Imperial Sacrifice to an Uncrowned King

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;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.