First rule (inherited from akamata-kuromata, binding): some of this wing's traditions enforce their own privacy — photography, recording, and discussion of the Yaeyama secret rituals are prohibited by the communities that own them. The site documents what published scholarship documents and stops. No imagery, no reconstruction, no workaround.
Second rule (parallel to the-north-wing): the Ryūkyūs were an independent kingdom with their own language family, cosmology (Nirai Kanai — the realm beyond the sea), and colonial history; Amami sits apart again, with its own history including the Satsuma period. Material here is cited as Ryukyuan or Amami — never silently absorbed into "Japanese folklore."
The wing as an ecosystem
Four drafted members, four different jobs — the wing already reads as a working landscape rather than a bestiary:
- The mischief in the trees — kijimuna. Red-haired banyan children; fishing partnerships paid in fish eyes; friendships ended by burned trees, octopus, or flatulence; the kijimuna-bi fires with a calendar date (lunar Aug 10, a death omen).
- The defense on the roofs — shisa. The guardian pair (open mouth wards, closed mouth keeps), Chinese-lion lineage, with case histories (the Madanbashi sea dragon; Tomimori's fire-stopping stone) — "not revived, never gone."
- The gods from beyond the sea — akamata-kuromata. Vine-covered visiting deities from Nirai Kanai at the Yaeyama harvest festivals; the closed pole of the raihōjin spectrum (the namahage's opposite); secrecy enforced as part of the ritual's meaning.
- The bridge — kenmun (Amami). Kappa's head-plate and sumo, kijimuna's banyan and fish-eye diet, recombined at the archipelago's midpoint — traits traveling like genes along a coastline; sightings declining with the forests.
- The systematics — majimun. The collective name for Okinawa and Amami's evil spirits: not one being but a class, with a membership list and one shared attack. If an animal-shaped majimun passes between your legs, you die. The whole demonology concentrated into a single geometry to avoid — boundary doctrine at body scale, your own stance as the torii the demon must not pass through. Read the roster and its logic surfaces: the ushi-majimun is sometimes a transformed coffin-carrier; the gan-no-majimun are coffin spirits shapeshifting into livestock; the mishigē-majimun are possessed rice scoops. The class is the shadow of the household economy's most charged objects — the animals you slaughter, the box you are buried in, the scoop that serves your rice. The counter belongs beside the mainland's postures: a loincloth worn as a headband — the garment of the body's lowest station promoted to its highest, the same inversion-magic as matanozoki. And one living creature is called majimun: the habu, which is regarded as a divine messenger.
- The visitation that went public — paantu (Miyako). Masked deities come smeared in mud from the sacred Nmari-gā spring and smear everyone in their path — people, houses, cars — because the mud "carries away malevolent spirits," and it "smells so strongly it lingers for days." The origin is the south wing's cosmology in one image: black and red masks wrapped in palm fronds washed ashore at Kubama beach centuries ago; villagers revered them as visiting spirits, one man put one on and ran through the settlement, and the running never stopped. Gods that arrived as flotsam — the sea beyond delivering its own costumes.
What the wing teaches the rest of the parade
- The raihōjin spectrum — the visiting gods who arrive on schedule: namahage public and UNESCO-listed at one end; akamata-kuromata closed and enforced at the other. And the middle pole, running as a live experiment. The paantu tried both: public blessing and heritage status (Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, 1993; UNESCO's "Visiting Deities" listing in 2018 — the same listing as the namahage). What followed is documented: tourists complaining about muddied clothes and cars, and incidents of visitors assaulting performers. Officials responded by restricting publicity and assigning escorts to the paantu — a deliberate step back toward the Yaeyama model. The lesson is worth stating plainly, because it applies to this site too: mud that doesn't stain carries nothing away. A visitor who wants the festival without the mud wants the god without the visit — and visibility is not a one-way door.
- The trait-gradient method: kenmun proves regional variation isn't noise but geography — the clearest specimen chain anywhere for how traits travel (kappa → kenmun → kijimuna, north to south).
- The ecosystem model: mischief/defense/visitation as complementary roles — the structure the shisa entry proposed, now filled.
Roster and gaps
Drafted: the four above, plus (2026-07-27) majimun — the demon-class taxonomy (the leg-pass rule; the funerary-livestock membership; the loincloth-headband counter) — and paantu — the Miyako mud gods (the raihōjin spectrum's contested middle pole; gods that arrived as flotsam). Still named, undrafted: Nirai Kanai (doctrine note), kiinushii (tree-master, noted in kodama). A candor note for readers: this wing so far rests on aggregate sources; Ryukyuan-language and Okinawan scholarship is the standing acquisition, and entries will say so until it lands.