Kabayama Hisataka

was a samurai retainer, "karō" (senior advisor), and senior deputy commander in the service of the Shimazu clan in the early Edo period. Hisataka was born into the fifth generation of the Shimazu family line, adopting 'Kabayama' as his surname in respect to the birch (樺, "kaba")-covered mountaintop (山, "yama") upon which his castle domain had been constructed.

Upon the orders of clan head Shimazu Tadatsune, with the permission of Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hisataka set forth from Kagoshima harbor with over 100 ships carrying roughly 3,000 soldiers in March 1609 [Kerr, George H. (2000). Okinawa: the History of an Island People. (revised ed.) Boston: Tuttle Publishing. p158.] . He was intent on militarily chastising the Ryukyu Islands for their perceived consistent gestures of defiance. Successful in the Invasion of Ryukyu, having faced little serious opposition, Hisataka received the command of governing the Ryukyu Islands, along with his deputy Honda Chikamasa, on Tadatsune's behalf. Hisataka is also known in some historical records as 呉済 'Gozai', a Chinese approximation of the Japanese pronunciation of 権左 'Gonza'. [The JKD Family: History of the Kabayama Bukei] [Smits, Gregory (1999): 'Visions of Ryukyu: Identity and Ideology in Early-Modern Thought and Politics'] .

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