ABSTRACT
McMullen explores the Japanese variant of the Confucian sacrificial cult (sekiten), which in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Ryūkyū was performed by the head of state. In Japan, however, emperors long refused to bow to Confucius, a foreigner of commoner status. This taboo was dramatically broken in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Emperors Kōkaku and Ninkō, and briefly Kōmei, personally sacrificed to Confucius within the Kyoto palace. Drawing on diaries and ritual descriptions, McMullen reconstructs these semi-clandestine ceremonies, situating them in the fraught political rivalry between the imperial court and the Tokugawa bakufu. He argues that Kōkaku's bold symbolic embrace of Confucian ritual authority—combining polytheistic spirit veneration with Neo-Confucian moral responsibility—prefigured a modern vision of imperial sovereignty, one that helped sustain the monarchy through the upheavals of the Restoration and resonated with global monarchical traditions.
