The two weeks Greg Smits spent traveling around Japan’s Ryukyu Islands last May were rough, particularly on his feet. But for Smits, Professor of History and Asian Studies, the blisters, callouses, heat, and humidity were well worth the effort. In Japan to research a new book on the history of warfare in the Ryukyu Islands, he knew he’d be walking a lot—because traveling by foot to off-grid locations was the only way Smits could find what he was looking for: the remains of fortresses and other archeological sites from the 1300s and 1400s that counter the long-held notion of the remote Ryukyu Islands as a pacifist paradise.

“There are over 300 such fortresses on the island of Okinawa and about 400 in all of the Ryukyu Islands,” Smits says.

Several of the biggest fortresses are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, but Smits was more interested in finding the less obvious remnants of Ryukyu’s warfaring past, the bits and pieces of observation towers, dugouts, trenches, and walls that today are “just overgrown piles of rocks in vast clumps of trees, sometimes so dense that I would have to push my way in.”

Smits, who’s researched other aspects of Ryukyu’s history, began researching and writing revisionist histories of the Ryukyu Islands while on sabbatical in 2016. He discovered literature—and part of his trip was to find more written material—that described merchants, pirates, and warring groups from mainland Japan and Korea as the main drivers of the region’s history, each group laying claim to the islands. Last summer, Smits aspired to find and photograph at least two examples of every militarily important feature of fortresses—sometimes in parts of southern Ryukyu where he was the only person around, where there was no internet, and where, to accomplish his goal, he had to rely on paper maps, later cross- checking his findings with Google maps.

The Western narrative around Ryukyu began in the aftermath of the 1820 Napoleonic War, when two British ships docked in Okinawa. “The captain and surgeon on board somehow got the impression that the people they met were peaceful and serene,” Smits says. “But of course, that was based on a highly controlled situation. The islanders were used to dealing with potentially powerful people to whom you want to give a good impression, then send on their way as soon as possible.”