the boundary between the Central and Southern Ryukyus. The notion of Ryukyu in natural sciences deviates nonnegligibly from that of humanities. In humanities, the label Ryukyuan is used as a conventional umbrella term for an ethnolinguistic supergroup who occupies the Amami, Okinawa, Miyako, and Yaeyama Islands. In other words, the Ōsumi and Tokara Islands are by no means Ryukyuan because ethnolinguistically speaking, they clearly belong to Southern Kyushu. To further complicate matters, the Central Ryukyus do not exactly match the Amami and Okinawa Islands because they are extended further north to cover the two inhabited islands of Kodakarajima and Takarajima of the Tokara Islands. Natural scientists maintain tension with the Japanese government, according to which the Ryūkyū Shotō encompass the Okinawa Shotō, the Sakishimau Shotō, and the Senkaku Shotō. The three-way division of natural sciences is disharmonious with the two-way administrative division of Kagoshima and Okinawa Prefectures. People on the island chain rarely voice their opinions about academic activities as they are quite remote from the discourse and knowledge of daily life. When they come to interfere with daily activities, however, strong oppositions to the label Ryūkyū emerge. For example, the World Natural Heritage site of Amami-Ōshima Island, Tokunoshima Island, northern part of Okinawa Island, and Iriomote Island was initially given the name of Ryūkyū Shotō when a panel of natural science experts decided to add the patchy group of islands to the tentative list of nomination in 2013. However, the Amami Islands and Kagoshima Prefecture as a whole strongly opposed the label of Ryūkyū being imposed on them. As a result, the candidate site was renamed Amami–Ryukyu before it was renamed again to the current, more descriptive name in 2017. Ryūkyū as a tourism brand of Okinawa Prefecture in the Japanese market Ryūkyū has a deep connection to the mainland Japanese gaze. Ryūkyū'''s association with cannibalism had been long forgotten before the beginning of the Edo period. The image of Ryūkyū in mainland Japan was primarily shaped by Ryūkyū's missions to Edo, which were intentionally alienized by Satsuma to portray Satsuma Domain and the Tokugawa shogunate as multiethnic superpowers. For its phonetic similarity, Ryūkyū was associated with Ryūgū, the undersea dragon palace from fairy tales. A romanticized view of Ryūkyū can be found in Takizawa Bakin's historical fiction Chinsetsu Yumiharizuki (1807–1811), in which Minamoto no Tametomo drifted to Ryūkyū and founded a kingdom there. The un-Japanese (and in fact