The Amami Islands in southern Kagoshima Prefecture, originally part of the Ryukyu Kingdom, were taken by the Satsuma domain in the 1609 invasion. They became both a sugarcane economy (the brutal “kokuto jigoku” or “brown-sugar hell”) and a political exile site for Satsuma. Saigo Takamori spent two crucial periods of exile here: three years on Amami Oshima (1859-62), where he married Aikana and fathered children Kikujiro and Kikukusa, and two years on Okinoerabu (1862-64), where he was confined in an open-air cell saved only by the magistrate Tsuchimochi Seisho. The Confucian classics and works of Wang Yangming he read on Okinoerabu formed the philosophical basis for his later Meiji leadership. The islands’ culture today fuses Ryukyu, mainland Japanese, and exile-borne traditions in unique forms like shima-uta songs, the August Dance, and Oshima tsumugi silk.