“State Letter” (Kokusho) Diplomacy: Japanese Foreign Relations with East/Southeast Asia and Iberian States, 15th-17th Centuries

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel uses “state letters” (kokusho) dispatched to and from Japan as lenses to reconsider three centuries of Japanese and by implication East and Southeast Asian foreign relations. Around the China Seas, letters exchanged between heads of state via envoys were the basis of diplomacy, in lieu of credentials introducing and empowering envoys themselves.
A panel of Japanese and Western scholars will demonstrate how examining “state letters”—and the merchants, missionaries, lords, and state leaders connected to them—offers fresh insights into a formative period in intra-Asian as well as East Asian-Iberian relations. Hashimoto Yu will examine letters from Ashikaga shoguns to Korea, correspondences often counterfeited by an intermediary lord. Shimizu Yuko will explore a merchant who bore and manipulated correspondence from Toyotomi Hideyoshi to the Spanish governor-general in the Philippines. Joshua Batts will outline the confusion and intrigue around a letter carried from Japan to New Spain by a Spanish missionary. Hasuda Takashi will discuss state letters to Japan drafted by traders in Tonkin and Cochinchina.
Through these multilateral examinations, the panel will propose a framework of “state letter” diplomacy as a new means to consider Japanese, East Asian, and Southeast Asian foreign relations as well as explore how newly arrived Iberians were incorporated into existing diplomatic practices. Overall the panel proposes considering the Chinese tributary system as a special variant of “state letter” diplomacy closely combined with immigration control. It will also discuss aspects of state formation during the transition from the medieval to the early modern world.

Area of Study

• Japan

Session Organizer

• Fuyuko Matsukata, University of Tokyo

Chair

• Robert Hellyer, Wake Forest University

Individual Presentations

• Is the State Letter Authentic? Envoys from the Muromachi Shogunate to the Chosŏn Dynasty in the Fifteenth Century - Yu Hashimoto, Hokkaido University

• The Letters of Toyotomi Hideyoshi to the Spanish Governor-General in the Philippines - Yuko Shimizu, Meijigakuin University

• The Emperor, The Prince, The King and I - Joshua Batts, Columbia University

• Diplomacy without Embassies: Relations between Vietnam and Japan in the Seventeenth Century - Takashi Hasuda, Niigata University

Discussant

• Peter D. Shapinsky, University of Illinois, Springfield