Talk:Mugen/@comment-76.115.252.161-20160607032202

Mugen's Origins

Mugen is  from Miyako-jima, as stated in the Roman Album. The Kingdom of Ryukyu had much closer ties with China than Japan, until they were subjugated by Satsuma. Ryukyu was actually considered to be a tributary state to China.

Satsuma didn’t gain total control right away, and Ryukyu continued to maintain a relationship with China for quite some time. First Satsuma allowed Ryukyu to continue to be mostly autonomous, then they started exploiting them for resources, labor, and taxes.

For a while, Ryukyu served as a back door for trading with foreign countries. In the Edo Period, it was illegal to trade with China or other nations (excluding the Dutch), but if Ryukyu did the trading and then passed those foreign goods onto Satsuma domain, Satsuma could claim that they were trading within Japan. The shogunate looked the other way.

As for the penal colony -- Okinawa, the biggest island grouping in Ryukyu, for which the modern prefecture is now named, sent their worst criminals into exile on Miyako and Yaeyama. These islands are far south, close to Taiwan. They were never officially labeled as "penal colonies" per se, but they were used as such. They weren’t exclusively penal colonies though - they still had a native population. It’s not as if everybody on Miyako was a criminal, although they were certainly treated that way by the Okinawans.

The people of Miyako and Yaeyama were treated horribly by the Kingdom of Ryukyu in a lot of other ways as well, but I won't go into that here since it doesn't directly relate to the show. Suffice to say that they were severely marginalized for a long time.

Ryukyu was never used as a penal colony by Japan. Japan had several of its own penal colonies, mainly forced labor camps, on islands near Honshu. (If you have evidence to the contrary, I'd love to see it. I've done a lot of research, and haven't found anything to indicate that Japan shipped criminals to Miyako.)