Portugal · Japan · 1543–1650
A trilingual reference work on the Nanban century: every event, person, and turning point of the Portuguese-Japanese encounter, 1543–1650.
Background: Kanō Naizen, Nanban byōbu (detail), c. 1600 — Kobe City Museum
The Spine
The Archive
From the accidental landing on Tanegashima to the final expulsion after Shimabara, a comprehensive chronology of the key events, treaties, and turning points that defined a century of contact between two civilizations at opposite ends of the known world.
When Portuguese merchants introduced the matchlock arquebus in 1543, they unknowingly handed the warring daimyō a tool that would reshape Japanese warfare. Within decades, Japan possessed more firearms than any European nation.
In 1613, a one-eyed northern warlord sent his retainer across three oceans to negotiate with Philip III of Spain and Pope Paul V. The mission spanned seven years, three continents, and ended in failure, martyrdom, and a galleon sold off as a Spanish warship.
A 16th-century Portuguese fish-pickling technique, four centuries of dormancy, a postwar restaurant kitchen running out of ideas for leftover chicken breast, and a tartar sauce argument that split a city in two. This is how Japan got its favorite fried chicken.
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A gift of sharkskin and gunpowder that left two Tokugawa councillors asking who had sent it, a votive ship lost to a shrine fire, and a governorship that was a promotion and a dismissal in the same document. A Japanese merchant became one of Siam's most powerful men, and a 1942 schoolbook turned his career into a national glory it never actually claimed.
The parish that had once been forced to prove its abandonment of Christianity by trampling sacred images bought that very ground, spent 30 years raising a red-brick cathedral on it, and watched an atomic bomb tear the building down 20 years later. What followed was not a debate over whether Urakami mattered, but over whether a ruin or a working church proved it best.
A Japanese priest carried a Latin-dedicated book from Nagasaki to Rome, then apostatized at Ōmura in 1619 and spent a quarter century helping the magistracy that hunted down the missionaries who had trained him. He signed that Roman dedication presbyter, priest, and that single Latin word is nearly the only thing about his life that historians agree on.
What this project is, how it treats its sources, and why it exists in English, Portuguese, and Japanese.
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