1. The audience is fully described in Naikaku Kiroku Kyoku (ed.), Hoki bunrui taizen, Gaikomon, Gaihin seppan (hereafter Gaihin seppan), p. 101. See also Ernest Satow, A Diplomat in Japan (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1921), pp. 359–62. The reader is referred to the 1931 painting by Hiroshima Koho which is on permanent display in the Seitoku Kinen Kaigakan, Tokyo. The painting in fact shows not Parkes’ audience but that of the Dutch minister. As will be seen, Parkes’ audience had to be postponed.
2. Parkes was referring to the etiquette normalized after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and disseminated in such handbooks as Baron Carl von Martens’ Guide Diplomatique (Leipzig, 1832) and J. C. Bluntschli’s Le Droit International Codifié (Paris, 1886).
3. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 197–223.
4. Such was the experience of Date Munenari just a few days earlier. He describes his experience in Nihon Shiseki Kyokai (ed.), Date Munenari zaikyo nikki (reissue: Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1972). See also Satow, A Diplomat in Japan, p. 358.
5. On Okuni Takamasa, see in English John Breen, ‘Shintoists in Restoration Japan’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 24, no. 3 (1990) pp. 579–602. Okuni Takamasa was, it should be noted, a keen advocate of open-country politics. See, for example, his treatise on international law (‘Okuni Takamasa’s Shinshin kohoron’, translated and annotated in Tetsuo Najita (ed.), Readings in Tokugawa Thought, Select Papers, vol. 9, translated and annotated by John Breen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).