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Introduction
Royal progresses have been observed in various forms throughout world history, from journeys made by Assyrian kings, to the progresses of England's Elizabeth I.1 This study uses the concept of the royal progress to re-examine a related phenomenon: that of alternate attendance (sankin kōtai) performed by the elite warriors of Japan's Tokugawa period (1600–1868). Approximately once a year, for two and a half centuries, daimyo lords, their samurai retainers and servants paraded along Japan's highways between their castle towns and the city of Edo in order to attend upon the shogun.2 Daimyo wives and heirs lived permanently in Edo as hostages. Alternate attendance has been likened to Louis XIV's court at Versailles in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and to the medieval German practice of Hoffahrt.3 Here, I argue that the ambiguous nature of sovereignty in Tokugawa Japan, with effective rule divided between the shogun and the daimyo, also allows us to consider alternate attendance as a form of ‘royal’ progress in so far as concerns the leg of the journey that took place within the daimyo's own territory (his domain, or han). This approach reveals the localised semiotics of daimyo power, as daimyo lords spent time in villages within their territory, holding audiences, giving out favours and receiving signs of submission from locals, before leaving their domain and embarking on the journey to Edo.
The focus of this article is a case study for which there exists a cache of local history materials detailing the visits made by the lords of Satsuma domain to a village of Korean potters and their descendants, en route to Edo during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Satsuma was located on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, its hereditary daimyo rulers belonged to a family called the Shimazu, and the Korean potters in question had settled in the village of Naeshirogawa in Satsuma after being taken there by the Shimazu armies during the Japanese invasions of Korea, which took place between 1592 and 1598 (the Imjin War).4 Thanks to records kept by the villagers, fifteen eyewitness accounts of daimyo visits to Naeshirogawa between 1677 and 1714 are extant, including the ceremonies and entertainments that were performed...