Reading about this reminds me of my favorite folktale from Yonaguni, which shows off how ingenious these embattled islanders were:
"It is said that from the top of the hills on Yonakuni, one can see Formosa and sometimes can even notice the lights on that island at night, so that one would think there would have been much intercourse with Formosa during the history of the islands. The commercial route is modern, however, and there has been little communication between Formosa and Yonakuni in former times. It is said that long ago the fierce natives of Formosa came and took captive some men and women on Yonakuni Island and ate them. The inhabitants of the island were, therefore, very much afraid of the Formosans and did not even date to light a fire at night lest the Formosans should see it and visit them again. There is a story that when the wind blew in the right direction, the natives of Yonakuni took long sandals of a length of two feet and threw them into the sea. When they drifted to Formosa, the [Yonagunians] thought that the Formosans, seeing them, would imagine from the size of the feet that there were very big men in that region and would refrain from exploring their country!"
(From Charles Leavenworth's account of his 1905 visit to Okinawa, "The Loochoo Islands".)
The Taiwanese cannibals never came back, so I'd say the Yonagunians' gambit worked!
This is actually rather less impressive than it sounds: Yonaguni is only about 100 km away from Taiwan. The major difficulty would be actually finding Yonaguni, as it's comparatively a very small island.
> "The project is aimed at examining what kind of boats Japanese ancestors used when they crossed the sea to travel from Taiwan"
While the topic is interesting, the wording of the article is problematic: given that formal annexion of the Ryūkyū date from 1879 and that the local people go through a process of Japanization[1] since this date, speaking of ancestors of Japanese people is more of a political statement than a scientific one.
Right; I wouldn't call them "Japanese ancestors". The Okinawans of today are descended mostly from migrants from the mainland, and even these people are not necessarily the same ones who came to the islands from Taiwan many millennia ago.
(Those underwater ruins that Yonaguni is famous for almost certainly stem from those people and not from today's Okinawans. While some of them look like a city of some kind, it is just as plausible that rock was cut out of the ground to build things. I would love to know the truth behind that amazing place!)
"It is said that from the top of the hills on Yonakuni, one can see Formosa and sometimes can even notice the lights on that island at night, so that one would think there would have been much intercourse with Formosa during the history of the islands. The commercial route is modern, however, and there has been little communication between Formosa and Yonakuni in former times. It is said that long ago the fierce natives of Formosa came and took captive some men and women on Yonakuni Island and ate them. The inhabitants of the island were, therefore, very much afraid of the Formosans and did not even date to light a fire at night lest the Formosans should see it and visit them again. There is a story that when the wind blew in the right direction, the natives of Yonakuni took long sandals of a length of two feet and threw them into the sea. When they drifted to Formosa, the [Yonagunians] thought that the Formosans, seeing them, would imagine from the size of the feet that there were very big men in that region and would refrain from exploring their country!"
(From Charles Leavenworth's account of his 1905 visit to Okinawa, "The Loochoo Islands".)
The Taiwanese cannibals never came back, so I'd say the Yonagunians' gambit worked!