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Kangi confirmed that To-te Sakugawa was indeed a scholar who studied diligently in China. He also believed that he was a teacher of kokugaku (ancient Japanese language, thought, and culture). It is said that Sakugawa lived beyond eighty years, which would, based on Kangi’s information, place his death somewhere around 1862, during the reign of Shotai-O.

Comparing oral tradition with the testimony of Kangi, and the old man from Shuri’s Ishimine District, it would appear that they are similar. Killed in the Philippines during the Second World War, Sakugawa Kangi was the fifth-generation descendent of To-te Sakugawa. He was survived by his younger sister, Sakugawa Sada (born 1914), who (at the time of this writing) resided in Shuri.

Like many Okinawans, Sada is a spiritual person who keeps the family tablets from the Buddhist mausoleum in her home. I visited her at her home on September 1, 1985 to study the commentary of the back of the tablet of To-te Sakugawa, and was permitted to take a photograph. At that time I learned that the original tablets were, like so many other valuable objects, destroyed during the war, and that those were replicas. The only information which appeared on the new tablets was secular names.