Valignano’s views and writings on Africans—in conformity with most Europeans at the time—are even more damning. He wrote that Africans were people incapable of understanding Christianity. Strangers to all human refinement. Without talents. Of low intelligence. Lacking in culture. Given to savage ways. Born to serve. He’d reached these conclusions after only spending a very brief time on the island of Mozambique, mainly populated by Europeans and Arabs, during his journey from Portugal to India. These beliefs must have been part of the ideological baggage which he brought with him from Europe.
Despite this, Valignano still entrusted his life—and, thus, the security and future of the entire Japanese mission—to an African man.
* * *
The exact terms of Yasuke’s employment are not known.
Around the age of nineteen or twenty he had entered the powerful Jesuit’s service as a bodyguard-cum-valet. Likely trained in violence, as well as comportment and service, during his teenage years, Yasuke was already undoubtedly proficient and well versed in both professions. His was a high-status job among working folk. Serving a noble churchman such as Valignano would have brought considerable honor, and the opportunity for a comfortable living too. Selecting this role over other positions which might have been open to him was probably an obvious choice. If he’d had a choice. If a slave, he still was probably paid and had opportunities to get tips, etc.—a model of slavery closer to ancient Rome, where some slaves managed eventually to buy their freedom. Indeed, many Portuguese and Indian slaves of Yasuke’s time did too.
The Jesuits were a new, radically modern order, and (despite the trade they occasionally played some part in for financial gain) officially condemned the institution of slavery. Over the following two centuries, in some parts of the world, such as Brazil and Paraguay, they even organized and armed native peoples to resist European slavers. Valignano himself explicitly disapproved of slavery; though as a man of his time, did nothing to stop it and was convinced God’s work could not be done if the Jesuits did not have servants and slaves to do the more mundane chores. These everyday jobs included engaging in violence, something which priests could not be seen to do, and so this kind of unsavory but necessary activity had to be outsourced to someone like Yasuke.
Valignano, by all contemporary accounts, was somewhat lacking in the Jesuit spirits of poverty and humility and had little compassion for the poor or lower classes beyond the conversion of more souls for his balance sheet. His focus was on the upper reaches of society in general. Whatever Valignano’s personal views—and, whether or not he inwardly lacked the spirit of poverty—he’d sworn the Jesuit vows and could hardly be seen walking around with an actual symbol of either wealth or slavery. Accordingly, Yasuke was most likely not a slave as we understand the word today.
The most likely scenario is that Yasuke had won his freedom in India, through service in war or through the death of a previous master. He could then have been recommended to Valignano by a Portuguese go-between or been individually recruited as a freelancer. Another possibility is that he was bought, then manumitted, as a specialist military slave from a band of mercenaries or a local broker. In any case, he would have been following in the footsteps of many other Habshis—as African soldiers were called in India—who’d entered Portuguese and Jesuit service to boost Portugal and her missionary order’s ability to defend their interests around the world.
However, to be clear: Yasuke had been a slave once. There is little doubt he was violently abducted by other Africans as a child and brought to India to be a soldier by Arab, Persian or Indian slave merchants. Everywhere in the world in this era—Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe—where people could be found to be enslaved, they were. Europeans, Arabs, Indians, Japanese, Chinese and Africans all sold, bought and/or abducted people for domestic bondage or export. These slaves underpinned ruling-class power and middle-class lives, providing every conceivable service from brute force to sex, music to manual labor; they carried goods, farmed land and sailed ships. The Portuguese esteemed Africans as being the most “docile and obedient” slaves and much valued them for their strength and size. In later centuries, the French professed to prefer slaves from the Indian subcontinent for similar reasons. Racial profiling at its most vile.
Japan, too, was also a slave-trading society at this time. Both domestic and foreign humans were available for sale. Foreigners were also able to buy Japanese slaves from Japanese or Jesuit brokers, most often girls destined for concubinage, in Macao, India or beyond, but also boys to work on ships or like Yasuke, as slave soldiers. A Jesuit source noted in 1598, “Even the [Indian sailors] and servants of the Portuguese are buying up [Japanese] slaves and selling them in Macao.” Valignano himself wrote, “who can bear with equanimity that [Japanese] people have ended up scattered all over the heathen kingdoms of the world, [home to] abject peoples of false religions given over to vice. Not only must they suffer bitter servitude among black barbarians, but also be filled with false creeds,” from which it can be inferred that African and Indian Muslims (“false creeds”) on Portuguese ships, were among the buyers. Despite their indignant tone, the Jesuits, at least in the earlier years of the Japanese mission, were also involved in this trade, certifying that slaves had been taken in a “legal” way and possibly even selling war orphans in their care.
The existence of Japanese slaves was a sensitive one because of its illegality in Portuguese law (to which the Jesuits were subject due to their sponsorship by the King of Portugal), Valignano’s immediate goals of charming rather than annoying his Japanese hosts, and because the Japanese were “white folk.” He explained that Muslims were different. “Since they are barbarians, and enemies of Christianity, they remain in perpetual slavery if they are taken prisoner after battle.” By Valignano’s logic, it was acceptable to enslave non-Christians, especially Muslims, and enforce their conversion to save their souls. Better a chained soul saved for God’s Kingdom than a free heathen, was Valignano’s strongly held view.
Slaves were also regularly imported, brought back to Japan from pirate raids in China, Korea and even farther afield, as well as being purchased from Europeans who brought them from as far away as Africa. In 1613, a Spanish embassy to Japan ran out of funds and they decided to sell all their valuables to a Japanese buyer. This included “a black man and the mattresses of his bed.”
The forms of slavery extant in Asia were perhaps different from the present-day image of what bondage entails, which is largely formed by the later Atlantic slave trade. While their bondage was equally degrading and tumultuous for the individuals concerned, slaves in Japan and much of Asia owned possessions, experienced a degree of freedom and were often even freed, adopted into the owner’s family or married to a family member. Some eventually became rich and respected members of their local communities.
But what was it to be a slave or bonded to a master in an age where all mankind served someone else? Everybody had a master or a patron, and was beholden to others for promotion, work, shelter, food and even basic survival. The exact social structure differed widely among different cultures, but a person who was truly “free” in modern terms was probably someone who would starve quickly, die from exposure or be prey to violence. To “be free” was to lack a master or patron who extended his or her power—to feed, employ, physically protect or house—on your behalf, however self-interested the motives for said protection often were. (Thus the hopeless panic which results when characters like Romeo or Dante are banished from their cities and lords; they lose everything.) Although the Jesuits probably sold orphans who were in their care, they would have done this for what they saw as good reasons: once the child was grown, he or she needed a patron, and the institution of slavery provided a last resort in this respect.
The true evil in slavery though, was the abduction, the rape, cruel punishments, the enforced migration, the slaughter in Africa and other victimized regions of an estimated ten people for e
ach slave who survived to be sold. And, in many parts of the world, the absolute lack of human status afforded those enslaved. To southern Europeans in particular, a slave was considered little higher than an animal and the slave’s master had absolute right over whether he or she lived or died. Again, in the sixteenth century everyone had a master and it was highly undesirable to be “free” in the sense we understand the word today. But, to be a slave was something else. It was to be treated as subhuman.
While in Valignano’s retinue, Yasuke was clearly not treated so. Most of his contemporaries counted themselves lucky to be fed, clothed and housed—often this sufficed as “wages.” Yasuke himself did rather better than food and shelter. He was probably paid, and certainly well dressed, managed to receive some education, and was armed to the teeth with well-made weapons. And of course, all of these things made his ability to serve Valignano that much greater. A man of Valignano’s stature could not be seen to be served and protected by a poorly armed beggar in rags. This was especially important in Japan, where, to protect their dignity and station, the servants of a lord were themselves supposed to look like great men so as not to dishonor their masters.
* * *
At the end of 1579, Valignano was making a brief visit to the Amakusa Islands, just south of Kuchinotsu, and one of the oldest and most successful missions, where most of the population had been peaceably converted. While there, a message packet arrived all the way from the mission in Kyoto, with news of a setback for the Jesuit mission.
Oda Nobunaga, the mighty warlord whose name tolled like a heavy bell over every conversation—and on whose interest and protection the Jesuits depended upon to keep the Kyoto mission going—had apparently suffered an embarrassing defeat. Rather, his second son had; defying his father to invade a tiny province, Iga, which the son had believed would be a pushover. Done, the boy claimed, for the “greater glory” of his father and to add to the provinces that the family controlled. Instead, the wily peasants there had thrashed him, killing thousands of Nobunaga’s troops and sending the powerful warlord’s son scampering home again with his tail between his legs. Iga remained independent, they had seen off the latest in a long line of would-be invaders largely defeated by men and women called shinobi.
Or, sometimes known as ninja.
The Jesuits had heard rumors of these ninja from the locals and Japanese warriors. But this was the first time official correspondence recognized their existence. They were known to the Japanese as the deadliest of assassins. Some said they weren’t really men at all or that they could change into beasts or ghouls during battle. Some called them ghosts, others claimed they could make themselves invisible and walk on water like the Lord Jesus. They specialized in stealth and mountain-forest fighting, although they were by no means limited to this terrain. They could, so it was claimed, swoop though the sky like bats, drop from treetops like spiders and burst from the undergrowth like deadly boar. They could make any item into a weapon, and the females specialized in using hairpins and chopsticks on their victims. They could see through walls and strike their opponents through doors. Most of the time no one knew they had attacked until after the dead were discovered.
Just the year before, it was told, a great lord in the north, Uesugi Kenshin, was killed by a ninja while sitting in his latrine. The assassin had supposedly waited in the stinking pit below all night for his chance and the killing stroke went straight up the sphincter and into the lord’s stomach. Kenshin, they say, did not die immediately, but took four days to perish in extreme agony. The ninja had probably drowned in the cesspit after poisoning himself. That was what they did, rather than be captured. Unlike normal warriors, they allegedly killed only for money, and had no honor beyond what they were paid. They were a hardy folk who gave little value to their own lives or even those of their families. They served for the greater good of their clans, to earn money to survive in their inhospitable lands. Selling their services was the only way the community could survive; the individual meant nothing. Ironically, it was said to be Lord Nobunaga himself who paid the ninja’s fee for that particular assassination.
The stories seemed absurd, but: What if they were true?
* * *
In the spring of 1580, Yasuke moved with Valignano to Nagasaki.
The port city, gifted months before to the Jesuits, was now entirely under Valignano’s control. The teen lord, Arima, after months of waiting, had finally been baptized. Conversions continued apace. Now it was time to focus on the first Jesuit-controlled colony in Japan.
God may have made the earth and waters, but Valignano and his highly educated Jesuit team made Nagasaki. He worked with engineers, sailors, planners and local merchants to expand on the existing basic infrastructures and build a seaport which was to become the foothold and foundation of an entirely Catholic Japan.
Within a year of the Jesuits taking full control, the population had doubled—a hybrid seaport of Japanese, Chinese, Europeans, Indians and Africans. The town now comprised around four hundred households and was bursting with Christian-convert migrants from all over the country, a much-increased permanent foreign presence, and ever more refugees displaced by local warfare—warfare provoked, to a certain extent, by the Jesuits’ presence in the region.
Nagasaki Harbor in the early nineteenth century, by Phillip von Siebold. The central focus of the picture is the Dutch trading post of Dejima. Moored near it to the right are two European ships and numerous smaller Japanese vessels. To the left, near the Chinese warehouses (now Nagasaki China Town) are two Chinese junks.
The port blossomed on imports of silk, guns, exotic and religious products, and exports of silver, sulfur and slaves. In turn, Nagasaki had become a thriving, multicultural port city, with all the problems and tensions that can ensue from such success. Community relations were often strained, and misbehaving mariners fought indignant locals out of arrogant pride or because they were starving and had stolen food. The fact that, by law, only Catholics could live in Nagasaki did not, it would seem, guarantee Christian brotherhood. A still-graver concern was the threat of the fiercely anti-Catholic Ryūzōji (still besieging Lord Arima’s castle) to the north and the Satsuma clan to the south; although a wary peace seemed to be holding.
Under Valignano’s orders, Nagasaki had been fortified with wooden walls, with plans for stone replacements when more funds became available. The fortifications also now boasted bastions, moats and multiple gun ports. To man his walls and guns, Valignano needed men, and the process of arming the Christians of his new town proceeded apace.
In the less threatening atmosphere of walled Nagasaki, Yasuke’s role changed slightly. One of his new jobs was to help train the militia, a ragged collection of refugees and masterless warriors, ronin, who’d recently embraced the Catholic cause. In time, these men would become a force to be reckoned with.
But Valignano, of course, conceived and planned far beyond just military matters. Several new churches also appeared. A new hospital, poorhouse and orphanage. And outside the city proper, there was even a burgeoning leper colony—the sign of a truly growing town. It was well-known that Jesuits looked after the poor and other unfortunates, so both groups flocked from afar. During certain festivals, the priests even symbolically washed the feet of representative paupers in public.
Outside the city walls, per Japanese convention, in Kawatamachi across the Nakajima River, lived the outcast butchers and leather workers. (Outcast because their association with death meant their business was considered “impure.”) As most leather came via Chinese ships, particularly from Siam (Thailand), Nagasaki quickly became a center of these industries. Here, Yasuke browsed and bought bows, armor, arrows and—most heartening of all, a staple from his childhood—meat. A rarity in Japan, though available widely in Nagasaki for Chinese people, other foreign residents and Christians.
Aside from the products in Kawatamachi, Yasuke would have found plenty to do in Nagasak
i, already far bigger than other towns he had visited in Japan up to this point, to occupy his few spare hours. He’d have hunted for deer and boar in the mountains, fished in the sea and rivers, made and met friends of all sorts, and likely, again, enjoyed a romantic liaison or two. There were plenty of eating and drinking establishments and nonromantic sexual release was easy to find within the walls and across the city limits, in Ōmura’s domain.
Surveying it all perched the new Jesuit headquarters, a well-fortified compound on top of a strategic promontory commanding the entrance to the entire harbor. It was essentially a fortress, separate from the main city fortifications, and guarded by Valignano’s local Catholic militia. A final stronghold should the need ever arise. It was a beautiful building, constructed in the Japanese style, and something between a palace and a temple. At the foot of the promontory was a brand new pier jutting out from the beach beneath the stronghold, for easy access to the sea.
Not only was the mission compound a place of religious worship, but much of the town’s business took place there as the Jesuits now had their fingers in almost every transaction in the region. One observer described it as being “like the Customs House of Sevilla” in Spain. Deals were concluded, contracts witnessed and signed, and merchandise—including humans—were bought and sold. It was the city hall, guild hall, corn exchange and main church all rolled into one and people were in and out all the time. A challenge for the bodyguard, but nothing Yasuke couldn’t handle. He would have known the Japanese language well by now, better, in fact, than Valignano. More importantly, he would have felt he’d earned Valignano’s trust. Knew his moods and habits, his disinclinations and even, now, some limitations.
Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai Page 7