Spotlight: Ryukyu Edo Nobori Emaki

It’s been nearly a week since I’ve updated. I’ve grown lax. But in the meantime, I’ve reached new heights of daily hits (though still no comments). Thank you, everyone, for your support!

I changed my banner image some days ago to a section of a Ryûkyû Edo Nobori scroll housed in the British Museum. The scroll was on display two years ago, when I was in London attending SOAS; the British Museum’s Japanese gallery had just been reopened after a renovation, with a fantastic exhibit describing Japan’s history (not just art history, but political/economic/cultural/social history) through art. This is precisely the sort of thing I should like to do should I hyopthetically ever become a curator.

This scroll is one of a great number of representations of the tribute missions made by representatives of the Ryukyu Kingdom (Okinawa) to the shogun’s capital at Edo. The kingdom was a semi-independent vassal to Satsuma han for most of the Edo period, and representatives from the kingdom journeyed to Edo eighteen times over the course of the period, to pay their respects to the shogunate on behalf of the kingdom. These missions were a great source of glory for the Shimazu clan lords of Satsuma, the only daimyo to have a foreign kingdom as its vassal (in fact, when the Ryukyuan king was brought to Japan in 1609-11 as a prisoner of war following Satsuma’s invasion of Ryukyu, it was the first time a foreign king had come to Japan), and extensive efforts were made to emphasize the foreignness and exoticness of the kingdom. The passing of the Ryukyu missions, a very rare glimpse of the outside world for the majority of the Japanese people, was thus a very special, rare, vibrant and colorful cultural affair; everything from the costumes of the representatives to their language, dances and song, and the accents on their palanquins, horses, etc. was exotic, exciting, and new. Ryukyu seems to have captured the interest and imagination of a wide range of people, not only commoners and peasants, but also scholars and government officials such as Arai Hakuseki, and artists, who captured the events in paintings and woodblock prints. Official record paintings such as this one were also created by painters officially in the service of the shogunate.

Let’s look at the work itself. Its official description on the British Museum website indicates that this pair of handscroll paintings by Kanô Shunko 狩野春湖 (d. 1726) represent the 1710 mission, the largest in the history of the practice (168 Ryukyuans accompanied roughly 1000 representatives of Satsuma on the domain’s sankin kôtai journey to Edo). It is in amazing condition for an object so old, practically perfect on at least the sections I saw, the colors as vivid and bright as if they were painted yesterday; the paper is covered in gold foil on the reverse side, giving some indication of the high class, formal shogunate Kanô school origin of the work.

I unfortunately can only make out on inscription on the two detail images I have; the man in red being carried in a palanquin on the first detail is identified as the vice envoy, ueekata of Yoza (副使　与座親方, fukushi yoza ueekata). “Ueekata”, the Okinawan reading of the characters normally pronounced “oyakata” in Japanese, being one of the ranks of nobility in the Ryukyu Kingdom, and Yoza a placename, the area in which or over which this man was the “ueekata”.

I wish I could make out the inscriptions identifying the figures on the other, longer, detail. Though the red color and style of the roof of the palanquin, which suggests perhaps more Chinese-influenced style than what might be seen in Japan, makes me think the man being carried might be the Ryukyuan chief envoy, perhaps even a royal prince, the men all around him are easily identified as Japanese, not Okinawan, by their clothing. Laborers in dark blue carry the palanquin, samurai in light blue, brown, and black accompanying them. Behind them are men in orange costume of a distinctively different, non-Japanese style. Though I cannot read these inscriptions, I can make out at least the character 刀, read “katana” or “tô” and indicating a blade of some sort; I therefore imagine that these inscriptions refer to the weapons carried, not to the carriers. In any case, it is those orange robes and hats, along with the Ryukyuan’s facial features, perhaps skin tone, and certainly their language, songs, and dances, which would have seemed marvelously foreign, exotic, and exciting to Japanese who caught a glimpse of the mission as it journeyed overland from Osaka (?, perhaps somewhere else on the Inland Sea coast) to Edo along the major highways of the nation.