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- Convenors:
-
Aaron Moore
(University of Edinburgh)
Noémi Godefroy (Inalco)
Travis Seifman (University of Tokyo)
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- Chair:
-
Travis Seifman
(University of Tokyo)
- Section:
- History
- Sessions:
- Thursday 26 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 26 August, 2021, -Chui-Joe Tham (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
The Ming-Qing dynastic transition in China captured the imagination of literati in East Asia. This paper will explore the changing landscape of historiography in Japan through an examination of how early Edo literati received, adapted, and wrote new histories of the dynastic conflict.
Paper long abstract:
The Ming-Qing transition (1618-1683), a dynastic upheaval that not only consumed much of China, but also saw the Qing invasion of Joseon Korea and an influx of refugees into Tokugawa Japan, was memorialised by writers across the region. Unofficial histories written by Ming subjects made their way to Korea and to Japan, and were either adapted for domestic audiences (a process known as kunten kundoku in Japan), or were used as the basis for new unofficial histories of the dynastic transition. Scholars have examined how news and information travelled about the struggle between the Ming and Qing dynasties to East Asia, and the impact of the eventual Qing conquest on Japanese and Korean conceptions of a Sinocentric world order. Recent work has even examined the role of late Ming historical writing in these changing worldviews.
In this paper, I will build upon preceding scholarship and my own analysis of the circulation, adaptation, and writing of unofficial history in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Japan in order to argue that there was a shift in historiographical thinking in the early Edo period. Imported histories about the Ming-Qing transition, as well as histories of the dynastic upheaval written by Japanese literati for a domestic audience, show that there was a greater interest in contemporaneity in historical writing, such that news or information about recent affairs began to be disseminated widely in an historical mode. In this way, contemporary events were considered within the larger temporal framework of history and memory, and in the case of the Ming-Qing transition, a larger geographical framework that considered the history of the mainland within the context of Japan’s own recent and distant past. At a time when Tokugawa intellectuals were beginning to delve into kōgaku or the examination of classical texts, and Tokugawa society was starting to be inundated by diverse new modes of knowledge production including maps, travel writing, and instruction manuals for everyday life, an exploration of historical writing about the Ming-Qing transition will provide insight into the transnational context of news, history, and memory in early modern Japan.
Travis Seifman (University of Tokyo)
Paper short abstract:
I examine formal audience ceremonies held in Edo castle to show how the kings of Ryūkyū (via envoys as proxies) were ritually incorporated into the Tokugawa order not solely or primarily as rulers of a foreign "tributary" kingdom, but rather in a manner which reaffirmed them as akin to buke vassals.
Paper long abstract:
Envoys from the Kingdom of Ryūkyū traveled to Edo for audiences with the Tokugawa shoguns seventeen times in the 17th-19th centuries. The shogunate's rhetoric regarding its relations with Ryūkyū and Joseon Korea invoked Ming/Qing political and cosmological discourses of the ruler as the center and source of civilization, to whom even foreign courts pay tribute. An examination of the audience rituals performed at Edo castle, however, reveals little effort to replicate the tributary rituals of the Ming or Qing courts. To the contrary, consideration of the scheduling of these audiences, their location, and the gifts exchanged suggests that the Tokugawa employed ritual practices and ideas well-established within buke hierarchies to incorporate the kings of Ryūkyū (through their envoys as proxies) into a shogun-centered order that was distinctively Japanese and decidedly buke in character. Where the Ming & Qing emperors, in various ways, incorporated tributary envoys, their own court officials, and others into a single all-encompassing entity known as "All Under Heaven," the shoguns did as samurai elites had for centuries, receiving each group of vassals, envoys, or other elite guests in separate spaces, at separate times, each in accordance with their rank, status, and/or relation to the Tokugawa house. Further, while Ryukyuan envoys wore Ming-style robes and kowtowed before the shogun as their counterparts on tributary embassies to Beijing did before the Ming/Qing emperors, they presented to the shoguns not the raw commodities typical of tribute - e.g. tin, copper, and sulfur - but rather gifts akin to those which samurai regularly presented to their lords, including horses, textiles, liquor, and most importantly swords: items of particular importance in a warrior hierarchy. In return, they received silver coins and seasonal clothing, just as samurai vassals did, the shogun performing his magnanimity, and his benevolence by clothing those under his protection.
Political rhetoric tells part of the story, but it was in the performance of diplomatic ritual that political realities were actually enacted; to understand the character of the relationship between the kings of Ryūkyū and the Tokugawa house, we must look at the rituals themselves.