Above: 琉球中山王両使者登城行列 (Procession to the Shōgun's Castle by the Two Envoys from the King of Chūzan, Ryukyu)(detail), 1710, ink and colors on paper, handscroll.
University of Hawaiʻi Sakamaki-Hawley Collection.

Performing Lūchū: Identity Performance and Diplomatic Ritual in Early Modern East Asia

A book project based on my PhD dissertation, exploring the role of visual, material, spatial, and performative aspects of diplomatic ritual traditions in 17th-19th c. Lūchū-Tokugawa relations in constituting and regularly reaffirming (maintaining) cultural and political realities.

The Okinawan kingdom of Lūchū dispatched seventeen embassies to Edo (today, Tokyo), the seat of the Tokugawa shoguns of Japan, between 1644 and 1850. The kingdom, wholly distinct and independent prior to the early 17th century, its sovereignty granted and recognized by the Ming Empire, had been invaded in 1609 by forces belonging to the Shimazu house, lords of the samurai domain of Kagoshima (Satsuma) at the southern tip of the Japanese main islands. The Shimazu did not topple the kingdom nor annex the whole of its territory (see note 1 below), but rather allowed the royal court to continue to govern and administer the islands, to maintain its tributary/investiture relations with the Ming (and later Qing) Empire, and to continue its own distinctive cultural practices and traditions. However, in addition to extracting heavy taxes/tribute from the kingdom and imposing restrictions and oversight on the kingdom’s foreign relations, the Shimazu also obliged the court to send regular embassies (several each year) to Kagoshima, as well as to send (far less frequently) embassies to Edo to congratulate each new Shogun on ascending to that position, and to express gratitude to the shogun for recognizing each new king who ascended to the Lūchūan throne.

These Edo embassies, typically consisting of roughly 70 to 170 Lūchūan scholar-officials, led by a Lūchūan royal prince, and accompanied by some 3000 warriors, guards, porters and the like associated with the samurai domain of Kagoshima (Satsuma) and/or the Tokugawa shogunate, made their way to Edo over sea and land to enact traditional ritual diplomatic interactions with the reigning shogun. Along the journey, they performed colorful processions in the streets and waterways of locations through which they passed, displaying to Japanese onlookers Lūchūan court costume, royal regalia, processional music, and other aspects of Lūchūan royal processional ritual, demonstrating to onlookers the cultivation and refinement of Lūchūan court culture (i.e. that they were not lowly, uncivilized, “barbarians”) and their foreignness (i.e. their distinctness from Kagoshima or Japan, and hence their independence and sovereignty); through careful and correct observance of proper ritual practice, the Lūchūans likely also hoped to demonstrate their high morality and civilization, forging or maintaining their kingdom’s reputation as a “Land of Propriety” (守禮之邦, Okinawan: Shurii nu kuni). And yet, at the same time, such processions served as an opportunity for the Shimazu to display the Lūchūans as under or amongst their banners, a part of their house, the only samurai house to claim such a relationship with a foreign kingdom and the only one to serve the Tokugawa in such a special way by bringing representatives of a foreign kingdom to pay obeisances and gifts (“tribute”) to the shogun (see note 2). Many observers, of course, also saw these processions of foreign embassies on their way to Edo as a sign of the power and virtue of the Tokugawa shoguns, that they should be able to inspire even foreign kingdoms to send embassies to pay respects and offer gifts to them.

Once in Edo, members of each embassy participated in three ceremonial audiences in the Grand Audience Hall (大広間, О̄hiroma) of Edo castle. The royal prince who served as lead envoy was formally received in audience by the shogun, kowtowing before him and presenting him (indirectly) with a formal letter from his king and a series of gifts. In the second ceremony, members of the embassy performed Lūchūan court music before the shogun and his men - including uzagaku 御座楽 (a form of court music closely emulating Ming & Qing musical traditions) and one piece from the uta-sanshin 歌三線 genre more widely known today as “classical Okinawan music.” Finally, in a third audience, the shogun (or high-ranking officials acting on his behalf) presented the members of the embassy with gifts in return, and a formal letter to the king.

It was in these rituals, and not in diplomatic negotiations, written policy agreements, or political maneuverings, that the traditional relationship between the Lūchūan royal court and the Shimazu and Tokugawa houses was constituted and maintained, being ritually reaffirmed on the occasion of each embassy (as well as through other ritual interactions). The content and forms of these rituals, though they did shift and develop somewhat over the period, were less determined by political considerations of the moment than by previously established protocol and precedents. Hardly something determined in isolation as a lone case of inventing new traditions, the forms and practices of Lūchū-Shimazu-Tokugawa ritual diplomacy were firmly embedded into broader traditions of Ming/Qing and Lūchūan court customs, and of samurai norms of behavior developing out of pre-1600 precursors and precedents.

My PhD dissertation, “Performing “Lūchū”: Identity Performance and Foreign Relations in Early Modern Japan,” examines these ritual interactions with a particular focus on:
(1) the ritualized ways that the Lūchūan embassies were received at port towns and post-stations along their journeys to and from Edo, and what this illuminates about the status into which they were ritually inscribed, and about the role of tradition and propriety in determining the form of such rituals;
(2) the processions performed by the Lūchūan embassies on the roads and waterways of early modern Japan, and the role of visual, sonic, material, and spatial aspects of procession as a particular form of ritual performance in creating, displaying, effecting, maintaining, particular cultural and political discourses and realities; and
(3) the audience ceremonies at Edo castle in which members of the embassies participated, and the function of visual, sonic, material, spatial, and other performative aspects of these ceremonies in contributing to the shaping and maintenance of the character of the Lūchū-Shimazu-Tokugawa relationship, with a particular focus on how the position into which the Lūchūan king or kingdom - via his envoys - was ritually inscribed within (or relative to) samurai hierarchies compares with that of others.

Sources

This project draws upon visual, material, and textual sources from both Japan and Lūchū, written in a variety of formats (both handwritten and printed), including classical Japanese grammar (文語体); Japanese, Lūchūan, and Chinese forms of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese, or kanbun 漢文); and the early modern Japanese epistolary form known as sо̄rо̄bun 候文.

Textual sources include official Shimazu, Tokugawa, and Lūchūan court records; diaries of Lūchūan and Japanese officials and of Japanese intellectuals, travelers, and others (as well as Dutch and Korean officials’ diaries in English and Japanese translation); and records by local officials and inn proprietors in post-stations and port towns visited by the embassies; among others. Many of these records have been published in modern Japanese type; others are available only in kuzushiji manuscript, accessible digitally, in print, microfilm, or only in archival manuscript copies.

Visual sources include a number of handscroll paintings depicting Lūchūan embassy processions across a number of the individual embassies, as well as paintings, woodblock-printed books, and hand-colored manuscript books depicting processions; costumes, banners, musical instruments, and other accoutrements; and preparations in cities and towns along the journey. I am grateful to curators, librarians, and archivists at museums, libraries, and archives in Tokyo, Kagoshima, and elsewhere in mainland Japan, as well as in Okinawa, New York, London, and Honolulu for granting me access to these rare materials.

Other materials consulted include historical objects such as Chinese musical instruments held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Lūchūan uzagaku musical instruments held at Shurijo Castle Park in Okinawa, an ornamental lacquerware dragon-halberd (龍刀) held at the Urasoe Museum of Art in Okinawa, and banners, sedan chairs, and other ritual accoutrements held at the National Museum of Korea and National Palace Museum of Korea in Seoul, which provide useful insights into the size, scale, and material character otherwise of such objects beyond what can be understood from their depiction on a page .

I am thankful to the Japan Foundation for their extensive and generous support during my year of dissertation research in Japan, and was fortunate during that period of being based at the University of the Ryukyus and at the University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute to also visit a number of smaller port towns and post-stations along the embassies’ journeys, including Futagawa (Toyohashi, Aichi prefecture), Tomonoura (Fukuyama, Hiroshima pref.), and Mitarai (Kure, Hiroshima pref.), as well as larger cities such as Kagoshima and Nagoya. This allowed me to gain a sense in person of the main streets, inns, temples, and spatial and cultural character of the locations otherwise (albeit with the knowledge that much has certainly changed in the intervening centuries), as well as to visit local history museums and to obtain museum catalogs, local history publications, and other such materials which might be otherwise rather difficult to obtain (or even know about). I look forward to continuing to visit additional such sites in future, extending my ability to inject local perspectives into my work as well as gaining new insights not otherwise found in the documents.

Moving Forward

I am currently in the process of revising the dissertation into a book manuscript, with an eye towards eventual publication as a scholarly monograph, while also conducting further research into various aspects of these events as well as
*their antecedents in late 16th and early 17th century embassies and the later comparative example of an 1872 Lūchū Kingdom embassy to Imperial Tokyo;
*scholarship on diplomatic ritual, gift exchange, and procession; and
*scholarship on Okinawan visual, material, and performing arts, as well as other subjects
in order to shore up and strengthen the arguments I present and the story I tell in the future monograph volume.

(1) The Amami Islands and others to the north of Okinawa Island were brought under the direct administration of Kagoshima after 1609, while remaining nominally part of the kingdom’s territory. The Amamis have a fascinating history of their own, becoming subject to oppressive structures of intensive sugar production that are more comparable to colonialist practices and patterns elsewhere in the world than almost any other circumstance in early modern Japan (outside of Hokkaido, perhaps). Due to their location, their lengthy period of more direct control by Kagoshima, and their far shorter period of Allied Occupation after World War II, the Amamis are today more thoroughly Japanized than the remainder of the Ryukyu Islands; as a result, along with the other Ryukyu Islands, and places like Tsushima, Hokkaido, and the Ogasawara Islands, consideration of the Amamis provides an opportunity for raising interesting questions about the contours, borders, and character of “Japanese culture” or “Japaneseness.”

(2) The Sо̄ house, lords of Tsushima domain, escorted Korean embassies to Edo in a somewhat similar fashion. However, in their case the political relationship might be described as the reverse: the lords of Tsushima were considered vassals by the kings of the Korean kingdom of Joseon (Chosŏn), not lords over them.