No Descendant Shall Remain: The Fourth Sakoku Decree and the Deportation of Nagasaki's Children, 1636

Fine Weather, Variable Winds

The Deportation of 287 People from Nagasaki in October 1636

On the morning of 20 October 1636 the weather over Nagasaki harbor was fine and the wind was variable, which is known because the Dutch wrote down the weather every day whether anything happened or not. It was the habit of a trading company that measured the world in sailing days. That week the entry ran longer than usual.

Four Portuguese galliots lay at anchor off the new island in the harbor, loading for Macao. They were the same vessels that came every summer with raw silk and left every autumn with silver, sailing on a schedule that no captain and no shogun could alter, because the monsoon set it. What they took aboard over those three days, alongside the silver, was 287 people.

They were the children of Portuguese men and Japanese women, born in Nagasaki, most of them raised there. With them went their mothers, and the women who had lived for years in Portuguese households without benefit of a sacrament that anyone in Japan was permitted to administer, and the Japanese foster parents who had taken such children in. The last group had been sentenced to death and then reprieved, on the sole condition that they leave the country forever with the children they had adopted.

The loading took three days, 20, 21 and 22 October. Nobody hurried. The wind was variable, the weather held, and the boats went out to the galliots in the ordinary way that boats had gone out to Portuguese ships in that harbor for sixty years.

Then the fleet sailed, and the mixed Portuguese and Japanese population of Japan's principal international port ceased, administratively, to exist.

The order under which this was done had been promulgated four months earlier, on 22 June 1636, by the shogun's council of state. It ran to eighteen points in the original. Two of them concerned children.

The Letters in the Sailor's Chest

The 1634 Paulo dos Santos Letters and the Nagasaki Smuggling Scandal

The chain that ended at the waterline began, as these things often do, with a man trying to collect a debt.

In September 1634 the Nagasaki magistracy searched an arriving Portuguese ship and found two letters written in Japanese, carried by a sailor named Luís Gouveia Botelho. Both had been written that July in Macao. Both were signed by Paulo dos Santos, a Japanese diocesan priest who had been deported from Japan two decades earlier in the general expulsion of the clergy, and who had spent the intervening years in the Portuguese colony watching his investments.

The first letter, dated 12 July 1634, was addressed to a Nagasaki merchant named Kagaya Shichibee. It reminded him that on a voyage in 1632 he had called at Macao and taken aboard three picos of Tonkin raw silk, roughly 181 kilograms, along with a hundred rolls of Cantonese damask, to be sold in Japan on the priest's account. Dos Santos wanted his profits. The second letter, dated the following day, made a similar approach to another Nagasaki merchant, Nakaya Mataemon.

What the magistrates had in their hands was not a devotional document. It was a commercial dunning notice from an exiled priest to his silent partners, and it demonstrated that the banished Church still owned a stake in the Japan trade.

The interrogations opened out from there, in the manner of interrogations. Kagaya Shichibee turned out to be no marginal figure but one of the wealthiest men in the city, a Dejima-chōnin, one of the merchant investors then financing the construction of the island in the harbor. The ship used for the 1632 run had been fitted out two years earlier by Jerónimo de Macedo, a former Portuguese Captain-Major who had been in Japanese custody, nominally, since 1621. His partner in the venture was Takenaka Shigeyoshi, known as Uneme, the magistrate of Nagasaki himself, who with his retainers had put 56,000 taels of silver into the illicit voyages.

The man appointed to police the smuggling of priests had been financing the shipping that carried their money.

In October 1635 thirteen people were executed for the affair. Botelho, who had carried the letters, was burned at the stake.

The lesson the bakufu drew was not that its officials were corruptible, a proposition it had never seriously doubted. The lesson was structural. The clandestine mission in Japan was being funded through the ordinary machinery of the silk trade, by Japanese merchants with Japanese ships and Japanese crews, and no amount of hunting priests in the countryside would matter while the money moved freely. To kill the mission, the state would have to reach the capital that sustained it, which meant reaching the men who moved it, which meant reaching the households in which those men lived.

Everything that followed in the Kan'ei decrees, the passports, the travel bans, the informer bounties, the walled island, the offspring clauses, proceeded from that conclusion.

Eighteen Points

What the Fourth Sakoku Decree of 22 June 1636 Said

The document promulgated on 22 June 1636 was the fourth of five orders now grouped together as the closed country decrees, issued between 1633 and 1639 under the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu. It was enacted by the Rōjū, the shogun's council of elders, and addressed downward as an administrative directive to the two Nagasaki bugyō, the magistrates, who were expected to carry it out on the ground and to report that they had.

The original Japanese text runs to eighteen points and obligations.

In the sequence familiar from Boxer, the clauses read:

Article 9 provided that no offspring of the Southern Barbarians would be allowed to remain in Japan, that anyone violating the order would be killed, and that all their relatives would be punished according to the gravity of the offense. Article 10 provided that Japanese who had adopted such offspring deserved to die, but that the adopted children and their foster parents would instead be handed over to the Southern Barbarians for deportation. Article 11 provided that if any deportee attempted to return, or to communicate with Japan by letter or otherwise, he would of course be killed if caught, and his relatives punished according to the gravity of the offense.

The surrounding articles set the tone. Japanese ships were forbidden to leave for foreign countries. Japanese subjects were forbidden to depart secretly. An informer who revealed a priest was to receive between two hundred and three hundred pieces of silver. Foreigners who sheltered priests were to be imprisoned at Ōmura.

Those clauses punished acts. Articles 9 through 11 did not. They created a category of person defined entirely by parentage, attached the death penalty to remaining inside the country while belonging to it, and made the offense inheritable in both directions, since relatives were liable for the presence of a descendant they had not chosen to produce.

The word doing the work was Nanbanjin, "Southern Barbarian", the administration's own term for the Portuguese. In every earlier edict it had described a nationality. Here it described a bloodline.

The Fan-Shaped Island

Dejima in 1636 and the Rent the Portuguese Paid to Be Confined There

Construction had begun in 1634 on a fan-shaped artificial island in the Nagasaki waterfront, facing the district of Edo-machi across a channel narrow enough to shout over. It was finished in 1636, in time to receive the season's Portuguese, and it was called Dejima.

The dimensions are recorded inconsistently, since everyone who measured it used a different unit and none of them were surveyors. The Japanese registry gives 3,969 tsubo, a little over three acres, which works out to something near two hundred yards by eighty. Contemporary European logs offer six hundred feet by two hundred and forty. It was in any case small, and it was surrounded by a stone wall and a palisade of stakes driven into the water, and it was reached by one stone bridge with a guardhouse on it.

The interesting thing about Dejima was not its shape. It was the financing.

The shogunate did not pay for it. Twenty-five wealthy Nagasaki merchants did, the Dejima-chōnin, who were required to advance the capital and who recovered it through rent. The Portuguese were charged 5,500 taels of silver a year for the privilege of being confined there, roughly 19,530 guilders, a figure bearing no relationship whatever to the value of three acres of reclaimed mud. The tenants had no alternative accommodation, having been forbidden to live in the town, and the landlords had no competitors. The rent was therefore whatever the landlords said it was.

This was a piece of administrative design of some elegance. The state acquired a quarantine facility at no cost, the merchant class acquired a guaranteed annuity, the merchants were bound tightly to the enforcement of a policy they had paid to implement, and the foreigners funded their own containment out of trading profits earned in the harbor they were now unable to leave.

The Captain-Major, the senior Portuguese officer of each season's fleet, had been lodged on the island in the new building. By the autumn of 1636 he had been moved off it, into a smaller paled house with a guardhouse attached in the town proper.

The Portuguese had been walled in with money borrowed from the people walling them in.

Eight Hundred Men and Eight Months

Why Portuguese Merchants Spent Eight Months a Year in Nagasaki

To understand how 287 people came to exist as a legal problem, it helps to understand what the monsoon did to a trading calendar.

The Macao to Nagasaki run was not a route a ship could sail at will. The southwest monsoon carried vessels north from the Pearl River estuary in June and July; the northeast monsoon carried them home from October into November. A ship that missed the window did not arrive late. It arrived the following year. Between those two winds sat an enforced residence of seven or eight months, during which several hundred Portuguese merchants, factors, pilots, servants and slaves lived ashore in a Japanese city with money to spend and nothing to do but sell silk and wait for the weather.

Four to six galliots made the passage each summer in the 1630s. In the 1636 season some eight hundred Portuguese reached Nagasaki. More than two hundred merchants would be ashore at any one time with their households, and over the course of a season they spent between 250,000 and 300,000 taels of silver in the town. For the townspeople this was not a trade. It was the economy. Nagasaki had been a handful of fishermen's huts within living memory, and the great ship from Macao had made it the richest small city in Japan.

Eight months is a long time. It is long enough to learn a language badly, to take a house, to hire a cook, to acquire the servants and bondspeople whose sale had been the subject of decades of unresolved argument in the Church. It is long enough to form an attachment. And since many of the Portuguese did not sail home at the end of the season but stayed, seasons compounding into years and years into permanent residence, the attachments compounded too.

They married into wealthy Japanese merchant families, which was rational on both sides, since a Portuguese factor with a Japanese wife had access to credit, warehousing, interpreters and local standing, and a Nagasaki merchant with a Portuguese son in law had access to the silk. Children followed. By the 1630s the port had a resident Eurasian population of some size, born in Japan, speaking Japanese, in many cases baptized, and in many cases indistinguishable in dress and manner from the neighbors.

The Japanese authorities had watched this population form for sixty years and had regarded it, until the 1620s, as an unremarkable consequence of foreign trade.

Then they began to regard it as a reservoir.

What 1623 Had Left Behind

The 1623 Expulsion That Kept Wives and Daughters in Japan

The 1636 order was not the first attempt to reach these households. It was the second, and the shape of the first explains a good deal about the second.

In 1623 and 1624 the shogunate expelled the resident Portuguese and Spanish laymen from Nagasaki, an operation covered by its own set of orders. Foreign men were to leave the country. They were explicitly forbidden to take their wives and daughters with them. Sons could go. Wives, daughters and the women who had lived in their households could not.

The reasoning was not stated, and probably did not need to be, since it was the ordinary logic of a state that regarded women as attached to the soil and to their families of origin rather than to their husbands. The consequence was a mass separation of households, conducted at the waterfront, which the sources describe with the phrase "pitiful outcry" and then decline to elaborate.

In 1624 soldiers searched the European houses in Nagasaki before the departures to make certain that no Japanese woman, servant or bondsperson was being smuggled aboard. The state was not merely permitting these women to stay. It was enforcing their staying.

Twelve years later the same administration, having examined the same population, reversed the policy entirely. The women who had been prevented from leaving with their husbands were now compelled to leave without them. The daughters who had been kept in Japan as Japanese were now removed from Japan as Portuguese. Some of the women embarked in October 1636 had been forbidden by law to sail in 1623, had subsequently remarried Japanese men, and had borne those men five, six or more children.

The Dutch diarist recorded that they were forced aboard, and that those later children stayed behind.

There was no provision in the decree for such cases, because the decree did not recognize them as cases. A woman who had lived with a Nanbanjin fell within the described class, and the class was defined without reference to what she had done since. The Japanese husbands standing on the shore were not deported, since they were not descendants of Southern Barbarians and had committed no offense the magistrates were interested in. Neither were their children by her, since those children were Japanese on both sides.

The family was disassembled along a line drawn twelve years and one policy earlier.

Two Hundred and Eighty-Seven

How Many Were Deported to Macao in 1636 and Who They Were

The shogunal administrative record and the diaries of the Dutch factory agree that 287 persons were embarked at Nagasaki in October 1636. This is a rare and slightly suspicious concord between two bureaucracies that agreed on almost nothing, and it probably reflects the fact that both were counting the same manifest handed to them at the same bridge.

The Dutch noted 290 souls arriving at Macao. Francisco Colín, writing in Madrid in 1663 from Jesuit correspondence, gave "more than two hundred and ninety". Later Jesuit reports of the 1640s spoke of over two thousand Japanese expatriated, a figure that covered the entire sequence of purges from 1614 onward and has been repeatedly and unhelpfully attached to this single voyage.

The gap between 287 and 290 has never been closed. Three additional souls could be births at sea, which on a six week passage with a substantial number of women aboard is entirely possible. They could be dependents who went uncounted at embarkation and counted at landing, or servants, or a clerk in Macao rounding a total he had been given verbally. They could be an error. The sources do not say, and the people best placed to know were the least interested in the arithmetic.

The 287 divided into three groups. There were the mixed race children themselves, born of Portuguese fathers and Japanese mothers. There were their mothers, together with Japanese women who had lived with Portuguese merchants over long periods. And there were the Japanese foster parents who had adopted such children, and who traveled under a suspended death sentence that would revive the moment they set foot in Japan again.

No surviving record breaks the 287 down between the three. This is the single most conspicuous absence in the entire documentary base. A state that recorded the dimensions of a mud flat to the tsubo, that priced a denunciation to the silver piece, that would within two generations be tracking apostate lineages through seven generations in the male line and four in the female, did not record how many of the people it deported were children.

It did not need to. The category was the point, not its contents.

The embarkation took place in a city that had been kept attentive. Days before the loading began, Japanese Christians from the Gotō islands were brought into Nagasaki and executed by suspension, a method that killed slowly and was chosen for that reason. In the same period the child of a Portuguese merchant was burned at the stake for having attempted to carry a letter into the country from Macao.

Article 11 had promised precisely that for anyone who wrote home.

The Silver That Sailed With Them

The 2,350 Chests of Silver That Left Nagasaki in October 1636

The same four galliots that carried the 287 out of Nagasaki carried something else.

In their holds were 2,350 chests of silver, each holding a thousand taels, for a total of 2.35 million taels, which the Dutch valued at 6,697,500 guilders. It was the season's takings, the proceeds of the silk sold in the pancada, the fixed bulk price at which the Nagasaki guilds bought the entire Portuguese cargo at a single negotiated rate. The Portuguese maintained, when the question of ownership came up, that most of it was not theirs at all but had been financed on credit extended by Chinese merchants at Canton, which is to say that the silver was leaving Japan already spoken for.

The figure has sometimes been read as the personal wealth of the deportees, which it was not. Nobody aboard those ships owned 2.35 million taels. The children of the Nanbanjin went to Macao as paupers and were fed there by charity. The silver was ordinary commercial cargo of an entirely ordinary autumn sailing, and its presence in the same hulls is only remarkable because it makes visible what the shogunate was choosing to lose.

The arithmetic is worth doing, in the currency of the time, where a tael of silver was a real weight of a real metal and not an abstraction. The Portuguese season put a quarter of a million taels into the hands of Nagasaki's townspeople every year in direct spending. It moved several million more through the silk trade, on which the shogunate itself took a cut, and on which the merchant houses of Sakai, Kyoto, Ōsaka, Edo and Nagasaki had built their fortunes. The city existed because of it.

Three years later the shogunate cut the trade off entirely, and it did so with its eyes open. This was not a government that misunderstood its own revenues. The council of elders had been reading the Nagasaki accounts for thirty years. It had concluded, on evidence it found sufficient, that the Portuguese carried priests, that priests produced congregations, that congregations produced loyalties running to a foreign sovereign, and that no volume of silver was worth a competing claim on the obedience of the shogun's subjects.

The deportation of 1636 was the first policy in which that calculation was applied to people rather than to cargo. It cost nothing to enforce. It removed no revenue. It simply emptied the households.

The council would spend the following three years discovering how much further it was prepared to go, and the answer, arrived at in a burnt fortress in Shimabara, was very much further.

Who Fell Outside the Category

Why William Adams's Children Were Allowed to Stay in Japan

The decree named Nanbanjin, and Nanbanjin meant the Portuguese. That single word of drafting determined who stayed.

The children of William Adams, the English pilot who had reached Japan in 1600 aboard the Liefde, remained in Japan. Adams himself had been dead sixteen years, having been made a hatamoto with an estate at Hemi and a Japanese wife, and his son Joseph inherited the red seal trading privileges. The children were as mixed in ancestry as any child embarked in October, and the difference the law recognized was that their father had been English, Protestant, and dead.

Melchior van Santvoort, another survivor of the Liefde, was not compelled to go anywhere. He left anyway, taking his Japanese wife and children out of the country to Taiwan, where the family solemnized the marriage before a Protestant minister, having been unable to solemnize it anywhere in Japan under any rite at all. He had read the direction of travel correctly. The exemption was not a protection. It was a delay.

The proof came on 21 February 1639 in a memorandum, an oboe, which extended the bloodline logic outward from the Portuguese in the flat prose of a maintenance schedule. Dutch nationals were prohibited from fathering children in Japan, and any child born thereafter was to be sent to the homeland of one parent or the other. Mixed race Portuguese children still at Hirado, including those who had formally renounced Christianity and pledged their loyalty to the shogun, were forbidden on pain of death to cross to Amakusa and were to be sent abroad as their circumstances allowed. Chinese residents at Nagasaki were denied permanent residence, and they and their wives and children were to be sent away as occasion required.

The clause about the apostates at Hirado is the one that shows the machinery working. Those children had done everything the state's own procedures asked of a suspect Christian. They had recanted, in the prescribed form, and had sworn the loyalty oath. They were exiled regardless. Under the earlier persecutions, apostasy had been the exit; the whole apparatus of interrogation, the pressures and rewards developed between 1617 and 1640, had been built around producing recantations. After 1636 recantation no longer answered the question, because the question was no longer about belief.

No numbers, no ship and no captain survive for the removal of the remaining descendants after 1639. The individual cases that are documented went to a different port entirely. The children of Cornelis van Neijenrode, formerly chief of the Dutch factory, were separated from their mothers and shipped to Batavia in 1637; the children of François Caron left with their Japanese mother for the same city in 1641. Mixed families of Dutch or English ancestry were routed to the Protestant capital of the Company's Asian empire rather than to Catholic Macao, a sorting performed with the same care the customs house applied to bales of silk.

From those Batavia exiles comes the one surviving body of writing by the deported themselves, the Jagatara-bumi, the Jakarta letters, written home on strips of silk and kimono cloth by women who knew the letters were illegal to receive. The best known are by a woman named Oharu, baptized Jeronima, who never returned and died in Batavia. Her letters have nothing to say about the Macao voyage of 1636, since she was not on it.

They are simply the closest thing that exists to a voice from inside the category.

The Misericórdia's New Office

How Macao Fed the Japanese Exiles After 1636

Macao in 1636 was a city wedged onto a peninsula it held at the pleasure of the Ming authorities and financed almost wholly by the Japan run. It was, in the most immediate sense, a city built on the Nagasaki trade. The fleet that arrived that autumn brought the season's silver and 290 destitute people who could not be sent back on pain of the passengers' deaths.

The colony absorbed them, which was not a foregone conclusion and reflects better on Macao than most things in this story reflect on anyone.

The Santa Casa da Misericórdia, the lay charitable brotherhood that in every Portuguese city of the empire ran the hospital, the orphanage, the dowry fund and the burial of the poor, took the exiles onto its books and distributed alms, food and shelter. The Misericórdia then did something it had not done for any previous influx. It created a permanent office dedicated to feeding and assisting the Japanese exiles, a standing line in the budget of a brotherhood chronically short of money, on the reasonable assumption that these people were never going home.

The burghers of the city, the sources say, received the exiles with compassion. They also received them into a subtropical port in October with an unfamiliar diet, unfamiliar water, a different disease environment and no work, after a six week passage in the hold of a galliot.

Many of the Japanese Christian women died quickly. The Jesuit accounts attribute the deaths, in a phrase that reads like a physician's shrug, to the inability to bear the change of climate, the food, and the treatment of the people there.

Among the first to die was an elderly woman known in the records as Gracia of Nagasaki, who survived two months after landing. She had lived through the whole arc, from the 1587 edict that first declared the missionaries expelled, through the persecutions of the 1610s and 1620s, through the martyrdoms of the following decade, in the city where all of it happened. She was deported at the end of her life for having descendants.

An unnamed woman of twenty-nine, from Kyoto, fatherless since the age of three, traveled with her mother and died shortly after arrival. The record preserves her age, her city, her mother's presence and the fact of her father's absence, and not her name.

Maria of Kyoto lived long enough to matter. She became, in the phrase used of her, head of all the others, the acknowledged leader of the Japanese women's community in Macao and a lay preacher among them. When she died she was buried with full civic and religious honors in the Church of São Paulo.

The colony that had shipped the silk that started the affair buried her under the finest roof it had.

The exiles of 1636 had at least joined an existing structure rather than founding one, which is why they were fed at all. Japanese quarters had stood in Macao since the first great expulsion of the clergy. Within that community the names that survive do so mostly in a legal capacity. Mâncio Sugimoto, Francisco Terawachi, Paulo Kozaki Shirobyoe, Luís Sanga, Mâncio Yofenji, André Kozaemon and Bartholomeo Kamachi appear repeatedly in the depositions taken by the Society of Jesus, sworn witnesses to the martyrdoms in Japan, deposed and re-deposed as the Jesuits assembled documentation for canonization processes that would grind on for centuries. They were the last people alive who had seen certain deaths, and the Church took their statements with the thoroughness of an institution building a case.

One document reverses the direction. On 25 October 1642 a wealthy Japanese merchant named Damião de Lima, not one of the 287 but a man of the older emigration, sat down in Macao to dispose of his property. He left 250 patacas to be distributed among the poor Japanese exiles, and then named the exiled community itself his sole heir. It is the only instrument in the file in which the deportees appear as recipients of anything by right rather than by charity, drafted by a Japanese man in a Portuguese notary's hand in a Chinese port, disposing of money made in a trade that had just been abolished.

None of them went home. Article 11 had settled that, and the shogunate's enforcement of Article 11, whatever else may be said of Tokugawa administration, was not lax.

The Machine That Outlived the Crisis

From Shimabara to the 1639 Expulsion of the Portuguese

Fourteen months after the galliots sailed, the peasants of the Shimabara peninsula and the Amakusa islands rose against a lord who had been taxing a famine-stricken population past the point of survival, and the last question about Christianity in Japan was answered in a way that made all previous questions irrelevant.

Roughly thirty-seven thousand people, peasants, women, children and masterless samurai, fortified the ruins of Hara Castle under a teenaged leader named Amakusa Shirō Tokisada. The shogunate mobilized a hundred and twenty thousand men. The Dutch factory at Hirado, invited to demonstrate whose side it was on, supplied the twenty-gun De Ryp, which bombarded the castle from the sea for fifteen days between 24 February and 12 March 1638 and fired 426 cannonballs. On the final assault virtually the entire garrison was killed. The rebellion and its suppression confirmed for the council exactly what the council already believed.

On the fifth day of the seventh month of Kan'ei 16, in early August 1639, the Rōjū signed the order expelling the Portuguese from Japan altogether. It gave three grounds: that the galliots smuggled missionaries, that they supplied and financed the clandestine mission, and that priests, money and weapons introduced by these means had produced Shimabara. Any Portuguese vessel entering Japanese waters thereafter was to be broken up and burned and everyone aboard executed. When Captain-Major Vasco Palha de Almeida arrived in late August with two galliots, he was forbidden to unload, handed a copy of the decree, and told to leave on the first favorable wind.

Macao, facing the loss of the trade on which it existed, sent a delegation to argue. The ship reached Nagasaki on 6 July 1640 with seventy-four aboard, including four ambassadors chosen for their standing rather than their expendability. They were arrested, held on Dejima, condemned on 2 August, and on 3 August sixty-one of them, all four ambassadors included, were beheaded on Nishizaka, the hill where the martyrs of 1597 and 1622 had died. Thirteen of the lower crew were spared to carry the news home. The ship and its cargo were burned in the harbor. The embassy of 1640 had been sent to plead for a trade that the council had already decided to end, and it received the answer the decree had promised in writing eleven months earlier.

The apparatus then turned inward, where it stayed for two centuries. Temple registration made every household prove a Buddhist affiliation annually. The ruizoku-aratamechō, the lineage registers developed under the inquisitor Inoue Masashige, tracked every birth, death, marriage, divorce, adoption and change of name in the family of a known apostate, from 1687 for seven generations in the male line and four in the female. A dedicated prison for suspected Christians, the Kirishitan Yashiki, was built at Kobinata in Edo in 1646. The Dutch, moved from Hirado to the empty Dejima on 18 June 1641, were held to ten or fifteen men, forbidden to let any Japanese be born or die on the island, and forbidden to keep a wife, a mistress or a child there. The women admitted were licensed courtesans, and any children they bore were registered as Japanese commoners with no claim on a foreign father's property.

Every one of those provisions is the 1636 clauses generalized. The state had decided that belief was unverifiable, that recantation proved nothing, and that the only variable it could actually audit was descent.

Chrysanthemums Among the Angels

The Japanese Carvings on the Ruins of St Paul's in Macao

The Church of the Mother of God stood at the top of a stone stair in Macao, and its granite façade had been carved in the 1620s and 1630s by Japanese Christian exiles working alongside Chinese stonemasons, under the direction of the Italian Jesuit Carlo Spinola, who left the work unfinished when he went to Japan and was burned alive at Nagasaki in 1622.

The exiles carved what they knew. The façade holds angels, a Portuguese caravel under sail, a bronze statue of the Virgin, the instruments of the Passion, an inscription in Chinese characters warning that those who worship the devil will suffer, and, worked in among all of it, Japanese chrysanthemums.

The church burned in 1835 and only the façade survived, which is why it is now called the Ruins of St Paul's and why several hundred thousand people photograph it every year.

The 287 who came ashore in 1636 arrived to find that wall already standing. Some of them will have been buried within sight of it. Maria of Kyoto was buried under it. Their descendants, where there were descendants, married into the city and into the Chinese and Indian and Portuguese families around it and eventually stopped being counted separately. Others went on down the trade routes to Cochinchina, Siam and Cambodia, where Japanese quarters already existed and a man who spoke Japanese and Portuguese was employable. That is the ordinary fate of exiled populations and was in this case the only available one.

In Nagasaki the record simply stops. There is no register of the households that were emptied, no note of what became of the Japanese husbands left on the shore, no accounting of the children who stayed because they had the wrong two parents to be deported. The magistrates had executed the order they were given, reported that Nagasaki now contained no descendant of the Southern Barbarians, and moved on to the next of the eighteen points.

That was the whole of the requirement. The decree had never asked what the category contained. It had asked only that the category be empty, and by the evening of 22 October 1636, in fine weather and a variable wind, it was.

Sources & Further Reading

Blussé, Leonard. Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century. Markus Wiener, 2002. Follows the Eurasian daughter of a Dutch factory chief from Hirado to Batavia, the closest available reconstruction of what deportation did to one mixed family's law, property and marriage.

Boxer, C. R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650. University of California Press, 1951. The standard English narrative of the whole period and the source of the article numbering used for the Kan'ei decrees, including the offspring clauses translated here.

Boxer, C. R. Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550-1770. Martinus Nijhoff, 1948. The fullest English account of Macao's institutions, including the Santa Casa da Misericórdia that fed the exiles and the Senate that later gambled the 1640 embassy.

Boxer, C. R. The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555-1640. Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1959. Reconstructs the annual voyage year by year, supplying the fleet sizes, the silver cargoes and the monsoon calendar that governed both the trade and the deportation sailing.

Cardim, António Francisco. Fasciculus e Iaponicis Floribus. Rome, 1646. A Jesuit martyrology compiled from the depositions of Japanese exiles in Macao, several of whom appear by name in this article as sworn witnesses.

Caron, François. A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam. Edited by C. R. Boxer, Argonaut Press, 1935. Caron's 1639 Dutch translation of the seclusion decrees is one of the three European recensions behind the numbering problem, and he was in Japan while the policy was carried out.

Colín, Francisco. Labor Evangélica. Madrid, 1663. Gives the figure of more than two hundred and ninety exiles, the highest of the three counts and the reason the total remains open.

Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 1973. The essential study of how the Tokugawa state constructed Christianity as a political category, which is the intellectual machinery behind the shift from conduct to descent.

Hesselink, Reinier H. The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560-1640. McFarland, 2016. A city-level history of Nagasaki that reconstructs the resident Portuguese community, its marriages and its finances in the years immediately before the expulsions.

Leupp, Gary P. Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. Continuum, 2003. The only sustained treatment of the households the decree destroyed, covering the 1623 separations, the 1636 deportation and the Dutch restrictions at Dejima.

Massarella, Derek. A World Elsewhere: Europe's Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Yale University Press, 1990. Sets the Dutch factory records against their commercial motives, useful when weighing testimony written by the party that inherited the trade.

Souza, George Bryan. The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630-1754. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Quantifies what Macao lost when Japan closed, and what the city did with the population and the debts left over.