East and West
War Dances Think of Hawaii. What is it that first comes to mind? A necklace of flower petals, girls in grass skirts, and the famous Hawaiian dancing. Hawaii is not the only place on Earth that has folk dancing deeply embedded into its culture. The practice exists throughout the Pacific – including Japan and Okinawa. Folk Dances are used to tell stories from the past and store the wisdom of past generations. Asian cultures have arranged information into explanatory folk dances for centuries. We might believe that writing would be more efficient, but for many Asian cultures, writing was a privilege reserved to those who could afford to learn it. This is in part due to the complexity of the Chinese writing system and the time and and effort required to learn it. China, Korea, Okinawa, and Japan have each used China's beautiful writing system of ideograms. These characters, called kanji in Japan, are the root of all of East Asia's writing systems. Such writing can be artistic in a way that the Roman alphabet cannot begin to approach. Beautiful, artistic, and mystical, the kanji may be impressive, but there is a disadvantage to such a writing system. There are around 25,000 characters, and learning to write them all is an exercise in life-long memorization. Learning even just a few thousand, the minimum necessary to write a letter home, is time consuming and very difficult. The Chinese system of writing is so complex that significant amounts of time are spent studying it instead of studying other things. Reading and writing in China and Japan is a huge challenge of learning an impossible number of characters - no two exactly the same and many with multiple meanings. Farmers of the 17th Century didn't have time to send their children to school every morning. Free time to study academics has traditionally been reserved to the wealthy classes of all societies. Therefore, oral traditions and folk dances would have been the best way for an Okinawan farmer to pass information along.
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