In the Beginning .... Part One.

 

 

Arrival of the Portuguese  1543
Painted according to traditional Japanese iconography;
the foreigners bring the treasure of health and happiness.

The first Europeans to arrive in Japan did so by accident rather than design. In 1543, a Portuguese ship was blown off course by a typhoon, shipwrecking the crew on an island called Tanegashima off the south-western coast of Japan. Somewhere, there will be a whole narrative describing the sailors’ unexpected lives on a Japanese island but suffice it to say now, that the Portuguese, ever the market traders, quite soon established more formal, commercial traffic through the major port of Nagasaki and again, in the vanguard of the contemporary imperative for Christianity to conquer the world, in 1549, the Jesuit priest, Father Francis Xavier ( 1506-1552) arrived to found the first Christian mission in Japan and begin a centuries-long connection between the Jesuits and Japan.

'Foreigners' arriving in Nagasaki
wearing strange clothes.

Saint Francis Xavier 1506-1552
Co-founder of the Jesuits

The Portuguese also introduced new forms of artistic expression to Japan such as oil painting, the organ, theatre and literature. The Japanese created original works inspired by Portuguese culture like the namban byobu which depicted scenes from the lives of the Portuguese in Japan and the nanban bungaku reflecting on the cultural and religious differences between the two peoples. Music too was an area of cultural exchange; the Jesuits taught the Japanese, Gregorian chant and polyphonic music and the use of musical instruments such as the organ, violin and flute.

Japanese depiction of the Portuguese
as 'the other', wearing eccentric
balloon-like trousers.

The fascination aroused by the arrival of the Europeans is revealed in many objects of late sixteenth/early seventeenth cultural objects such as in decorated screens, flasks and stirrups. These decorations usually showed what the artist imagined the object or person to resemble, they never having seen an actual foreigner or a specific foreign object. In the images here, the Portuguese are shown with long noses and balloon-like trousers on a screen produced in Kyoto, the capital, not in Nagasaki where the nanban-jin, the foreigners, had arrived. Similarly, in the image on the screen [above] depicting the arrival of the Portuguese, their ship is shown bringing wealth and happiness from over the seas while the sailors are the bearers of good fortune; all of this is

in accordance with  traditional Japanese iconography.

17th century Japanese matchlock musket,
copied from the Portuguese.

But the Portuguese also brought modern weapons like the matchlock guns and these sophisticated killing arms had a significant impact during the Japanese civil war in the early Edo period, 1615-1868. Japan’s feuding warlords quickly recognised the power of the matchlock and within a decade, guns were being produced in Japan in large numbers. Traditional Japanese armour was relatively powerless against the new guns and so heavier, Western armour-plate was widely copied.

Traditional Japanese helmet and
neck guard.

The arrival of Christianity had a profound effect on Japan. Father Francis’s mission became the most successful in Asia and by the early 1590s, there were an estimated 215,000 Japanese Christians. The
Imperial Regent of Japan, Toyotomi Hideoshi (1537-1598) began to sense that this popular Christian God was a threat to his authority, and he issued a decree expelling all Christians, which, though never fully carried out, triggered the persecution and executions of Christians under the later rule of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616) and his successors, culminating in the outlawing of Christianity in 1614 and the execution of thousands of martyrs, among them the 26 saints of Japan who were crucified at Nagasake in 1597. In 1637/8, following a failed Christian uprising, all Japanese Christians were forced to renounce their religion or be executed as Christianity presented a perceived threat. During this period, Japanese Christians kept their faith secret, forming communities of Kakure Kirishitan, hidden Christians, who survived for centuries without contact with the outside world.

 Franciscan missionaries
persecuted in Japan 1597.

 From 1639, under the sakoku or ‘closed country’ policy, all Portuguese were forbidden entry to the country as were missionaries, and most foreign trade was prohibited. This policy of national seclusion, sakoku, was considered essential to maintaining political stability under the Tokugawa Shogunate and continued for almost two centuries with trade restricted to Chinese and Dutch merchants only. The Dutch were seen as less of a political threat than other Europeans, as they were primarily interested in trade and did not attempt to convert the Japanese to Christianity.

Japanese women and Dutch traders await the arrival
of a Dutch ship being towed into harbour at Dejima.