Ryukyuan missions to Edo

The 1710 mission was one of the largest; in this scroll a Japanese printer depicts Ryukyuan guards and a music band escorting the envoy and his officials through Edo.

Over the course of Japan's Edo period, the Ryūkyū Kingdom sent eighteen[1] missions to Edo (琉球江戸上り, ryūkyū edo nobori, "lit. 'the going up of Ryūkyū to Edo'), the capital of Tokugawa Japan. The unique pattern of these diplomatic exchanges evolved from models established by the Chinese, but without denoting any predetermined relationship to China or to the Chinese world order.[2] The Kingdom became a vassal to the Japanese feudal domain (han) of Satsuma following Satsuma's 1609 invasion of Ryūkyū, and as such were expected to pay tribute to the shogunate; the missions also served as a great source of prestige for Satsuma, the only han to claim any foreign polity, let alone a kingdom, as its vassal.[3]

  1. ^ Nineteen, if the 1609–11 journey of King Shō Nei and his advisors to Sunpu as prisoners of war following the 1609 invasion of Ryukyu is counted.
  2. ^ Toby, Ronald P. (1991). State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu, p. 87., p. 87, at Google Books
  3. ^ Walker, Brett L (Fall 2002), "Foreign Affairs and Frontiers in Early Modern Japan: A Historiographical Essay", Early Modern Japan (PDF), pp. 50–51.