Pacheco, Diego. “The Founding of the Port of Nagasaki and its Cession to the Society of Jesus.” Monumenta Nipponica 25, no. 3/4 (1970): 303–323.
Saunders, A.C. de C. M. A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Üçerler, Antoni. J. “Alessandro Valignano: man, missionary, and writer.” Renaissance Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 337–366.
Chapters 4 & 5
The Jesuits and drama: All around the world, the Jesuits were also strong believers in the power of theatre and drama to bring bible stories and the message of Jesus to life. Japan was no exception. The plays were performed with elaborate music and dance, often in the dark, and lit by lanterns and torches that were designed to keep out the literal and spiritual dark and show the central message of The Light. These became key events, cementing the central role of missions in lives and communities, even “uncomprehending converts,” perhaps simply following their patriarch’s, headman’s or lord’s order to become Christian, got a living, breathing expression of the concept they had professed during baptism. Divinity lived and could be seen. School children and local people took part and viewed them with gusto. One can only imagine the wonder with which these plays were greeted in small and extremely remote Japanese fishing villages and mountain communities, far from the domainal capitals and castle towns where any form of theatrical entertainment normally took place. In a way that would not be possible through words or pictures, until the printing press arrived from Europe in 1590 and started to mass-produce Christian artwork and texts, the message of the Bible came to life and worked its way into the people’s hearts through performance. The most popular were the Christmas plays, and the first one took place in Ōtomo Sōrin’s territory, Bungo, in 1560. Thousands are said to have traveled from miles around to see the story of Adam and Eve enacted by local Japanese Catholics. A tree sporting golden apples was placed in the middle of the stage, and so “real” was the performance that when Lucifer tempted Eve beneath the apple tree, the audience burst into tears. Things only got worse when an angel appeared and led Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. As a finale, the angel reappeared and consoled the weeping playgoers with news of a distant day of salvation. Yasuke must also have enjoyed these dramas, a release from the often-monotonous work of his everyday life; perhaps he even joined in the acting. Balthazar, one of the three kings who attended Jesus’ birth was, after all, traditionally depicted as a black-skinned Ethiopian.
Nagasaki prostitution: The Nagasaki region was poverty stricken and difficult to farm, and has borne the reputation for centuries of selling its daughters, and sometimes sons, into prostitution, permanently or as a temporary measure to raise a dowry for a good marriage, a reputation that continued well into the twentieth century. The fact that it was a port city with a widely fluctuating and wealthy population from all over the world simply added to a historic issue of poverty, capitalistic craving and human trafficking. Both poor women themselves and their families often jumped at the chance to escape poverty and to share in the riches of trade seemingly everywhere around them.
Images of Africans: Later, pictures of non-Asians (both black and white) would show them as devil-like beings, but the pictures during this early period of contact before Christianity came to be seen as a threat, seem to be remarkably nondiscriminatory. They show the “exotic” habits, clothes, behavior and racial characteristics in a generally unprejudiced, but clearly fascinated, way.
Blackened teeth: Ohaguro was a fashion for painting teeth black for cosmetic purposes, which persisted in Japan from ancient times until the nineteenth century. Women normally did it after they had married, but high-class men such as imperial court aristocrats and senior samurai also partook. Teeth were varnished with a lacquer made of iron filings, which needed to be reapplied several times a week, somewhat similar to modern-day nail varnish. The people in the fishing villages where Yasuke initially lived would probably not have had the time or resources to paint their teeth in this manner, but Lord Arima’s court would have, so Yasuke would have encountered it soon after arriving in Japan. He may also have been aware of the practice from living in Macao.
Selected Bibliography
De Sousa, Lúcio. Daikokaijidai no nihonjin dorei (Japanese slaves of the Maritime Age). Tokyo: Chuko Sosho, 2017.
De Sousa, Lúcio. The Jewish Diaspora and the Perez Family Case in China, Japan, the Philippines, and the Americas (16th Century). Macao: Macao Foundation, 2015.
Fogel, Joshua A. Articulating the Sinosphere. Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Josephson, Jason Ananda. The Invention of Religion in Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Kang, David C. East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Keevak, Michael. Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Nelson, Thomas. “Slavery in Medieval Japan.” Monumenta Nipponica 59, no. 4 (2004): 463–492.
Turnbull, Stephen. Ninja: AD 1460–1650. Oxford: Osprey, 2003.
Turnbull, Stephen. Katana: The Samurai Sword. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2011.
Turnbull, Stephen. Ninja: Unmasking the Myth. Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2017.
Chapter 6
Marriage and divorce: Yasuke arrived in 1579, an interesting time for sexual relations in Japan. Despite long exposure to Chinese ideas, society was still in the process of absorbing Confucian ethics of human relations, where women take a decidedly inferior role to males. However, it had probably not taken serious root among the less educated lower and rural classes. Buddhism had also become popular among the lower classes over the previous few centuries and the emphasis it puts on perceived female pollution may also have been having an effect on how society saw women and women saw themselves. In 1579, Catholicism, with its very foreign concepts of marriage and sexual relations had only a small hold in Kyushu and central Japan, but there seems to be little indication that many male converts chose to follow the missionaries’ teachings on having only one sexual partner. Indeed, why should they when they saw the foreign Catholics, and later Protestants, who lived in Japan ignoring them with abandon? Following local custom, the foreign visitors commonly took a temporary wife and then paid her off at the end of their stay. That money became her dowry, so that she could take a more stable local husband and have a family. At this point in history it does not seem to have damaged a woman’s reputation to have had sexual relations with a foreigner. Japanese and foreign men who could afford it often had one principle wife (polygamy in Japan was rare), but several concubines; the temporary visitors to Japan simply took temporary “wives,” and “divorced” them at the end of their stay. Japanese men who had reason to live in different places at different times of the year, for example, merchants, also followed this practice and men who were exiled abroad, for example to the Amami Islands (which only officially became part of Japan much later) often took a local wife too.
But what were the older ways that still exercised such a powerful influence on the Japan that Yasuke knew? Firstly, this era was seeing the lowest point in the status of women in a region that had since ancient times held female status in high regard with clear property and inheritance rights, wide participation in economic and military activity, relative sexual freedom for both sexes, high rates of divorce by either party and remarriage among other things. We now see these things as modern, but various parts of the world knew them of old. From 1300, this status began to fall and by Yasuke’s time, wives were going to live with their husband’s family instead of staying with their own, inheritance was largely the privilege of an elder son, divorce by the male was more common than the female, property rights were reduced and dowries became commonplace. Still the Jesuits were shocked at the degree of freedom that women enjoyed, fr
eedom of movement without a husband’s permission, high levels of female literacy (the fact that literate females were respected), the commonplaceness of makeup and beautification (among both sexes), and the degree to which women were able to refuse an arranged marriage and enjoyed certain sexual freedoms. They also noted that the higher up the social scale, the less equal intersex relations were; i.e., a peasant couple were basically equal but aristocratic ladies far from it.
Mori clan drives out Catholics: The Mori clan of western Honshu were originally a minor family in the shadow of the far more powerful Ouchi clan, but by the 1550s, the Ouchi’s day was done and in 1557 they were destroyed by the Mori, who took their capital city of Yamaguchi. The Jesuits had set up one of their first missions there in 1550 and around five hundred local people had been quickly converted. It is said that the first ever Japanese Christmas mass was in fact celebrated there in 1552. The Mori were not impressed with the headway made by the Jesuits and expelled them forthwith.
Sea Lords: They were often simply called pirates in Japanese, kaizoku, and wokou, Japanese bandits (or dwarf bandits) in Chinese. Sea Lords is the name modern scholarship assigns them. They were generally peripheral peoples who came under no central land-based control until just around Yasuke’s time when they were being co-opted into “legitimate” state structures and land-based norms of hierarchy.
Selected Bibliography
Cooper, Michael. Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1974.
Fujita, Niel. Japan’s Encounter with Christianity: The Catholic Mission in Pre-Modern Japan. New York: Paulist Press, 1991.
Nawata Ward, Haruko.Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650. Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.
Ōta, Gyūichi (J. S. A. Elisonas & J. P. Lamers, Trs. and Eds.). The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2011.
Shapinsky, Peter. Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
Turnbull, Stephen. The Samurai: A Military History. London: Routledge, 1977.
Turnbull, Stephen. Pirate of the Far East 811–1639. Oxford: Osprey, 2007.
Chapter 7
Pirate attacks: Japanese pirates were known around the world to be tenacious fighters. One particular example was that of an English ship overrun off Singapore in 1604, which managed to contain a raiding pirate band in its own main cabin after a long fight. After four further hours of siege, the English realized the pirates would fight until the last man and ultimately used their cannon to destroy a portion of their own ship; all the pirates died.
Rocket launchers: After the end of the Korean invasions in the 1590s, the Japanese government sent a mission to find out more about these rockets, as they’d been so deadly. They also appear to have been on Japanese pirates’ ships in Yasuke’s time, a decade or more earlier.
Ama: The “sea women” divers have a history stretching back several millennia. Until the 1960s, the ama dived wearing only a loincloth or nothing at all, and still today dive without the aid of scuba equipment. They are best known for pearl diving, but traditionally dived for anything of saleable value, including shellfish, coral and kelp. Today, a few women still ply this trade, but the harshness of the environment and availability of other work means this ancient profession dwindles by the generation.
Selected Bibliography
Cooper, Michael. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965.
Kataoka, Yakichi. “Takayama Ukon.” Monumenta Nipponica 1, no. 2 (1938): 451–464.
Petrucci, Maria Grazia. In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Islands of the Gods: A Reappraisal of Konishi Ryusa, a Merchant, and Konishi Yukinaga, a Christian Samurai in Sixteenth-century Japan. Unpublished Masters thesis, The University of British Columbia, 2002.
Shapinsky, Peter. Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
Society of Jesus. Cartas que os padres e irmãos da Companhia de Jesus escreverão dos reynos de Japão e China II (Letters written by the fathers and brothers of the Society of Jesus from the kingdoms of Japan and China—Volume I). Evora, Portugal: Manoel de Lyra, 1598.
Turnbull, Stephen. Pirate of the Far East 811–1639. Oxford: Osprey, 2007.
Watsky, Andrew M. “Politics, and Tea. The Career of Imai Sokyu.” Monumenta Nipponica 50, no. 1 (1995): 47–65.
Chapter 8
Kyoto: Kyoto’s location and layout were originally chosen primarily for their auspicious properties as defined by geomancy (hōgaku or hōi in Japanese) and magical divination. These spiritual antecedents had practical advantages too—the rivers and southern valleys allowed positive energy to flow from favorable directions, but also trade goods. The mountains blocked malicious spirits and evil from disrupting human affairs but also acted as defensive barriers and sources of natural resources. Water to the north, Lake Biwa, channeled prosperous currents, and also acted as a useful trade route connecting Kyoto with the north coast and abundant marine produce, particularly mackerel. Kyoto was founded as Heian-kyo, meaning the “capital of tranquility and peace” when Emperor Kammu moved the Japanese capital there from Nagaokakyō in 794, and was conceived on an enormous scale. Chinese and Japanese architects, engineers, soothsayers and diviners laid out the city and its key buildings on Chinese lines, an enormous grid system of twelve hundred blocks of uniform size. The main entrance to the south was the great Rajōmon gate, which opened on the imposing Suzaku Avenue that bisected the city. The wide boulevard’s northern terminus was the Imperial Palace, whose compound housed both ceremonial and residential buildings and additional structures, such as the Court of Abundant Pleasures, a pavilion designed for banqueting and entertainments. Civil space was reserved for two large public markets, as well as for merchant and artisan quarters in the lower city. High nobility and other aristocratic families were allotted land for residences according to rank in the upper city. Over the next ten centuries, the city had been called Kyo, Miyako, or Kyo no Miyako; and in the eleventh century, the city was renamed Kyoto (capital city), and all of the appellations essentially used Japanese renderings of the Chinese character for capital. Even after the seat of imperial power was moved to Tokyo in 1868, there remained a view—persisting to modern times—that Kyoto was still the spiritual and cultural capital of Japan. In 1945, Kyoto was the initial target for the “Fat Man” atomic bomb. However, several senior American generals knew Japan well enough to argue that destroying cherished Kyoto would make it impossible for the Japanese to ever forgive or work beside the Americans. The room agreed and another target on the list was ultimately chosen instead: Kokura, to the northeast of Nagasaki.
African or African American women in Japan: When Yokohama, near Tokyo, opened for foreign trade in 1859, large numbers of foreign people came to live there. Among these were the first black, believed to be African American, women who were described by the famous artist Utagawa Sadahide as very hard workers. He portrayed them in a famous artwork in which he anthropologically recorded conditions among the foreigners.
The Kanō School: The Kanō School was the dominant Japanese school of artistry from the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Artists often created work in teams, under a leading artisan, often a member of the original Kanō family. Typical subjects were scenes from nature and from Chinese classics. However, around 1590, the great works that we can see in this chapter, depicting multicultural life in Nagasaki, began to be created. They are called nanban byobu, or “southern barbarian folding screens.”
Southern barbarian was the term by which the Japanese referred to southern Europeans, Africans and Indians because they approached Japan from the south on Portuguese ships. The term southern barbarian itself is Chinese and originally ref
erred to the people of the South China Seas. The Japanese were often called “eastern barbarians” by the Chinese.
Selected Bibliography
Berry, Mary Elizabeth. The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Curvelo, Alexandra. Nanban Folding Screen Masterpieces: Japan-Portugal XVIIth Century. Paris: Editions Chandeigne, 2015.
Elison, George and Bardwell Smith (Eds.). Warlords, Artists and Commoners: Japan in the Sixteenth Century. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981.
Farris, William Wayne. Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2009.
Screech, Timon. “The Black in Japanese Art: From the beginnings to 1850.” In The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art, edited by David Bindman and Suzanne Preston Blier, 325–340. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Society of Jesus. Cartas que os padres e irmãos da Companhia de Jesus escreverão dos reynos de Japão e China II (Letters written by the fathers and brothers of the Society of Jesus from the kingdoms of Japan and China—Volume II). Evora, Portugal: Manoel de Lyra, 1598.
Chapter 9
“The Black Monk from Christian”: By the time of Yasuke’s arrival in Japan, the Japanese concept of the world had developed quite considerably, or rather that of the ruling classes had. The Jesuits brought the first globes to Japan sometime in the 1570s, and it is known that Nobunaga treasured his and spoke at length with foreigners like Yasuke whom he met. Nobunaga (and the other high-ranking Japanese lords) would have been as conversant in world geography as most European rulers of the time.
However, outside ruling circles, old parlances would have proliferated. The traditional way of describing the world was gosankoku (The Three Countries), meaning China, Japan and India, and by extension, in traditional thought, the known “civilized” world. The traditional Asian worldview was centered on China, the Sinosphere. The very characters that make up the name for China in the Japanese language (and in many other East Asian languages) mean “the central kingdom” or sometimes “central effervescence.” Culturally, this remained the same in Yasuke’s day, but the Chinese had definitively rejected Japan diplomatically and commercially in the first half of the sixteenth century and this forced Japan to look farther afield for resources and markets. Ironically, this set off a great century of Japanese seafaring and commercial expansion in Asia and, to a certain extent, as far afield as Europe, with the help of the Jesuits. Introducing Yasuke as the “Black monk from Christian,” was a sign that the speaker, and Nobunaga’s court, were aware of a world outside the Sinosphere, and that Yasuke was from Christendom.
Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai Page 38