an earthquake in mainland Japan. It seems that the Ryukyu Kingdom was male-based and once a woman married, she was considered a part of her husband’s family. Women did not carry their family registers with them.
I can only go back two generations of my grandmother’s family. Her father’s parents were Sofun Furugen and Uto Arakaki. I believe that they were born in the 1840s in the Ryukyu Kingdom. The kingdom became Okinawa in 1872.
My grandmother’s father Kama Furugen was born in the Ryukyu Kingdom around 1865. My great grandmother Uto Inafuku passed away when my grandmother was about 10 years old. I believe that they were from the Nishihara area of Okinawa.
My grandmother’s family owned a tofu factory and pig farm in Okinawa. My grandmother made tofu in Haiku using a grindstone and mature yellow soybeans.
The earliest known reference to soybeans in Okinawa appeared in 1534 in the Record of Messengers to Ryukyu. Thereafter soybeans became a widely grown crop. Although uncertainty still remains, tofu is thought to have arrived in Ryuku by the mid 1600s. In 1683, tofu was widely available at that time in Okinawan markets and was produced…
