The Ryukyu shrink from the bearers of European enlightenment as from the plague. They must be made to need it, however, since, as a European, Goncharov considers it a natural and universal stage of human civilization. He relegates considerable evidence of Ryukyuan material prosperity and moral advancement—both of which cast in unflattering relief quite big sections of nineteenthcentury Europe— to the mundane, material end of the spectrum. Its opposite end is a “spiritual” realm, into which the Ryukyuans have apparently not strayed, but which they must be helped along to reach, for the sake of the proper unfolding of Eurocentric conceptions of human history. And so, even a paradise may use improvement after all.