is a name with multiple referents. The endonym prototypically refers to Okinawa Island in southwestern Japan. Today it can cover some surrounding islands (i.e., Okinawa Islands) and, more importantly, can refer to Okinawa Prefecture, a much larger administrative division of Japan, although the people from the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands still feel a strong sense of otherness to Okinawa. A related term, , also has multiple semantic domains. It was a name for an Okinawa-centered kingdom before it was replaced with Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. Ryūkyū was an exonym for Okinawa Island and remained largely alien to the native populations. Westerners have used the word for a larger chain of islands (the Ryukyu Islands, or the Ryukyus), for which the native populations have no folkloristic term. Detached from the native populations' perception, the Western usage became mainstream in multiple disciplines of natural sciences although there remains a non-negligible disagreement over the exact extent of the un-Ryukyuan term. Okinawa Okinawa Island The first known possible reference to Okinawa can be found in the Tō Dai-wajō Tōsei-den (779), a biography of Chinese Buddhist monk Jianzhen written by Ōmi no Mifune. Jianzhen and a Japanese embassy to Tang China accidentally stopped over the Southern Islands during their travel to Japan in 753. One of the islands mentioned in the book was A-ko-na-ha (阿児奈波), which the book stated was located southwest of Tanegashima. A-ko-na-ha is usually identified as Okinawa Island. However, this identification is not without a problem as the biography suggested that Jianzhen's ship had spent only one day to travel from A-ko-na-ha to Yakushima, which is about 500 km away from Okinawa Island. Before the famous voyage, the Japanese imperial court had dispatched several expeditions to the Southern Islands but for unknown reasons, the name of Okinawa was absent from the records. The hiragana spelling おきなは was first attested in the Nagato Manuscript of the Tale of the Heike (circa 1300). A Muromachi-period document dated 1404 mentioned an Okinau ship (をきなう船), which was dispatched by the Okinawa-based kingdom of Ryūkyū to pay tribute to the Ashikaga shogunate. The Okinawa-based kingdom of Ryūkyū referred to their island as Okinawa for numerous occasions. The Yarazamori Gusuku Inscription (1554) associates Okinawa (おきなは) with the earth under the king (天下). The Omoro Sōshi, a compilation of archaic ritual songs, contains a dozen of songs referring to Okinawa (おきなわ and おきにや). The small polity used a predominantly