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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2022
This study examines the practice of ‘alternate attendance’ (sankin kōtai), in which the daimyo lords of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) marched with their retainers between their home territories and the shogunal capital of Edo, roughly once a year. Research on alternate attendance has focused on the meaning of daimyo processions outside their domains (han), along Japan's highways and in the city of Edo. Here I argue that, even as daimyo embarked upon a journey to pay obeisance to the shogun, the ambiguous nature of sovereignty in early modern Japan meant that alternate attendance could also be used for a local agenda, ritually stamping the daimyo's territory with signs of his dominance, much like what has been highlighted in the study of royal processions in world history. I focus on the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, providing a case study of visits made by the Shimazu family, lords of Satsuma domain, to a village of Korean potters within their territory, whose antecedents had been brought as captives during the Imjin War of 1592–8. During daimyo visits, a relationship of mutual benefit and fealty between the Shimazu and the villagers was articulated through gift-giving, banqueting, dance and displays of local wares. This in turn was used to consolidate Shimazu power in their region.
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31 Vaporis, Tour of Duty, 63.
32 The times and dates of Shimazu travel, as well as the routes taken, are recorded in official han documents reprinted in Kyūki zatsuroku tsuiroku, ed. Kagoshima-ken Ishin Shiryō Hensanjo (8 vols., Kagoshima-ken, 1971–8). See also Takafumi, Ueno, Satsuma han no sankin kōtai: Edo made nan'nichi kakatta ka (Kagoshima, 2019)Google Scholar.
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48 Ibid., 113.
49 The term ‘Korean’ is used as a convenient shorthand in this article, for the modern nation state did not exist at this time. In the Japanese sources used in this article, the most common adjective used to describe the origins of the villagers and their identity is ‘Chōsen’ (i.e. Choso˘n, the name of the dynasty that ruled the peninsula from 1392 until 1897).
50 Watanabe Yoshirō, ‘Naze Satsumahan wa Naeshirogawa ni Chōsen fūzoku o nokoshita no ka’, Kadai shigaku, 52 (2005), 9–18; Naito, Bunroku keichōeki ni okeru hirōnin no kenkū, 224–55.
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52 Haraguchi Torao and Robert Sakai, The Status System and Social Organization of Satsuma: A Translation of the Shūmon tefuda aratame jōmoku (Tokyo, 1975), 22–7.
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55 Sennen Chōsen yori meshiwatasare tomechō, 111.
56 Ibid., 125.
57 Ibid., 111.
58 Cho˘ng Kwang, Satsuma Naeshirogawa no Chōsen kayō (privately published, 1990), 95–128. Kanme is usually pronounced ‘kanmai’ in standard modern Japanese.
59 Cho˘ng, Satsuma Naeshirogawa no Chōsen kayō, 102.
60 Watanabe Miki, ‘Sappan shōke hyakuzu ni yoru Minami Kyūshū seikatsu ebiki’, in Nihon kinsei seikatsu ebiki, Minami Kyūshū hen, ed. Nihon Kinsei Seikatsu Ebiki Minamikyūshūhen Hensan Kyōdō Kenkūhan (Kanagawa, 2018), 149–56.
61 Sennen Chōsen yori meshiwatasare tomechō, 112.
62 Ibid., 112.
63 Ibid.
64 ‘Bronze’ and ‘silver coins’ were usually alloys. Japanese money, measures and weights were not standardised during the seventeenth century, and varied between domains. Due to the destruction of official documents in the nineteenth century, little is known of Satsuma's currency history. Here I offer approximate measures based on what is known of currency in other parts of Japan:
1 kan (= 1 kanmon = 1 kanme) = 1,000 mon (or monme) = 3.75 kg
1 mon(me) = 1 sen = 3.75 g
1 kin = 0.16 kan = 160 mon(me) = 16 ryō = 600 g
1 hiki = 10 mon(me)
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66 Martha Chaiklin, ‘Introduction’, in Chailkin, Mediated by Gifts, 1–23, at 6; Katherine Rupp, Gift-Giving in Japan: Cash, Connections, Cosmologies (Stanford, 2003).
67 Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques’, L'Année Sociologique 1923–4 (1), 30–186, at 33.
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71 Haraguchi and Sakai, The Status System and Social Organization of Satsuma, 28.
72 Daimyo heirs were hostages raised in Edo, and did not officially travel to their domains until they inherited them.
73 Hanpōshū 8, Kagoshimahan shita, ed. Hanpō, 93.
74 Yamada Tamemasa, Ansei gannen Shimazu Nariakira sanpu otomo nikki (1854), in Kagoshima Kenshi Nariakira-kō shiryō 4, ed. Kagoshimaken Ishinshiryō Hensanjo (Kagoshima, 1984), 902.
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95 Murai Shōsuke, ‘Post-war Domain Source Material on Hideyoshi's Invasion of Korea: The Wartime Memoirs of Shimazu Soldiers’, in The East Asian War, 1592–1598 (2015), 109–19.
96 Geertz, Local Knowledge, 125.
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