Shureimon Gate

This guide to Shureimon Gate in Okinawa opens with a puzzle: after three days of naval shelling reduced Shuri Castle to ash in May nineteen forty-five, why was this modest gate the very first structure Okinawans chose to rebuild? It traces the plaque reading shurei no kuni, a nation of propriety, a title a Ming emperor granted the Ryukyu Kingdom in fifteen seventy-nine, and the four centuries in which its kings stopped here to pray before entering a court oriented toward Beijing rather than Tokyo. It follows the gate from its original raising under King Sho Sei in the fifteen thirties through the battle that reduced it to rubble.