近世 일본의 天皇과 「西洋」

Emperor and the West in Early Modern Japan

Since their first encounter with the Japanese in the middle of the sixteenth century Westerners tried very hard to figure out who the Japanese emperor was. Few contemporary Japanese paid attention to the emperor or the imperial institution. As a result the emperor was rarely mentioned in contemporary Japanese documents. The emperor, however, attracted the attention of the Jesuit missionaries who were looking for the ultimate protector of their Christian mission in Japan. They made serious efforts to approach the emperor and these efforts could be chronicled in their documents. What is very important in Westerners’ understanding of the Japanese emperor is that they came to realize that the position and role of the emperor changed historically. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries watched the emperor maneuvering in the midst of power struggle between shogun, unifiers and powerful daimyo. In the late nineteenth century Western diplomats were able to see the emergence of the emperor as a key player in the Japanese politics. They tried to understand how the imperial institution was able to persist even after it stopped functioning as a secular power. They found a very useful framework in explaining the coexistence between the emperor and the shogun in their own history. The Japanese emperor could be compared to the Pope of Europe. Engelbert Kaempfer who came to Japan in the late seventeenth century suggested the dual structure of ecclesiastical emperor and secular emperor. This conceptualization of Japanese emperor was succeeded by Commodore Perry who opened Japan in the middle of nineteenth century.