“Early Modern Ryukyu between China and Japan: Repatriating Castaways from China, Korea, and “Unidentified Places”,”

The Journal of Historical Studies (Rekishigaku Kenkyu) 810,2006

[Abstract]

The most significant feature of early modern Ryukyu (1609-1879) is that it was brought within the political orbit of Tokugawa Japan, while at the same time maintaining tributary relations with China that had been in place since the fourteenth century.  How China and Japan, the two dominant regional powers, managed their overlapping claims and the discord that sometimes arose between them, remains a significant question for the historiography of maritime East Asia, as well as of the state actors in the region-China, Japan, Korea, and Ryukyu.  In this paper, I examine this problem by focusing on the rules and procedures for the handling of foreign castaways from China, Korea, and “unidentified places" imposed on Ryukyu by both China and Japan.  (The records are vague as to where these “unidentified places" might have been, but seem to use the term to indicate people from the region of Southeast Asia.)

I will show that from the beginning of the sixteenth century Ryukyu, Ming, and Korea used their tributary networks, which converged in Ming China, to repatriate castaways among them.  After the invasion of Ryukyu by Satsuma in 1609, however, Japan forced Ryukyu to change its procedures for castaways, requiring that Korean and Chinese castaways be repatriated through the office of the Tokugawa bakufu's Nagasaki magistrate, in conformity with the procedures for foreign castaways in Japan proper.  However, with the establishment of the Qing state (1644), the repeal of China's maritime restrictions in 1684, and the promulgation of new Qing edicts for the protection and repatriation of castaways, Ryukyu reverted to pre-1609 procedures of direct repatriation.  At the same time, behind the scenes the Tokugawa authorities gradually strengthened their controls over Ryukyu's handling of foreign castaways, particularly the prohibitions on Christianity and on unauthorized foreign trade.  Ryukyu, moreover, worked to conceal its relationship with Japan from the Qing authorities, out of concern that it might be suspected of collaboration with the Japanese.

My analysis demonstrates aspects of Ryukyu's “dual attachment" to both Chinese and Japanese claims of suzerainty.  I show that the changes in routes and procedures for repatriating castaways, which previous scholarship has tended to read as evidence of autonomous Ryukyuan action, are in fact the result of differences in the implementation of Qing and Japanese systems of control over Ryukyu.  These differences occur against a background of a hierarchy of Chinese and Japanese claims to the ordering of international space in East Asia; the dominant, a ^Chinese world order" whose existence was widely accepted in the region, on the one hand, and Japanese ideological assertions of an imagined Japanese world order (Nihon-gata ka'i kannen) that was recognized only in Japan.  I conclude that Ryukyu organized its relationship with Japan in to maintain this system of dual suzerainty, simultaneously subject to oversight by both China and Japan.

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