Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai

by Thomas Lockley

  Japão: The Jesuits’ lingua franca was Portuguese and they called Japan “Japão,” but they also sometimes used Iapam which is a name from old Portuguese, a word nearer to modern Galician (a Spanish regional language) than modern Portuguese. The revolutionary 1603–1604 dictionary Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam (written by the Jesuits and comprising 32,293 entries) contains two more entries for Japan: nifon and iippon. The title of the book, however, clearly gives the name: Iapam. (The letter J was not used regularly until the seventeenth century.) The early Mandarin Chinese name for Japan was Cipan (sun origin), but the Portuguese likely first heard the word Jipang being used in the islands of Southeast Asia. Over time, Cipan and Jipang and Iapam morphed into the English word “Japan.”

  The Black Ships: When the Portuguese conquered Goa, they conveniently found a thriving shipbuilding industry combined with an abundance of timber resources within easy distance. They co-opted, probably enslaved, the shipwrights and established secure supplies of wood, and were soon building all shapes and sizes of vessels, from longboats to galleys to huge oceangoing naos, which eventually exceeded one thousand tons. This meant that they did not have to rely on ships arriving from Europe and could swiftly increase their local maritime power through exploiting colonial resources and manpower. It is said these ships were constructed of a black-colored wood, hence the name by which they became known in Japan—“kurofune,” or “black ships.”

  Selected Bibliography

  Boxer, C. R. Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1948.

  Cooper, Michael. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965.

  Correia, Reis and Lage, Pedro. “Francisco Cabral and Lourenco Mexia in Macao (1582–1584): Two Different Perspectives of Evangelization in Japan.” Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies 15 (2007): 47–77.

  Fujita, Niel. Japan’s Encounter with Christianity: The Catholic Mission in Pre-Modern Japan. New York: Paulist Press, 1991.

  Gill, Robin. Topsy-Turvey 1585. Key Biscayne, FL: Paraverse Press, 2005.

  Moran, J. F. The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth Century Japan. Abingdon: Routledge, 1993.

  Russell-Wood, A. J. R. The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808. A World on the Move. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

  Souza, George. The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea 1630–1754. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

  Chapter 2

  “Italian”: Valignano would have called himself Neapolitan. The ruling family of the Spanish Empire, the Hapsburgs, had territories dotted throughout Europe and the world that they’d acquired by marriage or conquest, and Naples happened to be one of them at this time. Subjects from different parts of the Hapsburg empire would not have referred to themselves by their emperor’s name; they used their local appellation. The people we now know as “Spanish” would have said Castilian or Catalan, etc., depending on their birthplace.

  Jesuits in Japan: The Jesuits, during Yasuke’s time, were the only missionary order Rome allowed to preach in Japan. To keep this monopoly, they argued that other orders—the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians—would only misunderstand the knotty complications of the Japanese mission; that their meddling would simply undo all the good work already done by Ignatius’s followers. While other orders, particularly the Franciscans, were lobbying to be let in, Rome steadfastly maintained the Jesuit monopoly. When other orders did eventually gain access, the Jesuits were proved right, among the first martyrs of Japan were a group of Franciscans who had overstepped the mark in what was considered decent and respectful behavior. They were crucified for their actions.

  Jesuit missionaries had been active in Asia—what Europeans knew as “the Indies”—since only 1542. Attracted by travelers’ and merchants’ tales, Francis Xavier first landed in the port of Kagoshima, in the southernmost of the main Japanese islands, Kyushu, in 1549. While he may have held the Japanese in high regard and referred to them as “the best race yet discovered,” as a good Jesuit, he still made great efforts to debate and supplant their religion and philosophy. The Buddhist establishment there was not initially hostile to these strange foreigners with their outlandish ideas and dogma, merely curious to know more, wondering perhaps if it was a new version of their own beliefs. Although Xavier made only a few hundred converts prior to his death in 1552, he’d efficaciously laid the foundations of the Jesuit mission in Japan and sent back the first reliable information on the “mysterious country” to Europe. He also left behind several priests, brothers and converts to carry on his work, which they duly did. By the time Yasuke arrived in 1579, there’d been one hundred thousand conversions. It was a fine start to the business of soul saving. The Jesuits worked hard at their mission in Japan, and from the first, they made genuine efforts to spread the Word of God through helping the poor and people in need of aid. While this endeared them to those people, much of the wider population remained puzzled by this and tended to look down on such charitable actions: Why would people who claimed such high status demean themselves by consorting with lepers and outcasts? Well, the poor themselves clearly didn’t all see it that way and the Jesuits founded hospitals, leper colonies and orphanages to which many flocked.

  Jesuit schools: By the 1570s, in the Japanese domains that had been touched by the missions, there were Jesuit catechism classes, informal schools which taught their students to be good Catholics, and also literacy in Japanese and basic Latin prayers. It was a rare opportunity to read and write in an age of war and chaos when only those upon high normally could. Although they would receive occasional attention from visiting priests and brothers, it was the Japanese lay helpers who carried on the teaching day to day. The Jesuits believed in education, and extended it wherever they could. They’d opened their first school in Europe in 1548 and founded more than thirty within the next decade. These schools were intended to counter the Reformation, act as missionary beachheads and promote the veracity of Roman Catholic thought. They also sponsored and facilitated scholarship, knowledge creation and global publishing on a massive scale. Jesuit dictionaries and lexicons of native languages in seventeenth-century Asia and the Americas were the first resources Europeans used to understand these ancient tongues, and still provide modern scholars with many of the earliest reliable phonetic transcriptions. In the next two hundred years, they’d found more than eight hundred formal educational institutions worldwide, in addition to countless unrecorded community classes, becoming one of the largest nongovernmental educational organizations in human history. Today, they still run more than five hundred institutions. (Jesuit schools have educated, among others, Descartes, Voltaire, Molière, James Joyce, Peter Paul Rubens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fidel Castro, Alfred Hitchcock and Bill Clinton.)

  Hinoe Castle: The fact of Arima’s castle of Hinoe containing building material from plundered Buddhist temples is taken from archeological records. It is estimated that some forty temples and shrines were destroyed while Valignano stayed in Kuchinotsu. What had been a rough fortress in 1579 had, by 1590, become a palace, with both Chinese and European influence worked into its Japanese splendor. The sliding doors were painted with gold leaf, and summer scenes of the flora and fauna of the mountains adorned them. After opening these doors, the beautiful scenery of the Sea of Ariake dotted with islands could be seen. Fróis’s assessment in 1590 was: “All rooms, big and small, were decorated with golden objects and resplendent and gorgeous paintings. This mansion is located within a brilliantly completed castle that was recently built by Arima Harunobu.”

  Selected Bibliography

  Braga, J. M. “The Panegyric of Alexander Valignano S. J.” Monumenta Nipponica 5, no. 2 (1942): 523–535.

  Cooper, Michael. Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China. New York and Tokyo: Wea
therhill, 1974.

  Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.

  Farris, William Wayne. Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2009.

  Hesselink, Reinier. The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016.

  Massarella, Derek (Ed.) and J. F. Moran (trans.). Japanese Travelers in Sixteenth-Century Europe: A Dialogue Concerning the Mission of the Japanese Ambassadors to the Roman Curia. London: The Hakluyt Society, 2012.

  Chapter 3

  Yasuke’s origins: Pinpointing Yasuke’s origins in Africa is difficult. One secondary source, Solier, who wrote about Yasuke in the 1620s, stated that Yasuke was from Mozambique. There is no other evidence for this, and no prior source mentions it. The tribe in the immediate vicinity of the Portuguese-occupied island of Mozambique were called the Makua, a relatively peaceful agricultural people who had only migrated to the region in the 1570s. Until circa 1585, long after Yasuke had left, they managed a relatively conflict-free coexistence with the Europeans. While there were probably a few Makua slaves at Yasuke’s time, the record is unclear, and the peaceful nature of relations makes it less likely that he was a Makua, as slaves would more likely have come from people who were unfriendly to the Portuguese. The possibility that he was sold because his family was in dire straits and he was an unneeded mouth to feed also exists. There were several famines during the decade, but a family would normally sell a young child not a strong young man. Another problem with this theory is that slavers preferred children because they were easier to control and manipulate; Yasuke would have been eighteen or nineteen when Valignano passed through Mozambique, late in the day to be enslaved. Finally the Makua had a very distinctive culture of filing teeth into points, this would surely have been a remarkable fact to the Japanese of the time, and would probably have been mentioned. It is not. One final problem with the Mozambique origin theory is that the Portuguese slave trade from Mozambique was relatively small at this time; only around two hundred to five hundred people a year were forcibly transported to India. Between 1500 and 1850 the total number of enslaved people transported to Indian Ocean destinations from Mozambique is estimated to have been between forty thousand to eighty thousand. The Arab, Jewish, Guajarati and Turkish slave trade from Northeast Africa by contrast was far larger; over the course of history, an estimated eleven to fourteen million Northeast African people were sold.

  And then there is his height and extremely dark skin. Neither are characteristic of the peoples of the Mozambique region, who are generally smaller and have lighter-colored skin. But the north of Africa, integrated into the Indian Ocean slave trade, provides a people who sound far more like our description of Yasuke. The Dinka, for example, from what is now (in 2018) the world’s youngest state, South Sudan, are famously, on average, the tallest people in the world. They are also strong warriors who hold themselves well and are much darker skinned (all things said of Yasuke) than their neighbors, in modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. The Dinka are cattle herders and fierce warriors who in those days lived slightly farther north of their current lands on the banks of the Nile. They partake of distinctive facial scarring upon reaching adulthood, but Yasuke would probably have been taken before his coming of age rituals and therefore lacked these features. Slave raiders from what is now northern Sudan also raided the Dinka people at this time. The Dinka people only got their modern name in the nineteenth century, probably after being randomly assigned it by a British explorer or administrator. They call themselves the Jaang. Through process of elimination, I have concluded that Yasuke was a member of the Jaang people.

  The Age of the Country at War: The name The Age of the Country at War (Sengoku jidai in Japanese) harks back to an era of intensive warfare in ancient China which concluded with the victory of the state of Qin in 221 BCE and the submission of the other six independent states which formed the Chinese world of the time. This was the first unified Chinese Empire, and the Japanese historians who named their “Age of the Country at War” after it were seeking to legitimize their own state’s unification and nationhood by alluding to a classical example of a state forged in bloody conflict.

  The Jesuit printing press: The Jesuit press in Japan, exported from Lisbon on Valignano’s orders, became their most globally prolific in the final years of the sixteenth century, producing copies of European and Japanese texts in the thousands when most print runs in Europe only ran into the hundreds. It was removed to Macao when the Jesuits were expelled.

  Jesuit plotting: Despite their worldwide reach and willingness to do virtually anything to meet their goals in Christ, the Jesuits truly didn’t have any plots more sinister than the saving of souls at this time. Any dreams of global European imperial domination are retrospective. That said, the leading Jesuits were often members of the most exalted families of Europe, and political intrigue came quite naturally. They could rarely avoid using worldly means to achieve their otherworldly ends. Some of the more blusterous Portuguese Fidalgos and Spanish conquistador types, however, did have more nefarious plans, perhaps, seeing the Jesuits as their tools to make a beachhead in East Asia. But such plans were pie in the sky and the Spanish throne absolutely forbade them; provoking the Chinese or Japanese to war would result in the loss of the Philippines and other imperial territories and valuable trade, not to mention the potential massacre of tens of thousands of Christians. The King of Spain specifically forbade his subjects to fight with Japanese samurai.

  Selected Bibliography

  Allen, Richard B. European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014.

  Chatterjee, Indrani, and Eaton, Richard. Slavery and South Asian History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

  De Sousa, Lúcio. Daikokaijidai no nihonjin dorei (Japanese slaves of the Maritime Age). Tokyo: Chuko Sosho, 2017.

  Farris, William Wayne. Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2009.

  Fogel, Joshua A. Articulating the Sinosphere. Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

  Gordon, Murray. Slavery in the Arab World. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1989.

  Jansen, Marius. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000.

  Lorimer, Michael. Sengokujidai: Autonomy, Division and Unity in Later Medieval Japan. London: Olympia Publishers, 2008.

  Madut-Kuendit, Lewis Anei. The Dinka History: the Ancients of Sudan. Perth, Australia: Africa World Books, 2015.