The Visualization of Korean Embassies to Japan and Their Impact in Early Edo Japan

Abstract

This article focuses on the visualization of Korean embassies to Japan (Chosŏn tongsinsa in Korean, Chōsen tsūshinshi in Japanese) in the Edo period and seeks to understand the processes of such within a larger sociopolitical network. Images of Korean embassies to Japan, or Korean official diplomatic delegations sent to Japan in the late Chosŏn period, were produced in various forms in Edo Japan. Among them, this study focuses on artworks from the seventeenth century when the images began to emerge. In order to explore the general tendencies of the images production and reception, this study pays particular attention to three types of paintings—panoramic cityscapes (toshi-zu), illustrated handscrolls of legends (engi emaki), and Korean embassy reception paintings (tsūshinshi kantai-zu). In the first half of the seventeenth century, Korean embassy processions were visualized in a diverse array of media to embody the will of the Tokugawa Shogunate and display the regimes great power and authority. While the elite members of the bureaucratic and military classes perceived and comprehended the images as the shogunate had intended, the majority of the general public, however, received them as representative of an alien parade or a festivity. In this regard, the study broadens its scope to temporary exhibition of Buddhist temple objects (kaichō) and community festivals (matsuri) in order to examine how the images transformed and proliferated through the two channels and considers the diverse context within which Korean embassies were visualized. To aid in its analysis this study refers to Alfred Gells anthropological theory of art and agency. This is to move beyond the linear understanding of an artwork as the final product of a patron or an artist that encodes the producers intent and shed light on how various agents interact with and influence one another throughout the entire process of production, circulation, and reception. Through this perspective, this study finds that in the visualization of Korean embassies, the agency of the resulting images—reflecting clear intentions and goals of their producers or patrons, or the first agents—went through secondary and tertiary transformations of interpretation that occurred in completely new ways in accordance with the recipients class, background, and interests. The application of such methodology also allows a challenge to be made toward the previous approaches that qualified Korean embassy images solely as illustrated records, or understood the works only in terms of an artistic exchange between the two countries or their impact on the respective art communities. Instead, this study enables the possibility of broadening the research scope to include various forms of popular culture that have been overlooked in previous studies.