classics such as the Tale of Genji and the Tales of Ise. In parallel with the shift in administrative documents, Ryūkyū's elite oral culture came to be recorded with the mixture of kana and kanji, under the influence of mainland writing conventions. As a result, the relationships between spelling and pronunciation became complicated. At the time omoro songs were recorded, radical sound changes that characterize the Shuri speech and other modern South Okinawan varieties, such as vowel raising, palatalization of [k] and [g] before [i], dropping of [r] before [i] were not completed if they had started. In contrast, ryūka songs and poems and kumi odori plays have significant gaps between spelling and pronunciation. For example, the first block of a ryūka is written as: However, it is pronounced as: Still, this pronunciation convention has non-negilible differences with modern colloquial speech. In the modern Shuri speech, the first word, meaning "today", is pronounced as [t͡ɕuː], not [kiju]. Adoption of the Japanese literary tradition Instead of developing their own literary writing, the samurai class of the kingdom embraced the literary tradition of mainland Japan. Fragmentary sources indicate that Japanese classics took a firm hold in the elite society even before Satsuma's conquest. The social lives of the elites at the very end of the Old Ryūkyū period were depicted by Taichū's Ryūkyū ōrai (early 17th century), a collection of correspondence arranged by month for the purpose of elementary education. In a letter between two ruling elites, one asked the other for copies of waka anthologies, namely, the Kokin Wakashū, the Man'yōshū, the Tales of Ise, the Shin Kokin Wakashū, and the Senzai Wakashū, in order to hold a renga (collaborative poetry) session. After the session, they played a kemari game. Kemari was taught by a member of the Asukai family, who had visited Okinawa prior to the event. One had visited mainland Japan and learned the Ikenobō school of ikebana (flower arrangement). Apparently, the ruling elites enjoyed the complete set of mainland high culture. However, most extant literary works date back only to the end of the 17th century. Two notable exceptions are the Kian Nikki (early 17th century) and the Chūzan Seikan (1650). The Kian Nikki was written by Kian, a tea master from Sakai, and it is the sole extant record of Satsuma's conquest of Ryūkyū from the view point of Ryūkyū. It followed the style of gunki monogatari