First EMJNet Travel Award: Travis Selfman, UCSB

Photo above: Taken by Sachiko Iwaubuchi, on March 23, 2019, during the EMJNet meeting, in Sheraton Downtown Denver, Denver, CO.

Letf: Philip C. Brown, Ph.D., Professor of Japanese and East Asian History of Ohio State University.

Right: Travis Seifman, Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Seifman's recent article is available from the UC Repository.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/335659jg

Abstract: “Emulating the Central Flowering”: Confucian Civilizational Rhetoric and Practice in Lūchūan Embassies to Edo"

Rhetoric and practices from the Ming and Qing courts were fundamental to the ritual order of many courts throughout early modern East Asia. Furthermore, such rhetoric stipulated that these practices constituted the sole mode of correct practice for Confucian civilization. Emphasis on the importance of correct adherence to proper ritual practices in accordance with ritual propriety (C: lĭ, J: rei) and precedent, along with great concern over the need to (re)learn the correct practices from China, can be seen in numerous internal court documents from the Lūchū (J: Ryūkyū) Kingdom.

Consideration of diplomatic rituals performed in the 17^th to 19^th centuries by Lūchūan envoys to Edo and by their Japanese interlocutors reveals, however, a far more complex and diverse set of standard practices. In this paper, I examine costumes, music, and other visual, material, and performative aspects of those street processions and shogunal audiences. These events involved neither total reproductions of Ming or Qing ritual practices as the one and only model of civilization, nor wholesale accession by the Lūchūans to Tokugawa ceremonial practices, despite what might be expected given Lūchū’s subordinate position in the Tokugawa order. Rather, they incorporated a mixture of Ming, Qing, Lūchūan, and Japanese warrior (bushi) ritual practices. Much the same can be seen in Korean embassies to Edo, and in Korean, Lūchūan, and Vietnamese missions to Beijing, complicating visions of early modern East Asian ritual diplomacy as dominated by China, or of Confucian ritual propriety and civilization as taking only one correct form.