The Portuguese of the sixteenth century were wisely secretive about their trade networks and the extent and nature of their contacts with other nations. As a result, the details of when and how the European Age of Discovery arrived in Japan are vague. While there may possibly have been earlier arrivals, what is known is that in 1543 a Chinese junk, on which two or three Portuguese merchants were travelling, was driven by a storm on to the shores of Tanegashima island, today part of the Japanese prefecture of Kagoshima.
According to an account of that encounter, the first Japanese to arrive at the remote cove in which the ship had come to rest were peasants from a nearby village who were intensely curious about the stranded Europeans. With no shared spoken language, the captain of the Chinese ship and the leader of the local Japanese village conversed using Chinese characters drawn into the sand of the beach using sticks. Through this medium the captain was questioned about the strange white-skinned men with bizarre clothes and unfamiliar facial features who were among his crew.1 Just as exotic and fascinating were the objects the Europeans carried. The local lord, Tanegashima Tokitaka, met with the men from Portugal soon afterwards and, after an impromptu demonstration, purchased two arquebuses (an early form of matchlock musket).2 Tokitaka gave these weapons to a master swordsmith named Yasuita Kinbei Kiyosada, who began work replicating the weapons, thus beginning the introduction of firearms into Japan. The muskets the Japanese blacksmiths devised were called tanegashima, after their place of introduction.
The following year more Portuguese arrived, this time in their own vessels, and the men who had been driven on to Tanegashima island were reunited with their countrymen. Rapidly, as further ships arrived and goods traded and exchanged, the two parties began to learn more of one another.3 Marco Polo had described Japan in his accounts as an island of gold, and in late Renaissance Europe Japan was recognised as the most distant of all known civilisations. What was clear to the Portuguese traders was that in Japan – as in most of Asia – they simply did not have the option of behaving aggressively, as the Spanish had in Mexico and the Caribbean. Sixteenth-century Japan was a demographic superpower, with a population probably in excess of 12 million, many times the size of Portugal herself and far larger than most European states; she was wealthy, highly organised and militarily formidable.
The Japanese emperor was little more than a symbolic, ceremonial figure, and so the nation was divided between numerous competing local rulers, the Daimyo. Despite being in a phase of internal strife and warfare, sixteenth-century Japan displayed none of the fragilities that had left Moctezuma’s Mexico so vulnerable to Cortés. The pattern of conquest and domination that characterised Europe’s contact with the civilisations of the Americas was not to be repeated in Asia, and the encounter between Japan and Europe was one the historian Holden Furber described as the ‘age of partnership’: an era of collaboration and interaction that has defined relationships between Asians and Europeans through to the early modern era.4
Trade was the only option available to the Europeans who came to Japan. And the attractions of such a trade were obvious and multiple. The Japanese themselves produced numerous products that were desired both in Europe and in other parts of Asia where the Portuguese also had trading bases. But, more significantly, they had the wealth to buy large quantities of the goods that Europeans were seeking to sell. Their wealth was in the form of silver. After Spain, with its recently acquired territories in Mexico and Peru, Japan was the biggest producer of silver in the world. By the start of the seventeenth century perhaps as much as a third of the world’s silver was mined in Japan.5 This precious metal was the commodity Europeans needed more than any other in order to trade with China, during an age economic historians call the ‘silver century’.6 Indeed, the interconnections and globalism of the early modern age can be partly understood through the global flows of silver. The bulk of that precious metal, whether mined in the New World or extracted from the volcanic rocks of Japan, was exported to China and used to purchase Chinese commodities. China was in many ways the centre of the first age of globalisation. Her share of the global population in the sixteenth century stood at around 25 per cent, a greater proportion than today, and she produced many of the most treasured commodities of the age – silks, fine porcelain, pearls and lacquer ware. The trade that developed between the Portuguese and the Japanese was in large part a Chinese trade. An old Ming Dynasty law prohibited Chinese merchants from trading directly with Japan, thereby allowing the Portuguese to act as middlemen, using New World and Japanese silver to buy Chinese silks, which were then sold to the Japanese for yet more silver. Then, returning to China, the Portuguese would trade Japanese silver for Chinese gold, at generous rates of exchange, and also purchase greater quantities of Chinese luxury goods which they then sold back in Europe at enormous profit.
The Japanese called their part in this global exchange the ‘Namban trade’. The name derives from a Sino-Japanese term that in its new context came to be applied to the Europeans. Rather unflatteringly, Namban meant ‘southern barbarians’: southern because the Europeans tended to arrive from the south, having travelled from their trading bases in China (Macao) and India (Goa); and barbarians because the Japanese were appalled by European standards of hygiene and etiquette. They were even more horrified by European table manners.
There was, however, another commodity within this trade that was little discussed in the centuries that followed: a slave trade. Japanese people, mostly poor peasants, were sold into slavery. The most valued were young girls, who were bought and sold for sexual purposes. It is probable that the first Japanese ever to see Europe arrived in Lisbon as slaves. There is also evidence that Africans and Malays, who laboured for the Portuguese on their ships and in the trading fort in Macao during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and who were themselves enslaved, became the buyers and owners of Japanese women peddled to them by the Portuguese.7
During the seventeenth century the Portuguese traders were joined in Japan by merchants and sailors from Spain, Italy, the Dutch Republic and England. The Japanese dubbed the Dutch and the English kōmōjin – red hairs. The Europeans introduced new technologies, new forms of art and new foods, some of which, such as sweet potatoes, were produce of the New World and therefore relatively novel even to the Europeans. Watermelons made their first appearance in Japan at this time, as did bread, but the most significant culinary innovation of the age was the Portuguese recipe for egg-and-flour fried batter, which after some adaptation became Japanese tempura.
This era of trade and encounter between Europeans and the Japanese was depicted in a popular new Japanese art form, namban-byobu – large, multi-panelled, folding painted screens. The work of the master artists of the Kano, Tosa and Sumiyoshi artistic schools, they are strikingly beautiful, abounding with detail and renowned for their lavish use of gold-leaf paints. The tradition of screen painting stretched back centuries; the screens were used to divide rooms in Japanese homes. They came in a range of sizes, with the numbers of panels ranging from two to six, though only around ninety namban-byobu from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have survived.8 Little known outside Japan today, they are exquisite representations of a largely forgotten phase of sixteenth-century globalisation, seen from the perspective of the Japanese.
The screens depict the arrival of Portuguese traders on the Japanese coast, in their black ocean-going ships – black because they were painted with pitch. It is probable that none of the artists who painted the screens ever saw the Portuguese ships with their own eyes. Some may have based their paintings on depictions of ships that appeared as details in European maps that had begun to circulate among the Japanese elite.9 But many of the most interesting and appealing namban-byobu depict the unloading of goods from the Portuguese trading ships. Wrapped bolts of Chinese silk are shown piled on the decks of the ships or being lowered into small boats and ferried ashore. Other goods lie in neat piles on the beach. The traders are shown parading through the streets of settlements, past the homes and the eyes of admiring locals. They carry with them Chinese furniture, exotic animals in cages or on leashes, and yet more silk. In a namban-byobu attributed to the painter Kanō Naizen, a camel is shown being led away from its place of landing, while a group of Portuguese and African sailors struggle to subdue two Persian horses. In another, peacocks and even Bengal tigers are shown arriving. While the Europeans provide the novelty and the narrative on the beach, awaiting them are Japanese officials, calmly interacting with their new trading partners.
What is apparent is that to the Japanese artists who produced them, and their fellow countrymen who bought their work, the crews of the Portuguese vessels were just as fascinating and exotic as the cargoes they carried – all the more so, as Japan’s encounter with the Portuguese inevitably entailed an encounter with the many and varied peoples of the Portuguese trading empire. On board the Portuguese galleons and caracas, and carefully portrayed by the namban-byobu artists, are Africans – both enslaved and free – Indians, Malays and Persians. Namban-byobu capture that moment when the Portuguese, then the most travelled and worldly nation on earth, encountered the relatively isolated Japanese. Here, magically preserved on the surviving screens, is what it looked like from sixteenth-century Asian eyes when the great circus of global trade and inter-civilisational contact came to town.
19. A namban-byobu screen by the Japanese artist Kanō Naizen showing the arrival of a Portuguese trading ship. Among the exotic goods being unloaded are camels and horses from Arabia. Namban, the term the Japanese gave their European trading partners, meant ‘southern barbarians’.
While the subject matter of namban-byobu is the arrival of outsiders, the artistic style is indigenous. Within the more playful namban-byobu there is even a sense of the Europeans being gently ridiculed. The loose bombacha trousers that travellers from Europe and her empires wore to protect themselves from mosquitoes are rendered comically baggy. European noses, which appeared prominent and extended to the Japanese, are exaggerated, and occasionally accentuated with a rakish moustache. Yet for all the frenetic activity and the observed novelty and exoticism of the scenes they depict, there is a stillness and calm to the namban-byobu. This, perhaps, hints at the sense of equanimity with which the Japanese regarded the arrival of Europeans: confident of their capacity to control the incomers, and focused on their own internal politics and power struggles. The Chinese translator who had interpreted for the first Portuguese arrivals at Tanegashima in 1543 was perturbed that the Europeans appeared to lack ‘a proper system of ceremonial etiquette’, and was appalled to see that they ‘eat with their fingers instead of chopsticks’, ‘show their feelings without any self-control’ and ‘cannot understand the meaning of written characters’. Yet summing them up, and reflecting on what their sudden arrival might mean, he concluded, ‘they are a harmless sort of people’.10
Events would prove the interpreter of 1543 wrong. The introduction of the arquebus radically interfered with the power balance of sixteenth-century Japan and played a key role in the Sengoku period, also known as the Age of the Warring States, in which Japanese armies equipped with domestically produced copies of European firearms fought for control and ultimately for unification.
Within many namban-byobu are depictions of another group of Europeans who were to unleash an equally destabilising force on Japanese society, one that would demand the Japanese to rethink their categorisation of Europeans as harmless. The figures in question can usually be found on the shore or in the waterside settlements. Already resident in Japan, they are shown waiting to greet the new arrivals from the Portuguese empire. These figures, the Jesuits, are at other times shown near their churches, built in the local Japanese style. For the Portuguese, the conversion of the Japanese was a mission of enormous importance. Arriving from a Europe torn apart by religious conflict and the Protestant Reformation, the Jesuits were determined to spread their faith to this most distant of nations, thereby bolstering the strength of the Roman Catholic Church, both literally and symbolically. So successful were the Portuguese missionaries in their task that the historian C. R. Boxer described the period (1549–1639) as Japan’s ‘Christian century’.11 In 1550 only around a thousand Japanese people had converted to the new faith. By 1580 that figure had reached about 150,000. By the end of the sixteenth century there were around 300,000 Japanese Christians; soon after that, half a million.12 The spread of the new faith was fastest in Kyushu, the most southerly of Japan’s three main islands, where a number of the local Daimyō had converted and were actively assisting the Jesuits in their work.
20. Newly arrived Portuguese traders are greeted by some Jesuits, the Catholic missionaries whose success at spreading the faith among the Japanese would ultimately lead to the expulsion of all Europeans from mainland Japan.
This wave of conversion was well under way in 1603, when the chaos of the Sengoku period came to an end. The arquebus, the weapon that the Portuguese had unintentionally introduced into Japanese warfare, had ensured that military victories were more decisive and complete than had been the case before the advent of firearms. The end of the Age of the Warring States was brought to a conclusion by the final rise to power of the dynasty that was to turn against both the Portuguese and their faith. The Tokugawa Shoguns, who were to rule Japan until the 1860s, developed a deep distrust of the Jesuits. And in the last years of the sixteenth century Japanese observers noted the bitter rivalries that existed between the Franciscan and Dominican orders. Disputes between the Europeans were increasingly conducted openly as the rival orders denounced one another and their motives to their Japanese hosts.13 The Tokugawa became more suspicious still as they came to understand what the Spanish had done to the Aztec people, and learned that the calamity that had befallen Mexico had been repeated some years later during the conquest of Peru and the destruction of the Inca Empire. The Japanese were similarly disturbed by the invasion and gradual conquest of the Philippines by Spain over the course of the late sixteenth century.
Shōgun Ieyasu, the first of the Tokugawa, was a strong proponent of foreign trade and tolerated the missionaries. During the early years of his reign the number of Christians began to rise rapidly however, and in 1614 he issued a Christian expulsion edict. In 1623 the second Tokugawa, Ieyasu’s son Shōgun Hidetada, executed fifty-five missionaries in Nagasaki (some of whom were symbolically crucified) and drove out the Jesuits. Japanese converts were brutally repressed, and all Japanese were prohibited from practising their faith, and sentenced to death if they refused to denounce Christianity. Churches built by the Jesuits were demolished. Between 1633 and 1639 the Tokugawa issued a series of so-called seclusion edicts, and Namban trade, which had begun in 1550, was halted. Tokugawa Shōgun Iemitsu declared a new era of ‘sakoku’ (isolation), in which Japan, in theory at least, was to be cut off from the rest of the world. The Japanese were forbidden to leave their country, and the construction of ocean-going ships was prohibited. All foreigners, not just the missionaries, were expelled, and foreign ships refused permission to enter Japanese ports. The sakoku era was to last 215 years. However, Japan’s isolation was never complete, and it is perhaps better to think of the sakoku era as a period of controlled contact – managed globalism – rather than of complete isolation. Japan’s window on the wider world was Dejima, a purpose-built artificial island in Nagasaki harbour. Access from the island to the mainland was strictly and easily controlled, allowing the Japanese to enjoy the benefits of foreign trade while ensuring that Europeans were not able to spread their faith or smuggle missionaries into the country. From Dejima the ships of the Chinese were permitted to trade, as were those of a single European nation, the Dutch Republic.
Why the Dutch? As Protestants, men more interested in profit than proselytising, the Dutch were more trusted than the Catholic Portuguese, although the Dutch were constantly questioned about their faith by their Japanese trading partners. It is also said that the Japanese preferred the company of the Dutch, who, like them, were enthusiastic consumers of strong alcoholic spirits, unlike the pious and often abstemious Portuguese. Yet drinking habits and religious confession cannot fully explain why the Dutch were able to find favour with the Tokugawa rulers of Japan. Part of their success was due to their ability to master the necessary diplomatic skills needed to win the trust of the Japanese.
At the centre of the story was the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company. Established in 1602, it was the first multinational corporation and the first to allow the public to buy and sell company shares and bonds. These were innovations perfectly suited to a state formed from seven separate, quasi-independent provinces and home to people whose Calvinist ethic encouraged them to save and accumulate capital. The principle behind the formation of the company was simple. The various pre-existing Dutch trading companies were compelled to join forces and merge into the new VOC, which was given monopoly rights over trade with the East Indies, thereby preventing Dutch companies from wastefully competing against one another.
Within the Dutch factory on Dejima, the VOC learned to play the game of local politics. The company operated under terms dictated by their host, with little room for manoeuvre, in a constrained and clearly defined role. Not only this, but the privileges the VOC enjoyed came with obligations and responsibilities with which they had no choice but to comply – these duties included making themselves available for military service to the Shōguns. The Dutch operated in an environment in which the power of the Shōgun was unassailable, impervious to whatever displays of military power the Dutch might contemplate, and in order to survive in that environment they allowed themselves to be incorporated into the power structure of Japan. They were, in effect, domesticated.14 Like all other vassals, they were expected to demonstrate their subservience and submission lavishly, theatrically and regularly. Each year the company’s representative made the long journey to the capital Edo (Tokyo) to prostrate himself before the Shōgun. One governor-general wrote in 1638:
The Japanese must not be troubled. You must wait for the right time and opportunity and with the greatest patience to obtain something. They will not suffer being spoken back to. Therefore the smaller we make ourselves, pretending to be small, humble and modest merchants that live because of their wishes, the more favour and respect we can enjoy in their land, this we’ve learned from long experience … In Japan you cannot be too humble.15
The Dutch were not simply the European nation with favoured nation status in Japan; they also acted as ‘merchants of light’, suppliers of advanced western technology and information, about events and developments in Europe and beyond. New ideas in the sciences and the arts reached Japan through the portal of Dejima, carried on the ships of the VOC. Through Dejima trickled the fruits of the European Enlightenment – clocks, maps, microscopes, celestial and terrestrial globes, eyeglasses and medical instruments. Telescopes, too, were imported, but eventually, like the arquebus before them, indigenous manufacturers learned how to replicate them.
In the later, more proactively inquisitive stages of the sakoku era, an earlier prohibition on western books was lifted and thousands of European texts containing developments in medicine, chemistry and philosophy were imported through Dejima. These books were translated by a hereditary caste of linguists from a handful of Nagasaki families, who passed their skills through the generations. They became the first link in a chain of what became known as rangaku (Dutch learning), a term that was deployed to describe all knowledge imported from the West, no matter what its origins.
One popular scientific curiosity imported through Dejima was to have an unexpected impact on Japanese art. The Japanese called them nozoki-karakuri, or Dutch glasses. This simple optical device consisted of a convex lens fixed into a wooden box, in front of which were placed printed landscapes that had been painted using European rules of perspective. The result was a convincing three-dimensional effect. The impact was all the greater for the Japanese, who were accustomed to the flat, decorative style of their nation’s dominant, state-sanctioned school of art.16 One of the artists who created images to be used in nozoki-karakuri was Maruyama Ōkyo. One of his earliest jobs had been painting faces on to dolls for a Kyoto toy merchant. Moving on to painting scenes for the Dutch glasses, Ōkyo studied vanishing-point perspective. His innovation was to apply his new understanding to revered Japanese subjects, such as the medieval Hollyhock Festival, infusing them with a previously unknown sense of depth.
21. A wood block print by Suzuki Harunobu shows two young Japanese women with a stereoscopic picture viewer – a device known as Dutch glasses. This fashionable European import made specially created images appear more three-dimensional.
22. A pair of pheasants by the Kyoto artist Maruyama Ōkyo shows the fusion within his mature work of influences from both East and West.
23. One of Maruyama Ōkyo’s most celebrated works, Cracked Ice. Painted on to a two-fold paper screen designed as backdrop for use in the traditional tea ceremony it applies western vanishing-point perspective to a traditional Japanese subject.
One of his masterpieces, Cracked Ice, is a low two-fold painted screen (furosaki byōbu) of the type used in the tea ceremony. It shows a sheet of ice, presumably on a lake, through which run a series of broken, jagged cracks, which disappear into the mist. The resulting effect is of a seemingly three-dimensional space, subtly governed by the rules of perspective. While a product of cultural synthesis, Cracked Ice remains fundamentally Japanese, displaying a philosophical contemplation of two concepts fundamental to Buddhism, imperfection and impermanence: imperfection in the form of the jagged, uncontrolled and irregular lines; impermanence in the subject itself, winter ice that will soon melt.
