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
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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.
Arriving in Kagoshima in 1549, the Navarrese co-founder of the Society of Jesus launched one of the most ambitious evangelization campaigns in history. His two years in Japan set the course for decades of religious and cultural transformation.
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.
The annual carrack from Macau to Nagasaki was the lifeline of Nanban commerce. Carrying Chinese silk, European curiosities, and Jesuit missionaries, these vessels, among the largest afloat, shaped the economic and cultural fabric of the exchange.
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A shogun who listened for three days and nights, a servant who crossed the world and came back with an answer, and a single quoted paragraph in an English history book of 1903 that is the only evidence any of it happened. Ibi Masayoshi was sent by Tokugawa Hidetada to inspect Christianity in Europe, and the archives of two continents have never produced his name.
On a June afternoon in 1613, a ship called the Clove anchored in a small Kyushu harbour and a captain named John Saris stepped ashore carrying a letter from King James I, a cargo of unsold broadcloth, and a grudge against the only Englishman in Japan. Ten years later, the English would sail away in debt, in disgrace, and in tears.
How a Portuguese physician with a cut-off tongue talked his way into a patriarchate
A posthumous orphan, a boy-king obsessed with crusade, and a catastrophic death in Morocco, how one man's medieval fantasies in Lisbon reshaped the future of Christianity in Japan
What this project is, how it treats its sources, and why it exists in English, Portuguese, and Japanese.
About the project →The books behind the articles — an annotated reading list of the essential scholarship on the Nanban century.
Browse the bibliography →Occasional updates on new articles and research findings. No spam.