一八六〇年代における德川幕府による琉球の位置附け --幕府がイギリス政府に提出した「返書」と報吿書を中心に--

Abstract

It is no secret that during the 1867 Paris International Exposition, the Satsuma mission asserted that the Satsuma daimyo was the king of the Ryukyu Kingdom, and effectively declared to the Western world that their domain was independent of Edo. While existing scholarship agrees that Satsuma's policy in this area was of deep concern to the shogunate, no studies have clarified Edo's response. However, according to British and Japanese diplomatic papers, the bakufu responded by sending the magistrate for foreign affairs, Kurimoto Aki-no-kami, to Paris, armed with a collection of documents to be translated into English and French to be submitted to the relevant European governments. In these documents, the bakufu pointed out that the shogun was the sole sovereign of Japan and that the lord of Satsuma was one of his retainers. In addition, the shogunate asserted that the Ryukyu Kingdom, while maintaining tributary relations with China, was firmly subordinate to Japan (the bakufu) as a dominion of Satsuma. The bakufu, however, also stressed the fact that because the Ryukyus had its own king, the Satsuma daimyo could not claim to be the Ryukyuan king. In these documents, the Edo leaders repeatedly refer to the Ryukyuan missions to Edo to demonstrate the subordinate status of the Ryukyus to Japan, as well as the hierarchical relationship between the shogun and the Ryukyuan king. This episode marks the first occasion in which the shogunate submitted documents on Ryukyuan-Japanese-Chinese relations to the Western powers on its own initiative. In conclusion, while the Ryukyu shobun refers to the process through which the Meiji government annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom between 1872 and 1879, a complete understanding of this event demands recognition of its antecedents in the Bakumatsu era. While most scholars date Japan's annexation of Ryukyu from 1872 and view it as a process involving mainly Japan, the Ryukyus, and China, I argue that the Ryukyu shobun should be investigated within a larger timeframe and from a global perspective.