Chimalpahin had described the arrival of a previous group of Japanese:
They wear something like an ornamented jacket, doublet, or long blouse, which they tie at their middle, their waist; there they place a catana of metal, which counts as their sword, and they wear something like a mantilla. And their footwear is soft, softened leather called chamois, counting just like foot-gloves that they put on their feet. They seem bold, not gentle and meek people, going about like eagles.
According to Chimalpahin there had been a falling out in Acapulco between Vizcaino and the Japanese, apparently over the disposition of gifts the embassy had brought with them. On March 4, 1614, he reports that an advance party of Japanese reached the city on that day, but Hasekura, Sotelo, and Vizcaino were trailing behind. “Señor Vizcaino is also still coming slowly, coming hurt; the Japanese injured him when they beat and stabbed him at Acapulco, as became known here in Mexico City, because of all the things coming along that had been made his responsibility in Japan, that the great ruler there, the emperor, gave him to be gifts on arrival.”
Vizcaino finally arrived in the city during Lent, on March 17. The remainder of the party followed one week later. Chimalpahin describes Hasekura as “a great personage.” He understands the purpose of the mission to be primarily religious: “The reason their ruler the emperor in Japan sent this lordly emissary and ambassador here is to go to Rome to see the holy father, Paul V, and to give him their obedience concerning the holy church.”
While from the Japanese side the religious aspect of the embassy seems unclear — a Japanese historian characterized it as a mix of some who wanted to use the kingdom of heaven for trade and others who wanted to use trade for the kingdom of heaven — once on Western soil the party left no doubt about its embrace of Christianity. Sixty-three Japanese were baptized in Mexico. Hasekura was the exception: he would be baptized in Europe as a publicity stunt.
After several months, leaving some members behind to continue developing trade relations with Mexico, the reduced embassy sailed from Veracruz to Spain, where Hasekura had an audience with Philip III and, astonishingly, assured him that all of Japan was ready to convert to Christianity. He proposed an alliance with Spain, and Sotelo added that this would forestall the efforts of the Dutch. Philip said he would think about it.
Hasekura was baptized by the king’s chaplain and given the Christian name Felipe. The Duke of Lerma was appointed his godfather. Then the embassy continued to Italy. They arrived in Genoa, where one observer described their appearance:
One of them was of Japanese nationality and was called Don Filippo Fasecura; the other a Spaniard of Sevilla, Luigi Sotelo by name, a Franciscan priest of the order of the “Osservanza.” They have with them a train of twenty-eight persons, for the most part Japanese, and these all are with the exception of one, of low stature, olive coloured; they have small eyes, little beard, and greatly resemble each other. Fasecura was dressed in a long black-velvet tunic, over which he wore another, shorter one, of black silk; his stockings were of yellow silk, made almost like gloves, that is, with the big toe separated from the rest; and with leathern soles, and he also wore a black felt hat. The ambassador and his companions had their hair close shaved on the top of their head and on the rest of the head it was long and tied up on the back like a tail. He carried a most beautiful scimitar and also a sword. The other gentlemen wore similar tunics but less rich. They all ate with little chop-sticks. Father Sotelo wore the habit of the order and also acted as interpreter.
The swords of the Japanese were especially admired. It was said that “their swords cut so well that they can cut a soft paper just by putting it on the edge and by blowing on it.”
Continuing to Rome, the embassy repeated its performance for Pope Paul V. A letter from Date Masamune was produced that said that while he was not himself a Christian he would welcome and protect Franciscan monks. In exchange, he asked the pope to put in a good word for him with the king of Spain for the purpose of trade. But the embassy, with its Franciscan bias, was received in Rome with little ceremony because of opposition from the Jesuits. The pope told Hasekura he would think about it, and consult with Philip.
Retracing its steps, the embassy returned to Spain, where Philip told Hasekura that he could not sign a treaty since he represented only a regional lord and not the official Japanese government. By this time word of Ieyasu’s expulsion of foreign missionaries had reached Spain.
His futile mission now as complete as it would ever be, Hasekura sailed from Spain to Mexico in 1617, but six of his party remained behind in Coria del Rio, near Seville, where there are today about seven hundred residents with the surname Japón. After spending a couple of years in the Philippines, he returned to Sendai in 1620, seven years after departing Japan. (At this point he had only twelve remaining companions.) He found the situation there entirely changed. A few months after the embassy’s departure Ieyasu had issued his edict expelling all missionaries from Japan. Tokugawa Hidetada had succeeded Ieyasu in 1616 and closed Japan’s doors even more tightly, barring nearly all foreigners from the country.
Opinion differs about whether Hosekura’s conversion was genuine. Was his baptism merely a diplomatic ploy? He is said to have abjured the faith once back in Japan, but this seems contradicted by reports that some of his descendants remained Christians.
Japanese Embassy to Rome, 1616, perhaps by Agostino Tassi and workshop. Fresco, Sala Regia, Quirinale Palace, Rome.
In the foreground of this image from the Quirinale the Japanese ambassador, Hasekura Tsunenaga, confers with the Franciscan missionary Luis Sotelo.
The embassy had accomplished nothing of political value, and in fact was an embarrassment to Date Masamune, who felt the need to write an apologetic letter to Hidetada, tactfully reminding him of the Bakufu’s involvement in the enterprise. Hasekura was tarred with the failure of the embassy, and his status greatly reduced. Life isn’t fair.
He still made out better than Sotelo. The Franciscans wanted to send him to Mexico, but he had not abandoned hope for a Japanese mission. Disguised as a merchant, he sailed from Manila to Nagasaki aboard a Chinese junk. There he was promptly seized and burnt alive, tied to a pole fixed to a pile of wood. To prolong his agony the fire was kept low for as long as possible before being allowed to rage.
The next Japanese embassy to Europe would not occur for another two and a half centuries. A theme park devoted to Hasekura’s embassy, featuring a replica of the San Juan Bautista, was created in 1993 in the harbor of Ishinomaki from which the embassy departed. The city was one of the worst hit by the 2011 tsunami, but the replica ship miraculously survived. According to Japanese newspaper reports, there is talk of using it as a symbol of the town’s hoped-for reconstruction.
In the years when Japan was active in Southeast Asia there was a small Japanese community in Vietnam, where many factions vied for control. The Le dynasty, based around Hanoi in the north, was the longest-ruling Vietnamese dynasty. But several other powerful family groups, including the Trinh, the Nguyen, and the Mac, were also powerful. When the Mac succeeded in driving the Le from Hanoi around 1520 Trinh and Nguyen factions established a new state in the south, which they claimed was the legitimate successor of the Le. Combining forces, they defeated the Mac and regained Hanoi.
Cooperation between the Trinh and the Nguyen ended there, however. A northern leader, Trinh Tung, claimed to be the legitimate heir of the Le dynasty, while a southern leader, Nguyen Phuc Nguyen, championed his own cause. Trinh Tung ruled in the north from around 1570 until 1623. Nguyen Phuc Nguyen, who succeeded his dynamic father in 1613, ruled in the south until 1635. Both claimed to be working in the cause of a figurehead Le emperor, whom both mostly ignored. Tensions would build up until the outbreak of the Trinh–Nguyen War, which would drag on from 1627 until 1672, exhausting both sides.
Into this heated environment came Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans. The Chinese had long had an interest in Vietnam. The prestige of the Le dynasty der
ived from having driven them out following the early, expansionist days of the Ming. But many aspects of Chinese culture remained, including Confucianism as a philosophy of governance. Now, as the Ming dynasty teetered toward its final days, more Chinese arrived, not this time as conquerors but in search of new opportunities. Japanese came as adventurers, merchants, and Christian refugees. Europeans — the first to arrive were the Portuguese — included merchants and missionaries.
Among the latter was a Jesuit named Christoforo Borri. In Italy his name had been rendered as Borro or Burro, but during his overseas mission he used such names as Brono or Bravo so as “not to offend the Portuguese ears with the word boro, which in their language does not sound good.”
Perhaps he would have been better to stick with burro, since he was as obstinate and difficult as a donkey. He entered the Jesuit order with a view to teaching, but throughout his life he never entirely came to terms with the order, or it with him. His first known trouble occurred not long after Galileo published his Starry Messenger in 1610. Borri aspired to be a scientist, and in particular an astronomer, like Galileo. Like Galileo, he obtained a position as a professor of mathematics, teaching at the Collegio de Brera in his home town of Milan. But he lacked the charisma or the political acumen and negotiating skills of a Galileo, and his life would take a different course.
Borri’s life, like that of his fellow astronomer Kepler, was determined by a youthful inspiration. Influenced by Tycho Brahe, Borri decided that the heavens were neither solid nor empty: they were liquid. Moreover, he said, there were three of them: one containing the moving planets, one containing the fixed stars, and the heavenly realm beyond. It was an idea just radical enough to offend traditionalists but not quite radical enough to please bold thinkers enthralled with Copernicanism. Nonetheless, for the next couple of decades, until his death in 1632, he never abandoned his pet idea. Nor, in all that time, did he convince many people to take it seriously.
Certainly his own Jesuit order did not favor it. Faculty at Borri’s school had been instructed to toe the party line in teaching astronomical subjects. Borri probably failed to comply, or he might have come to odds with his superiors for some other reason. Throughout his life he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Whatever the reason, sometime between 1610 and 1614 he got canned.
It was a devastating blow for the young scholar. His deepest desire was to win acclaim as a brilliant mathematician and astronomer, but he was now cut off from academia. He had not developed a network of contacts that would enable him to stay current with developments in his field. So he shipped out to do missionary work overseas. He had formulated a theory about a new way to determine longitude, and he needed to get readings from distant places to develop it. His system involved measuring and mapping the deviation between magnetic and true north in different parts of the world, so Asia was an ideally distant location for him to acquire the readings he needed.
The year 1616 found him sailing from Goa to Macau: having departed Lisbon in April 1515, he would have arrived in Goa in the fall and then had to wait until the following spring for the next voyage to Macau. But he was not to remain there long: what with the persecution of missionaries in Nanking in 1616 and the need for new missionaries in Vietnam, Borri retraced his steps to Cochinchina, as the Europeans called southern Vietnam (they called northern Vietnam “Tonkin”). It is not known whether he antagonized members of the order during his brief stay in Macau, but he seems quickly to have proved unpopular in Vietnam.
The Jesuit mission in Vietnam during Borri’s time consisted of four or five priests. A surviving letter from one of them, a Portuguese named Antonio de Pina, is full of criticism of his colleagues. According to de Pina, “Whenever something happens, if I don’t go, no one else goes.” De Pina also says that the other priests made no effort to learn the Vietnamese language. Of his superior he says, “Whether he says a word or not, it comes to about the same.”
Olga Dror and K. W. Taylor, who have done a masterful job of reconstructing Borri’s story from the fragments of documentation that remain, speculate that de Pina’s letter suggests that the Vietnam mission was divided by the Jesuit order’s “Rites Controversy.” Some missionaries, of whom the best known is Matteo Ricci — another was Roberto de Nobili, who, working in southern India, learned Sanskrit and comported himself as a Brahman — believed that the best opportunities for conversion resulted from being informed about the local culture and working from within its belief system as much as possible. Ricci considered Confucianism a philosophy rather than a religion, and so he situated Christian ideas in a Confucian context. His successor, Nicolas Longobardi, took a harder line. According to him, before a Chinese could embrace Christianity he would have to renounce the teachings of Confucius. Just as in Europe there was no room for Galileo’s deviation from official teachings about the heavens, so in overseas missions there must be no compromise in religious purity and rigor.
It’s not certain what Borri thought about this issue, but he demonstrated little interest in Vietnamese culture. Although he claimed the language was easy to learn he never became adept in it and was unable to use it effectively in missionary work — the meager evidence available suggests that he made few conversions. He did not even master the transliteration system that his own colleagues had developed. He stayed for five years in Vietnam and left as clueless as he had arrived about the differences between Taoism and Buddhism.
Borri was recalled to Macau. He said that he was forced to leave Vietnam on account of illness. But an Italian Jesuit who wrote about the Vietnamese mission said its modest successes owed
no part to Father Christoforo Borri … who was recalled by his superiors to Macau; not, as he wrote, to be put in the hand of physicians there, who would heal his body, because it was not ailing; but to cure his soul, that is, to return it from anxiety to fervor of the spirit.
On the other hand, another Jesuit (though writing a century later) called Borri “once the most praised among the evangelical laborers.”
Borri returned to Macau and stayed there about a year, teaching at a Jesuit college. Even though he won an award for gallantry when the town was shelled by the Dutch, he was soon on his way back to Goa. There he crossed paths with Pietro della Valle, who would be his biggest supporter in his remaining years. Della Valle was fascinated with his scientific theories and activities. According to Dror and Taylor, “After Borri’s death, della Valle seemed to be the only person interested in his legacy.”
Borri sailed for Europe on the same ship that was to carry the unfortunate ambassador Garcia de Silva y Figueroa, who would die of scurvy off the Azores before reaching his homeland. He taught for a while in Lisbon and continued to advocate for his celestial and navigational theories. He tried to win a cash prize the Spanish and Portuguese had offered to anyone who could solve the problem of determining longitude. While it is difficult to assess how accurate Borri’s system, the details of which have been lost, actually was, his presentation to the court was described as a fiasco. One observer called it “presumptuous and bizarre.” Another said his work had “little reliability and solidity.”
Borri made one last try. In October 1616 the Dutch captain Dirk Hartog had made landfall at Shark Bay on the west coast of Australia (150 years before Captain James Cook’s better publicized journey to Australia’s east coast). Borri called for an expedition there as a test of the navigational apparatus he had invented. But the Spanish empire had grown weary. The council responded with some truth that the king “already had more land than he could maintain; it is not worthwhile to search for more.”
Failing to make headway in Portugal and Spain, Borri returned to Rome and pressed his case to the pope. He pressed it a little too hard. Della Valle reported that “In Rome, Father Borri had a lot of troubles with his superiors, who did not like his direct contacts with the pope.” He also had “great troubles with the Spaniards.” Della Valle does not specify the exact nature of these troubles, which may have involved com
plaints about his missionary activities or his behavior at court.
In the end Borri was removed from the Jesuit order. Della Valle said that he had received a papal dispensation to transfer to the Cistercian order (famous as brewers of the Trappist ales of Belgium). Others said that, in an echo of the dismissal from his teaching post that had long ago launched his career as a traveler, he had been drummed out of the order. It was also said that he wore out his welcome with the Cistercians within a few weeks, but won a court order protesting his dismissal.
“On his way to announce his victory in court to the prelate,” a priest wrote in a letter, “an accident happened, which put him into bed, where he died the following day.” The fatal “accident” was reported to have been a stroke. He was forty-nine. The year before his death he had published a book about Vietnam, called An Account of Cochin-China, and it is mainly for that artifact of an episode that he regarded as a sidetrack in his scientific career, rather than for the astronomical and navigational activities that he considered his life’s work, that he has been remembered, to the extent that he has been remembered at all. His correspondence with Pietro della Valle went unnoticed until it was discovered in the Vatican archives in 1947.
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