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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Tokugawa's use of paintings of warrior chronicles in international diplomacy, with focus on The Tale of the Heike. It reveals what messages the Tokugawa sought to send to foreign audiences through the paintings, and thereby sheds new light on their understanding of the tale.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the Tokugawa bakufu’s use of paintings of warrior chronicles in international diplomacy, with focus on paintings of The Tale of the Heike. It was conventional for the Tokugawa government to present paintings that depicted scenes from medieval warrior chronicles to foreign monarchs as diplomatic gifts. For instance, inventories of official gifts from the Tokugawa shoguns to Korean kings often list Heike folding screens. Similarly, the gifts from the shogun Tokugawa Iesada to King Willem III of the Netherlands in 1856 included screens of battle scenes from several warrior chronicles. Many of these works, some of which are extant, have been studied in previous scholarship, but there are more dimensions to these works that would help us better understand the multifaceted roles that the Tokugawa expected them to play in the diplomatic relationships between Japan and other countries. For instance, the imperial and warrior governments before the Tokugawa did not include paintings of warriors and battles in their official gifts, and it remains to be investigated why the Tokugawa added this genre to their official gifts. I will also analyse what scenes from warrior chronicles the Tokugawa selected for depiction and how they had these scenes rendered in the gift paintings, by investigating these paintings as well as historical documents pertaining to them. I aim to thereby figure out what messages the Tokugawa shoguns sought to convey to foreign audiences through the gift paintings. My investigation spans the wide range of gift paintings and other items that Japanese leaders presented to their counterparts in several countries (e.g. China, Korea, the Netherlands, Britain, France, and the United States) throughout the premodern periods. This investigation will reveal a subtle variation in the Tokugawa’s use of warrior paintings in different contexts, and my interpretation of this subtlety against the background of international diplomacy will in turn shed new light on the Tokugawa’s understanding of warrior chronicles, and The Tale of the Heike in particular.