1616

by Christensen, Thomas

  Besides encouraging trade with Japan, Ekathrosrot also provided a settlement district for Dutch merchants. The Dutch respected the Japanese presence in Siam and conceded them a monopoly on the Siamese-Japanese trade because they were concerned about continuing their own trade with Japan from outside the Siam corridor. The Japanese had already limited Portuguese and Spanish access because of their association with Jesuit missionaries. Jeremias Van Vliet, a Dutch merchant who was active in Siam, wrote that

  Some Japanese merchants for a long time frequented the Kingdom of Siam, and appeared there yearly with their junks, capital, and merchandise, principally in order to enjoy the profit which Siamese deer and ray-skins used to yield. Of these appetizing gains they became so greedy that (seeing the abundance of living in the country) some remained resident there, whereby the inclination of the Siamese Kings (who have always been fond of foreign merchants) toward the Japanese nation, especially on account of the quantity of silver that was yearly brought to Siam by traders in their junks, so increased that their Majesties sent various embassies with suitable presents and letters full of friendly compliments to the emperor of Japan.

  Many of the Japanese in Ayutthaya, like Yamada Nagamasa, performed dual roles as as merchants and warriors. As merchants they exchanged silver from Japanese mines for gunpower, dyes, sugar, pepper, and skins; they also acquired textiles from India that had been transported to Siam. A Japanese daimyo wrote to a Siamese minister, “Friendship between neighbors … has nothing to do with distance. The waves are now quiet, and merchant vessels can go to and fro, to the mutual benefit of both countries.” One merchant from Nagasaki is said to have married a daughter of the king, an indication of the merchants’ prestige. As warriors, the Japanese samurai aided the Ayutthayan state against its traditional rival, Burma, and also served certain factions by intimidating rivals in internal power struggles. Japanese samurai were internationally renowned as warriors, and Japanese swords were the best in the world.

  Besides warriors and merchants, some of the expatriate Japanese were refugee Christians who had taken advantage of the shipping connection to Siam to flee anti-Christian persecution in Japan carried out by Ieyasu and stepped up by his successor, Tokugawa Hidetada. Eventually more than three thousand Christians would be martyred in Japan. The Siamese, by contrast, appear to have been relatively tolerant of religious diversity. Yamada, though not himself a Christian, was supportive of the refugee faction. He is known to have provided a banquet for visiting Italian priests, as one reported in a letter back to Rome.

  The Japanese maritime campaign was conducted by means of “Red Seal” ships. Functionally, these ships were rather like the mainstays of the VOC fleet — they were heavily armed merchant ships. In design they were influenced by Japanese exposure to Portuguese vessels: they resembled Western-style ships in having square sails and rudders. They were nearly the size of European galleons, holding more than two hundred passengers. They are called Red Seal ships after the vermilion-colored stamp from the shogunate that authorized them to ship out. Several such ships left each year for Siam during the early seventeenth century. Other destinations included the Philippines, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam.

  It is difficult to separate legend from history in considering the role of the Japanese in Siam. In Japan Yamada Nagamasa has traditionally been viewed as a heroic figure, and his exploits applauded and exaggerated. In Thailand, where he is associated in popular culture with the Japanese occupation during World War II, his role has been downplayed. He must have served the king well, because he was rewarded with a royal title and entrusted with important responsibilities.

  Following the death of King Songtham in 1628, a power struggle ensued between his brother and his son. Yamada successfully supported the cause of the son, but the struggle for power in the Ayutthayan court continued behind the scenes. Yamada, so the story goes, was sent to put down a revolt in the south, and he was victorious. But during the fighting he was wounded in the knee. A treacherous former ally is supposed to have dispatched a healer, purportedly to tend to him but actually with secret instructions to poison the wound. In 1629 or 1630 Yamada died. Shortly thereafter, relations between Japan and Siam came to an end. In 1636 the Japanese decreed that no citizen could go abroad, and no Japanese resident overseas could return to Japan.

  At the helm of one of the Red Seal ships in 1616 was an Englishman named Will Adams. He was returning from a trip to Ayutthaya, his large ship loaded with 143 tons of sappanwood (Caesalpinia sappan, used as a red dye) and 3700 deer skins.

  Like another famous seafaring man of the period, Yusuf Reis (Jack Ward), Adams was a native of Kent. He had entered the sea trade early, after his father died when he was twelve. He had served under Francis Drake and saw naval service against the Spanish armada in 1588. In 1598 he hired on with an ill-fated fleet of five ships bound for the Pacific by way of the Straits of Magellan. After a brief raid in western Africa, the ships crossed the Atlantic. Two were lost to bad weather but three made it into the Pacific. Two of the remaining three ships, including the Liefde (“Charity”), with Adams and his brother Thomas on board, made it up the coast to present Ecuador. There Thomas and twenty other men were lost in a skirmish with natives. The third ship later turned up in Indonesia where its crew was killed by the Portuguese.

  Seventeenth-Century Red Seal Ship, before 1818. From the Gaiban Shokan. Colors on paper. National Archives of Japan.

  This illustration of a trade ship heading from Nagasaki to Vietnam was part of a reference to a compilation of diplomatic documents of the Tokugawa shogunate prepared by Kondo Seisai (1771–1829).

  Now undermanned, the two remaining ships feared attack from the Spanish, so they set off across the north Pacific. Her companion vessel was lost to a typhoon but in April 1600 the Liefe, with only a couple dozen survivors, washed up in Japan. Among those to welcome them were Portuguese priests who assured their Japanese hosts that the Dutch were pirates who should be crucified.

  The Portuguese overplayed their hand. Their influence on the shogun was not as great as they imagined. Ieyasu had tolerated their presence because he thought they were necessary for the trade between Macau and Nagasaki to function smoothly; they were needed primarily as interpreters. But by this time the Portuguese had had a presence in Japanese for more than half a century. Some merchants had married Japanese women in Nagasaki. There was no longer any shortage of translators.

  Adams was interrogated in several lengthy sessions by Ieyasu himself. Apparently the shogun was impressed by the thirty-six-year-old seaman. As Adams later reported, Ieyasu informed the Portuguese Jesuits that “we as yet had not doen to him nore to none of his lande any arme or damage; therefore against Reason and Justice to put us to death. If our countrey had warres the one with the other, that was no cause that he should put us to death.”

  Ieyasu recognized that Adams had a deep knowledge of large oceangoing vessels, and he employed him and another of the surviving sailors, a Dutchman named Jan Joosten, to assist his secretary of the navy, Mukai Shogen Tadakatsu (usually called Mukai Shogen), in the design and construction of Japan’s Red Seal ships. From the voyage of one of these, which encountered a Dutch ship off Borneo, word got back to Europe of Adams’s survival in Japan. But Adams had little contact with Europeans for several years, over which he became acculturated to Japan.

  Adams and Joosten were given the rank of hatamoto: samurai in direct service of the shogun. Gradually Adams became the shogun’s chief advisor and interpreter regarding relations with Europeans. He replaced the former advisor, the Jesuit linguist João Rodríguez Tçuzzu, who fell so far from the emperor’s favor that he was sent away to Macau.

  In a letter to Claudio Acquaviva, the Jesuit “general,” Rodríguez characterized the Japanese as “wayward and inconstant,” and unfit for admission to the order. Adams was more sympathetic to Japanese culture, so it is not surprising that Ieyasu would have preferred him. “The people of this Land of Japan are good of nature, curteous
above measure, and valiant in war,” he wrote. “Their justice is severely executed without any partiality upon transgressors of the law. They are governed in great civility. I mean, not a land better governed in the world by civil policy.”

  He married the daughter of a highway official, despite the fact that he had left a wife in England (he did manage to write to her and send her money). That problem was solved by Ieyasu pronouncing Will Adams the Englishman dead; in his place was born the white samurai Miura Anjin — by this stroke his English wife was made a widow. With his Japanese wife he had a son named Joseph and a daughter named Susanna.

  In 1613 an English captain arrived in Japan with the hope of establishing an English trade base there. (The Dutch complained that the English “dogged their footsteps all over the East,” according to historian C. R. Boxer, “only venturing to trade in places where the Hollanders had already broken the back of Iberian resistance.”) He was appalled at the extent to which Adams had adopted Japanese customs. He complained that Adams insisted on giving “admirable and affectionated commendations of Japan” and concluded “It is generally thought amongst us that he is a naturalized Japaner.” What might have set the captain off is the low valuation Adams placed on his cargo.

  The captain claimed that Adams and Mukai Shogen had discussed an invasion of the Philippines, planned for sometime in 1616. But Mukai apparently doubted the ability of the Japanese navy to confront larger Western-style warships. The death of Ieyasu put such plans on hold as Mukai was making efforts to upgrade the Japanese fleet.

  Beginning in 1614 Adams became involved in the Red Ships trade. The trip from which he was returning in 1616 was his second to Ayutthaya. Unfortunately for him, Ieyasu died shortly before he reached Japan. Thereafter Adams’ influence diminished. But he did make two more trade expeditions to Cochinchina (Vietnam). He died in 1620. His son, Joseph, inherited his title of Miura Anjin and prospered through the sea trade until the closure of the country, after which information about the family is lost.

  In the Quirinale, the residence of the Italian president in Rome, are frescoes painted by Agustino Tassi, Carlo Saraceni, and Giovanni Lanfranco in 1616 and 1617. These painters were masters of architectural detail and perspective foreshortening, and both of those skills are on display in the frescoes, as figures lean over balconies and crane, peer, and bend in myriad directions. Some sections of the paintings depict the Persian embassy of Robert Sherley — he looks young and rather overwhelmed. Another panel shows an ambassador from the Congo, Emanuele Ne Vunda.

  Another ambassador, who had come to Rome from a much more distant location, is also depicted. His name was Hasekura Tsunenaga, and he was a diplomat in the service of the influential daimyo Date Masamune. In 1616, at the time the frescoes were painted, Haskura was on his way to Mexico from Europe and was planning his return trip across the Pacific.

  Date Masamune was a strongman who was originally based on Japan’s west coast, on what Korea calls the East Sea and Japan calls the Sea of Japan. He bridged the gap between Japan’s warring years and the new Edo era of peace. Having lost an eye to smallpox during childhood, and affecting battle gear that featured an enormous crescent moon on the helmet, the “one-eyed dragon” (dokuganryū) cut a flamboyant figure.

  His family relations were turbulent. His mother favored his younger brother and reportedly tried to poison Masamuno on his behalf. The attempt failed and she ended up fleeing the region. Masamuno put an end to his brother’s pretensions to rule by killing him. Soldiers under his command also killed his father, although this happened while he was being held hostage. He defeated this enemy and had the kidnappers and their families tortured and killed.

  Fierce though he was, Date was no match for the power of the unifier of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and he was forced to become his vassal. He assisted Hideyoshi in his ill-fated, bloody invasion of Korea. After Hideyoshi’s death Date championed the cause of Tokugawa Ieyasu. This turned out to be the right horse to back, and Date was rewarded by being transferred to the Sendai domain on the east coast of Japan. The largest and most prosperous domain in northern Japan, Sendai was roughly equivalent to modern Miyagi Prefecture, near the epicenter of the devastating 2011 earthquake.

  Date sought to increase trade in Sendai, so he encouraged foreign visitors, even missionaries. One missionary who found shelter in Date’s region was a Spanish Franciscan named Luis Sotelo, who had traveled between Japan and Mexico on more than one occasion. In 1613 Sotelo jouneyed to Tokyo from Sendai to inaugurate a new church. This was during one of Ieyasu’s crackdowns on missionaries. Seven who had been arrested with Sotelo were executed, but he was released at the request of Date, who had plans for him.

  Date’s ambitious plan was to send an embassy to Philip III of Spain and Pope Paul V in Rome. The embassy would travel through Mexico, and Date hoped to initiate a trade channel between Japan and Acapulco. The project was at least approved by, and perhaps conceived in collaboration with, the Bakufu, the shogunal government in Edo. Sotelo may have put a bug in Date’s ear. He was keen on the embassy, because such a journey could increase the influence of his Franciscan order, which had so far been in the shadow of the Jesuits in East Asia. At the head of the embassy was one of Date’s retainers who had served with him during the Korean campaign, a man named Hasekura Tsunenaga. Sotelo would accompany him.

  Mukai Shogen sent his chief carpenter to assist in the construction of a vessel in the style of a Western galleon, which may have been reconstructed from a ship that had wrecked on Japanese shores. The construction involved thousands of workers and was completed in a month and a half. Besides Sotelo, another Spaniard, Sebastian Vizcaino, lent technical assistance. Vizcaino, who was in his mid-sixties, was a veteran soldier and sea captain. Widely traveled, he had at one time been stationed in New Spain, where he was assigned to survey the California coast to locate harbours that could be used by galleons making the return trip from Manila to Acapulco. He visited San Diego Bay, Point Lobos, Santa Catalina Island, Carmel, Monterey Bay, Sierra Point, and Coyote Point, all of which owe their names to him.

  Christian Martyrs of Nagasaki, early seventeenth century, Japan.

  The unknown Japanese artist who painted this picture of Christians being martyred during the early-seventeenth-century crackdown on the religion was influenced not just by Western religion but also by Western painting style and technique. Neither influence would survive in this blatant a form. Although Japan enjoyed two and a half centuries of relative peace, when the country was opened to the outside world in the mid-nineteenth century it experienced a painful period of adjustment amid extremely rapid social and cultural change.

  In 1611–1612 Vizcaino received permission from the Bakufu to perform a similar survey of harbors on the east coast of Japan, with the idea that they could be a stopping-over point for Manila-Acapulco galleons. Ieyasu is said to have had misgivings about this project and to have consulted Will Adams. Adams, who was no friend of the Spanish, replied that in Europe such activity would be seen as reconnaissance for a possible military invasion. It appears that Vizcaino was allowed to finish his survey, but was always viewed with suspicion thereafter.

  With the arrogance of a Spaniard who had lived in the Americas, where the Spanish conquest had seemed surprisingly easy, Vizcaino made matters worse by adoping a condescending attitude toward the Japanese. Ieyasu had made it clear that he was only interested in trade and did not want any missionaries sent to Japan. Vizcaino scornfully rejected this, telling one daimyo that the king of Spain cared nothing about trade with Japan “nor any temporal interest, for God had given him many kingdoms and dominions…. All nations should be taught the Holy Catholic Faith and thus be saved.”

  Ieyasu was having nothing of it. He provided the embassy with a message to the viceroy of New Spain that read:

  The doctrine followed in your country differs entirely from ours. Therefore, I am persuaded that it would not suit us. In the Buddhist sutras it is said that it is difficult to conve
rt those who are not disposed to being converted. It is best, therefore, to put an end to the preaching of your doctrine on our soil. On the other hand, you can multiply the voyages of merchant ships, and thus promote mutual interests and relations. Your ships can enter Japanese ports without exception. I have given strict orders to this effect.

  The ship was christened the San Juan Bautista. It set sail with Vizcaino as captain in October of 1613, carrying 180 persons, including 60 who were attached to the embassy. In an odd echo of the Persian embassies of the Sherleys, there was subsequently some dispute about whether Hasekura or Sotelo should be viewed as the primary ambassador, but the Western nations the embassy visited all treated Hasekura as the ambassador, and it is difficult to believe that Date or Ieyasu would have placed their mission in the hands of a Franciscan friar.

  The ship reached the Philippines the next month and made excellent time across the Pacific, arriving in Acapulco the following January. While in Mexico the embassy was witnessed by a native writer named Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quanhtlehuanitzin, who has come to be known by the mercifully shortened name Chimalpahin. He was associated with a church in Mexico City. His book, written in Nahuatl and translated as Annals of His Time, is one of the most significant documents of the period by a native American from Mexico. Nothing like the work of the Peruvian writer Guaman Poma, the book is in the tradition of Nahuatl annals. Such books were community documents recording events of their time, and they were, for the most part, devoid of personal items and editorializing. Traditionally Nahuatl annals would have combined texts and images, but by Chimalpahin’s time the use of images had severely declined. What Chimalpahin has given us instead is a lengthy text detailing events concerning his parish.