stone inscriptions were written by Buddhist monks, not the people of Kumemura. Satsuma's conquest of Ryūkyū of 1609 turned Chinese affairs into Ryūkyū's raison d'etre. The Tokugawa shogunate refused to embrace the Chinese world order and had never established diplomatic relations with China. As a result, Ryūkyū became Japan's one of four gateways to foreign countries. Under the direction of Satsuma, Ryūkyū was committed to rebuild Kumemura. In the 17th century, the samurai of Kumemura replaced Buddhist monks as the writers of stone inscriptions. The 18th century is dubbed as the "century of Kumemura". They switched from Written Japanese to Classical Chinese as the language of Ryūkyū's official books. The Chūzan Seifu, the Kyūyō, and other official books were the products of this period. However, the samurai of Kumemura were assimilated to the Okinawan society to the level that they chose sōrō-style Written Japanese for daily activities. How Classical Chinese texts were read aloud in Okinawa is a question that attracts scholarly interest. There were two approaches in Japan: chokudoku and kundoku. Chokudoku is a way of reading Chinese texts in the original order, usually with Chinese sounds. Kundoku is an elaborate method to read Chinese texts as Japanese. While Chinese uses the SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) word order, Japanese is SOV. To cope with the ordering differences, kaeri-ten markers were added to the texts to change the word ordering to the Japanese one. While Chinese is an analytic language, Japanese is an agglutinative language with a rich set of small grammatical markers. For this reason, Chinese texts were annotated with okurigana, Japanese grammatical markers written with kana. The annotation scheme that realizes kundoku is called kunten (reading marks). The Okinawan elites adopted the Japanese way of reading Classical Chinese. Tomari Jochiku (1570–1655), a Confucian scholar from Yakushima, is credited for introducing a style of kunten called Bunshi-ten, together with the Satsunan school of Neo-Confucianism. Bunshi-ten was developed by Tomari Jochiku's mentor, Bunshi Genshō. Tomari Jochiku brought the Four Books of Confucianism annotated with Bunshi-ten. Kundoku based on Bunshi-ten became the standard way of reading Classical Chinese in Ryūkyū. Even in Kumemura, both chokudoku and kundoku were taught in school. When Ryūkyū received Classical Chinese documents from countries under the Chinese world order (i.e., China and Korea), the samurai of Kumemura made kunten annotations to them. The government officials then read them as Japanese. Linguistically speaking, the Okinawan varieties underwent radical sound