The Year on the Gable: Hirado, the Matsuura Lords, and the Century of the Open Door, 1543–1641

The Date on the Gable

Why the Dutch Warehouse at Hirado Was Demolished in 1640

The largest building on the Hirado waterfront had stood for sixteen months. Three stories of dressed stone, some forty-five meters along its long axis, it had been finished in July 1639 under François Caron, a Frenchman who came out to Asia as a cook's mate, learned Japanese better than any Dutchman of his generation, and rose to run the most profitable factory the Dutch East India Company owned anywhere. It was the most emphatic statement the Company had ever made in stone about how long it meant to stay.

On 9 November 1640 the shogunate had it pulled down.

The reason given was the gable. The builders had cut the year of construction into the stonework in the Christian era, which in a country that had spent a quarter of a century systematically eradicating Christianity was less an architectural detail than a confession. The Dutch appear to have had no idea what they had done. They took it apart at their own expense, watched by officials sent from Nagasaki. Seven months later they were ordered off the island altogether.

What made that order remarkable is not that Japan closed a door. Japan was closing doors everywhere in those years. What made it remarkable is which door.

Hirado, written 平戸, is an island roughly thirty kilometers long and ten across at its widest, lying off the northwest shoulder of Kyūshū on the old Hizen seaboard. Its neighbors on the mainland side were the small, quarrelsome fiefs of Ōmura and Arima. Its neighbor on the other side was the open ocean.

That geography decided everything. Hirado had a deep, sheltered, easily defended harbor sitting directly on the sea road between the Chinese coast and the Japanese archipelago, which made it valuable to anybody arriving from outside and nearly worthless to anybody already inside. Everything Hirado had, it had because somebody sailed it there.

The lords of the place were the Matsuura, assessed under the Tokugawa at 63,000 koku and classed as tozama, the outside lords, meaning those who had not been on Tokugawa Ieyasu's side before Sekigahara and would spend two and a half centuries being reminded of it. The town held perhaps 2,000 residents in 1584. This was not a power that could impose anything on anybody. What it could do was offer terms.

The Matsuura had grown up among the wakō, the mixed Chinese and Japanese sea raiders of the East China Sea, and in that world a lord's function was to provide anchorage, protection, warehousing and silence, and to take a cut. He did not ask where the cargo came from. He asked what proportion of it stayed.

The King of Hui

Wang Zhi, the Chinese Pirate Lord Who Made Hirado His Base

The Portuguese did not discover Hirado. They were shown it, by a man who had made it the northern terminus of the largest criminal enterprise in East Asia.

Wang Zhi, 王直, also called Wufeng, began as a failed salt merchant from She County in Huizhou. The Ming had banned private overseas trade under the haijin, the sea prohibition, which meant that the most profitable commerce on the Chinese coast was by definition illegal and therefore run by men prepared to be criminals. In 1544 he joined the smuggling base at Shuangyu off the Zhejiang coast, which the Portuguese knew as Liampó, and rose to command its fleet.

The sources credit him as the Chinese pilot aboard the junk that put the first Portuguese, and the first firearms, ashore at Tanegashima on 23 September 1543. Whether or not that attribution survives scrutiny, the structural point stands. European contact with Japan arrived inside a Chinese network, on Chinese hulls, and it went where that network already went.

Where it went was Hirado. Wang Zhi established a mansion and a factory there under Matsuura protection, and lived, in the phrase his enemies used against him and his followers used with pride, as a sea king. He flew royal banners. He kept a bodyguard of several hundred rōnin, masterless samurai who had found an employer less fussy about references than most. Styled King of Hui, he is said to have employed 2,000 people at Hirado.

He also mass-produced matchlocks in the foundries of Hizen and shipped Japanese sulfur out in order to bring saltpeter in, because Japan had volcanic sulfur in abundance and almost no natural nitrates, and gunpowder requires both. A Japanese warlord who wanted to shoot at anybody was, in the 1550s, dependent on a supply chain whose Chinese end was controlled by a wanted man.

The Ming eventually noticed. The censor Zhu Wan razed Shuangyu in June 1548, and Wang Zhi, still hoping for a pardon, hunted down the rival pirate Chen Sipan in 1551 and handed him over; the reward offered was 100 loads of rice. He dumped the grain into the sea and turned on the empire that had insulted him. Between 1552 and 1555 his fleets tore along the Chinese seaboard and came within reach of Nanjing, and the investigators sent to explain the disaster reported that seventy to ninety percent of the so-called Japanese pirates were Chinese coastal subjects under Chinese commanders. The pirate problem was a Chinese unemployment problem with a foreign name.

The Supreme Commander Hu Zongxian solved it by fraud. Lured back with promises of pardon, Wang Zhi sailed from Japan, reached Zhoushan on 17 October 1557, was arrested at Hangzhou that December and beheaded on 22 January 1560. The words attributed to him at the end have the ring of a man who had spent twenty years correctly calculating everybody's incentives and finally met one he failed to price in: "Never have I imagined that I would be executed here."

In 1567 the Ming legalized private overseas trade, which achieved in a paragraph what two decades of naval campaigning had not, and the junk traffic went on regardless.

Piloted In by a Pirate

The First Portuguese Ship at Hirado, 1550

In the summer of 1550 the first Portuguese ship entered Hirado harbor. It was commanded by Duarte da Gama, carried Francisco Pereira de Miranda, and was piloted in by Wang Zhi.

Francis Xavier, then at Kagoshima and losing patience with the Satsuma authorities, heard of it and set off on foot up the coast to reach it. The sources disagree about the month by a full season, one of them placing him at Hirado before the ship arrived.

One statement in the sources has at least fifteen Portuguese ships calling at Hirado between 1550 and 1569; the year-by-year tallies drawn from the same material sum to twenty-nine. The two counts are measuring different things, the official nau do trato voyages licensed from Goa on one hand and every Portuguese hull that dropped anchor on the other.

The resident foreign population grew all the same. In September 1557 five Portuguese merchants stayed for the winter, accompanied by fifteen to twenty young men, slaves and servants, of whom thirteen or fourteen paraded through the town carrying matchlock arquebuses. That image is the whole relationship in miniature: a handful of foreigners, in a town of two thousand people, walking the streets armed with the one technology every warlord in Japan wanted, in a domain whose lord had no means of disarming them and no intention of trying. By 1562 the resident Portuguese merchant population had reached ninety.

Matsuura Takanobu, who ruled from 1541 and appears in Jesuit reports as Taqua Nombo, understood exactly what he was handling. The Jesuits, who were not disinterested witnesses, call him calculating, piratical and untrustworthy, which in their vocabulary meant a lord who declined to convert.

Luís Fróis records that Takanobu welcomed Xavier and his successors with elaborate hospitality while simulating an interest in Christianity he did not feel. This was less hypocrisy than market research. Merchants and missionaries traveled on the same ships and answered in the last resort to the same crown, and a port that mistreated the priests would shortly find it had no carracks either. Religious tolerance at Hirado was a term of trade.

The economics were simple. The Great Ship came once a year, carrying silk in thousands of piculs against Japanese silver in hundreds of thousands of taels, and the customs revenue from a single visit could transform a small domain's finances. There was no second ship. A lord who lost the carrack lost the year, and a lord who lost it twice lost his standing among neighbors who were watching closely. Chief among the watchers was Ōmura Sumitada, whose territory lay just across the water, and who would prove more flexible about what he was willing to concede in exchange for a ship.

Thirteen Hundred in a Season

Gaspar Vilela's Mass Conversions on Ikitsuki and Takushima

In 1550, in the first weeks of contact, a man named Koteda Yasumasa was baptized Jeronimo. In 1557 Balthasar Gago baptized his sons: the heir Yasutsune as Don Antonio Koteda, and a younger brother, Kageyu, adopted into the allied Ichibu house, as Don Juan Ichibu.

Between them the brothers held Ikitsuki, Don Antonio ruling the southern half from Tachiura and Don Juan the northern half from Ichibu. The island lies off Hirado's northwestern coast, a short crossing and a very long way from anywhere a daimyō's inspector was likely to go. For half a century the Koteda and the Ichibu were the shield behind which Christianity in those waters did essentially what it liked.

What it liked, under Gaspar Vilela, was spectacular. Vilela baptized 1,300 Japanese within months on Ikitsuki and Takushima, converting the entire population of Takushima, roughly 600 people, and winning some 800 on Ikitsuki. Those components sum to 1,400 rather than 1,300, which is the sort of arithmetic that survives in mission reports because nobody expected anyone to add it up.

It was also, to everybody else on the islands, an act of war. Encouraged by Don Antonio, Vilela's converts pulled down three Buddhist temples, burned sutras, broke images, and carried the ancestral tablets and household deities of their neighbors down to the shore and threw them into the sea. The Jesuit accounts report this with satisfaction. In a society organized around the household's continuous obligation to its dead, the destruction of ancestral images was not a doctrinal statement. It was the annihilation of other people's families, retroactively.

Buddhist crowds answered by stoning churches and toppling crosses, and Takanobu expelled the Jesuits in late 1558. Vilela went on to the capital. For five years afterward no Jesuit was permitted to reside in Hirado town.

The ban had a loophole large enough to sail a mission through. It held where Takanobu's writ was direct and visible; in the Koteda villages of the western coast it was a dead letter. Propagation began at Kasuga, Shishi and Iira in 1558, and by 1561 those three villages had churches and the Hirado territory held some 2,000 Christians across seven or eight villages. In 1563 a cross went up at Neshiko and Misericórdia confraternities, the lay charitable brotherhoods that were the Portuguese church's most durable export, were founded in all three.

Alessandro Valignano put 4,000 Christians on Hirado and the adjacent islands in 1580.

A Bolt of Coarse Cotton

The Miyanomae Incident of 1561, the First Clash Between Samurai and Europeans

In 1561 a Japanese resident of Hirado and a group of Portuguese merchants fell into an argument on the waterfront at Miyanomae about a bolt of coarse cotton cloth. Fróis, who looked into the incident afterward, is emphatic that the cloth was worth only a few monme, a trifling sum, and equally emphatic about what lay underneath it.

The underlying problem was silver. Japan in the 1560s had no unified coinage worth the name for large transactions, so foreign trade ran on raw silver by weight, which meant that every substantial deal depended on a scale, a set of weights and an assay, and that the honesty of all three was a matter of opinion. Each side suspected the other of shaved weights and adulterated metal, and each was sometimes right. Fróis presents the affair as commercial friction rather than cultural hatred, which from a Jesuit with every incentive to blame Japanese barbarism is notable testimony.

The argument became a fight. The Portuguese Captain-Major of the Japan Voyage, Fernão de Sousa, came ashore to support his countrymen, armed Matsuura retainers converged on the waterfront, and the whole thing turned into a general melee in the streets of a town where a substantial fraction of the adult men carried a sword as a matter of daily habit.

De Sousa was killed. So were thirteen or fourteen others; the sources give the Portuguese dead as fifteen including the Captain-Major, or fourteen including him, and the difference has never been resolved. It was the first armed clash between samurai and Europeans, and the first indication that the Portuguese, who had spent a decade treating Japan as the one civilized country in Asia, could be killed in it as easily as anywhere else.

Takanobu's response was to do nothing at all. Fróis wrote with the restraint of a man who knew the sentence would carry itself that the lord had shrugged off the matter without punishing or chastising the evildoers. It is likelier that he assumed, as he had assumed for a decade, that the ships had nowhere else to go.

They had somewhere else to go. In late 1561 Luís de Almeida opened negotiations with Ōmura Sumitada and came away with the concession of Yokoseura, a harbor in Ōmura's domain, granted with municipal authority and tax rights vested in the Society of Jesus. In 1562 the annual nao under Captain-Major Pero Barreto Rolim sailed past Hirado without stopping.

The customs revenues that had made the Matsuura rich went with it.

The Crossfire at Fukuda

The Battle of Fukuda Bay, 1565

Yokoseura did not last either. It burned in late 1563 during a rebellion against Ōmura Sumitada, and some of the Portuguese left with a ruined port returned to Hirado in 1564 to trade, over explicit Jesuit warnings. A great fire then destroyed the town and much of their imported goods, and the merchants believed, without being able to prove it, that it had been set with Takanobu's knowledge. In the same period he grudgingly allowed the mission to be re-established, and the sources are candid about the motive. The priests were let back as decoys, to draw the ships in.

The ships declined to be drawn. In the summer of 1565 Captain-Major Dom João Pereira arrived with the annual carrack meaning to trade at Hirado; the Jesuits talked him out of it, and he took the Great Ship instead to Fukuda, a secluded harbor in Ōmura's territory.

Takanobu decided to take the carrack.

He financed it the way everything in that world was financed. Merchants of Sakai lent him eight or ten large seagoing junks against an agreed share of the expected booty; combined with fifty or sixty funé, the smaller Japanese war boats, this produced a flotilla the sources call about eighty vessels, though the itemized components total between fifty-eight and seventy. Aboard were several hundred picked samurai. Against this the Portuguese had two hulls: the nau do trato itself, a carrack of enormous size and correspondingly enormous unhandiness, and a small, highly maneuverable galleon.

The Jesuits got a warning to Fukuda. Pereira ignored it and set no watch. The flotilla came into the bay at dawn with many of the Portuguese ashore, leaving perhaps eighty Europeans and their slaves aboard the flagship. Samurai swarmed up over the stern, where a carrack's great cabin and its galleries offered the one boarding point a high-sided ship could not properly defend, and carried off Pereira's writing desk. Hand-to-hand fighting cleared the decks.

The battle was decided by the galleon. Small enough to be worked in a confined bay, she took a position from which her guns could rake the Japanese boats where they lay most tightly packed. War boats were open, wooden and crowded, with nothing at all between a round shot and forty men. The hulls came apart.

The Japanese lost more than seventy killed outright and over two hundred wounded. The Portuguese lost a handful wounded, no vessel, and none of the cargo, which was valued at a million crowns.

Before Fukuda the Japanese had rated the Portuguese no better than the Chinese; afterward they were reckoned a people not to be trifled with, a reputation bought at a price Takanobu had not meant to pay. Hirado's commerce collapsed and Ōmura's ports flourished, and Takanobu, constrained by the desire of gain, gave up active persecution, apologized, and let the Jesuits rebuild. In 1566 four Christian emissaries from Ōmura who entered Hirado carrying letters to Don Antonio Koteda were seized and executed as spies, so the conversion to tolerance was evidently partial.

Burned out of Hirado and out of Yokoseura, the Portuguese and the Jesuits drew the obvious conclusion: what the trade needed was one port, defensible, permanent and under their own influence. In 1571 Ōmura Sumitada opened Nagasaki to Portuguese trade. That decision was made in the smoke over Fukuda Bay.

The Funeral of Matsuura Takanobu

How Hirado Destroyed Its Christian Community After 1599

Takanobu's rule ended in 1568 and his son Shigenobu succeeded him, and for thirty years Hirado did what small maritime domains do when the great trade has gone elsewhere. It fished, it watched Nagasaki grow, and it kept its harbor in repair.

The wider world came to it anyway. In 1591 Hideyoshi ordered the Matsuura, with the other daimyō of the littoral, to mount a coordinated sea guard against Chinese incursion. The following year that coast became the staging ground for the invasion of Korea, Hideyoshi's headquarters at Hizen Nagoya rising in five months across the water and swelling to 100,000 people or more, larger than any city in Kyūshū and entirely temporary.

The war brought tens of thousands of Koreans to Kyūshū as captives, and many were sold by Portuguese merchants at Nagasaki into slavery in Southeast Asia, China and Europe.

Then, on 1 April 1599, the retired daimyō Matsuura Takanobu died, and the domain's Christian settlement died with him.

Shigenobu ordered every vassal family to attend the Shinto and Buddhist funeral rites, on pain of expulsion and confiscation of lands. Don Jeronimo Koteda, Don Antonio's heir, and his cousin Balthasar Ichibu refused. In October or November 1599 they launched a fleet of boats and slipped away in secret to Jesuit-administered Nagasaki, taking 600 Christian retainers with them. At a stroke the domain lost its Christian gentry, a substantial part of its trained military manpower, and the entire administrative class of Ikitsuki.

Shigenobu's retaliation was systematic. Every Christian church on Ikitsuki was demolished and burned, including the church at Yakiyama in Yamada that had housed the Jesuit seminary; on its ruins Shigenobu founded a Buddhist temple, Shōzen-ji, which is a specific and legible statement. The Christian cemeteries were desecrated, the graves opened, the bones taken out and thrown into the sea, and the standing crosses pulled down.

The parallel with what the converts had done to the Buddhist dead forty years earlier was presumably not lost on anybody.

The Second Opening

How the Dutch and the English Came to Hirado in 1609 and 1613

In April 1600 a Dutch ship came ashore in Bungo with twenty-four men alive out of a complement of about 110, and only seven of those able to stand.

The Liefde had left Rotterdam in June 1598, with an English mariner named William Adams as pilot-major. Her confiscated cargo included 19 bronze cannon, 5,000 cast-iron shot, 500 matchlocks and 50 quintals of powder, which is not a trading assortment; it is an armory, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had a battle to fight at Sekigahara that autumn, understood it at once. He kept the survivors, and the consequences of that decision took two decades to work through.

Hirado's re-entry into the world trade was engineered, quietly, from Hirado. In 1605 Ieyasu allowed the Liefde's former captain Jacob Quaeckernaeck and Melchior van Santvoort to sail for the Dutch factory at Patani carrying a shogunal pass inviting Dutch trade, in a junk supplied by Matsuura Shigenobu. The lord who spent 1599 digging up Christian graves spent 1605 underwriting the voyage that would bring Protestant Europe to his harbor, which is as concise a summary of Matsuura foreign policy as the record affords.

It worked. The Roode Leeuw met Pijlen and the Griffioen reached Hirado on 1 July 1609, and with Adams's help the envoys extracted from Ieyasu a shuinjō, a vermilion-seal patent, of unusual generosity. Where the Portuguese were bound by the pancado, the arrangement under which Japanese merchant guilds bought the entire silk cargo at a fixed rate, the Dutch could enter any harbor in Japan and sell to whom they liked at what they could get. The first opperhoofd, or chief factor, was Jacques Specx. Having no access to the Chinese silk markets, the Company had very little to sell, and covered the gap for a decade with private trade and with privateering.

In June 1613 the Clove arrived under Captain-General John Saris, greeted by the daimyō, another Matsuura Takanobu, this one Shigenobu's grandson, and by the retired Shigenobu. The recurrence of that name across three generations has caused endless trouble in the sources, and any statement about a Matsuura Takanobu needs a date attached before it means anything. Saris ignored Adams's advice to site the factory at Uraga near the Edo markets, building at Hirado instead, next to the Dutch, in order to watch them. The ten years that followed were a sustained commercial catastrophe.

The Christian community was destroyed in these same years, quietly, in the villages. In 1609 Gaspar Nishi Genka, senior retainer of the Koteda estate and baptized as an infant by Vilela himself, refused to recant, and was executed with his wife Ursula and his eldest son Juan, a catechist. Gaspar was permitted to be beheaded on the exact spot where the Yamada cross had been pulled down ten years before, a courtesy extended by men who understood perfectly well what they were doing.

The Rent Economy

How the Matsuura Profited From the European Trade at Hirado

There were no customs duties. Under the Tokugawa the European companies at Hirado paid no formal impost and no anchorage tax, a fact that appears in every triumphant Dutch and English report of the period and meant almost nothing, because the Matsuura had four other ways of getting paid and used all of them.

The first was presents. Saris distributed 340 dollars' worth among Shigenobu and Takanobu on arrival in 1613, and by 1615 Richard Cocks was reckoning the season's presents at more than ten percent of the Hosiander's entire cargo value. A gift was not optional, could not be refused without insult, and had no fixed rate, which made it the most efficient tax ever devised. The second was forced loans, which were presents with the fiction of repayment attached; the English were asked for 4,000 taels in 1622, and by the mid-1630s the Matsuura owed the Dutch East India Company an estimated 30,000 guilders. The third was monopoly. The fourth was leverage, since the Matsuura were the Europeans' only channel to Edo, and a lord who carries your letters can also edit them.

The daily texture of this survives in the Dagregister, the Dutch factory journal kept by the opperhoofd Nicolaes Couckebacker. In September 1633 the First Regent Matsuura Nobutomo pressed him to let Hirado's citizens buy imported goods first at the fixed pancado price. When Couckebacker pressed in return for the 10,000 taels the domain owed the Company, the regents pleaded a new building in Kyoto, a son's wedding in Edo, and a poor harvest. The debt was not paid.

That winter, on the hofreis, the annual court journey to Edo, the lord served as the Company's intermediary, edited the Dutch letters to the shogun for protocol, and required four half-cannon lying at Osaka as gifts. He was later furious to find that the Dutch had declared 45 pieces of red cloth while holding 71. The Dutch were cheating him. He was extorting them. Both regarded the other's conduct as a breach of trust and their own as ordinary prudence, and the arrangement ran on that basis for thirty-two years.

The English had gone by then. Their factory closed in 1623, after ten years in which the Dutch undersold their broadcloth in a country that did not want broadcloth and the Fleet of Defence brought over a thousand sailors into a small town and turned it, in one company captain's phrase, into a Second Sodomye. When the Bull sailed on 24 December 1623 the factory's bad debts stood at 12,821 taels, of which the Matsuura family owed 1,524 taels, 6 mas and 7 candereen, itemized down to the personal bills of individual relatives. Nothing was ever recovered.

Dry Soil and Blue Stone

The Archaeology of the 1639 Dutch Warehouse at Hirado

The Dutch, at this point, doubled down.

Their compound had grown in three phases, and the archaeology of it is unusually legible because the Company wrote everything down and the Hirado City Board of Education dug it up. From 1609 the VOC rented a private residence with a fireproof warehouse and began at once to reclaim the shoreline. Between 1612 and 1636 they reclaimed further ground, demolished machiya, the townhouses of the Japanese quarter, and built the stone boundary wall still known as the Dutch Wall. From 1637 they built in monumental Western stone.

The great warehouse of 1639, begun the previous December and raised in seven months, was the culmination, and its excavation in 2002 by Hirofumi Hagiwara and Arishige Katō recovered a building that no drawing shows. Nine pillar foundations were confirmed of an estimated eleven, matching the ground-floor pillars in the Company's own ledgers.

The materials tell the story better than the plan does. There was a great quantity of broken roof tile and not a single pantile among it, only traditional Japanese flat and round tiles, which means that the most European building in Japan wore a Japanese roof. There was coarse basalt, the blue stone, from Takashima four miles off, used for arches, windows and stairs. And there was a dense layer of river pebbles under the floor, matching ledger entries for laborers hired to carry river stones to lay around the joists, because stone under timber keeps the damp from rising and the rot from taking the floor.

The dimensions were a puzzle for years. The July 1639 ledger gives an internal measurement of 148 by 41 feet, and the foundations match nothing until the figures are read as Japanese shaku rather than Amsterdam feet, at which point they come out at 44.84 by 12.42 meters and the trenches fit exactly. The Company's clerks were writing down what their Japanese contractors measured, in the units the contractors used, and labeling it feet.

The building was a hybrid throughout. Western in its load-bearing stone, its three stories, its arched openings and its staircase; Japanese in its carpenters and masons, its joists laid straight over gravel, its timber truss roof and its clay tiles. And engineered specifically for Hirado: because the reclaimed ground was compacted sand and clay rather than the soft mud of the Netherlands, the builders abandoned driven piles altogether and used a dry-soil footing, shallow trenches twice the width of the wall filled with basalt and mortar, spreading the load rather than carrying it down.

The famous copperplate published by Arnoldus Montanus in 1669 shows none of it, having been drawn from old maps and a wooden model by a man who never went to Japan. By the time Amsterdam thought to engrave the place, the warehouse had been rubble for a generation.

The Order to Vacate

Why the Shogunate Moved the Dutch From Hirado to Nagasaki in 1641

The demolition of 9 November 1640 was the warning. Almost nobody read it correctly at the time, because the Dutch position had never looked stronger.

The numbers make that plain. Across the four years from 1635 to 1638 the factory imported 8,823,100 guilders' worth of goods and returned net profits of 6,334,010. In 1640, the peak, imports reached 6,295,367 guilders and exports 3,943,079, most of the outbound value in Japanese silver.

Then came the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1639, in the wake of Shimabara, and the execution of the Macau embassy that arrived in 1640 to plead for its restoration. The Dutch had spent thirty years arguing that they were merchants and not missionaries, that they carried no priests and preached nothing, and the argument had been believed. It remained believed. What changed was not the shogunate's assessment of the Dutch. It was the shogunate's assessment of Hirado.

Nagasaki was shogunal land, administered by shogunal governors, with an artificial island already built in its harbor and standing empty since 1639. Hirado was a tozama domain on the outer sea frontier whose lords had for ninety years conducted their own foreign relations, extracted their own revenue from foreigners, edited the correspondence passing to Edo, and run up debts to a foreign corporation the shogunate had no way to audit. The Chinese junks had been confined to Nagasaki in 1635. The Portuguese were gone. The Dutch at Hirado were the last surviving piece of the old order, in which the maritime frontier belonged to whoever lived on it.

On 21 May 1641 the order came to vacate. The transfer was complete by June.

The consequence was immediate and measurable. In 1641 the factory's imports came to 1,022,908 guilders, a fraction over sixteen percent of the previous year, which is to say that moving the operation seventy-five kilometers down the coast cost it four fifths of its volume in a single season. The Dutch complained bitterly and were told, correctly, that they were still trading and the Portuguese were not.

For Hirado there was no consolation at all. The domain lost the gifts and forced loans, the warehousing, the provisioning, the shipwrights and the interpreters, and kept only its 63,000 koku of assessed rice and its debts. The harbor that had held Wang Zhi's junk fleet, the Portuguese carracks, the Clove and thirteen Dutch ships in a single season went back to fishing. The Dutch Wall stayed up. It is still there.

The Sixteen Cards

The Hidden Christians of Hirado's Western Coast

What survived on the island was the thing the Matsuura had spent forty years trying to destroy.

The Christian villages of the western coast, Kasuga and Shishi and Neshiko and Iira, went underground after the prohibition and stayed there. Not for a generation. They stayed for two hundred and thirty years, and in some places longer.

What they built were not churches and not really secret societies either; they were villages, reorganized. At Neshiko, the whole community formed a single group under a hereditary leader called Tsujimoto-sama, who kept the nandogami, the closet deities, the sacred objects hidden in a household storeroom. Beneath him sat clusters of two to eight related households that met each February to draw lots from a set of sixteen wooden cards, one depicting the Virgin and fifteen the mysteries of the rosary. Two centuries of Catholicism, with no priest, no Latin, no mass and no bishop, compressed into sixteen pieces of wood in a box and a lottery held after the new year.

The costs are recorded where they were paid. Executions of prominent Hidden Christians at Shishi and Neshiko in 1645. Father Camillo Costanzo taken on Uku Island and burned alive in 1622, and Gaspar Koteda, grandson of Don Antonio, killed in the same season along with Augustin Ōta, the sources disagreeing about which of them died at Hirado and which on the rock of Nakaenoshima, in a way that suggests the accounts were assembled by people counting the dead rather than watching them die.

When the ban was lifted in 1873, 72 households in the Hoki area and 44 around Himosashi declared themselves Catholic. But the western-coast villages, the old Koteda country, largely did not come in. They had a religion already. It was theirs, it had been handed down through the households of people who had been executed for it, and it did not obviously require correction by a French priest with opinions about the rosary.

The organization at Aburamizu dissolved in 1956. Neshiko's disbanded in 1992. At Kasuga, the last of them, the rituals ceased in 2007, four hundred and fifty years after Gaspar Vilela came ashore and started burning things.

The warehouse lasted sixteen months. The trade lasted ninety years. The faith the Matsuura dug out of the ground and threw into the sea lasted until there was nobody left who remembered the words.

Sources & Further Reading

Boxer, C. R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650. University of California Press, 1951. Still the indispensable framework for the Jesuit mission at Hirado and Ikitsuki, the Miyanomae killings, the Fukuda engagement and the shift of the Portuguese trade to Ōmura's ports.

Boxer, C. R. The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555-1640. Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1959. The source of record for the annual voyages, the captains-major, the silk quotas and the pancado, and for the ship-by-ship chronology that makes the Hirado arrival counts checkable.

Clulow, Adam. The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan. Columbia University Press, 2014. Explains why the VOC's legal and diplomatic position in Japan was so much weaker than its trade figures suggest, and how the shogunate's view of domain-run foreign relations produced the move of 1641.

Cooper, Michael. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543-1640. University of California Press, 1965. Supplies the eyewitness voices in translation, including the Jesuit descriptions of the Matsuura court and of the merchants wintering at Hirado.

Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 1973. The sharpest analysis of the iconoclasm question and of how conversion in a domain like Hirado functioned as a political act before it functioned as a religious one.

Farrington, Anthony. The English Factory in Japan, 1613-1623. British Library, 1991. The complete surviving English archive in two volumes, including the letters of William Adams and the accounts from which the factory's debts, rents and gift expenditure are drawn.

Fróis, Luís. História de Japam. Edited by Josef Wicki. Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, 1976-1984. The contemporary narrative behind almost everything known about Matsuura Takanobu, the cloth quarrel at Miyanomae and the battle in Fukuda Bay, written by a partisan who was nonetheless a superb reporter.

Hesselink, Reinier H. The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560-1640. McFarland, 2016. Traces the chain running from the loss of Hirado through Yokoseura and Fukuda to the founding of Nagasaki, and the populations that ended up in its streets.

Massarella, Derek. A World Elsewhere: Europe's Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Yale University Press, 1990. The best account of the English factory's commercial failure, of Cocks and Saris as managers, and of the Anglo-Dutch violence in the Hirado roads.

Montanus, Arnoldus. Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen der Oost-Indische Maetschappy in 't Vereenigde Nederland, aen de Kaisaren van Japan. Jacob Meurs, 1669. The famous copperplate of the Dutch factory, valuable as a record of the compound's second phase and misleading about everything built after 1636.

So, Kwan-wai. Japanese Piracy in Ming China during the 16th Century. Michigan State University Press, 1975. The standard English-language treatment of Wang Zhi, the Shuangyu network, the haijin prohibition and the real composition of the wakō fleets.

Turnbull, Stephen. The Kakure Kirishitan of Japan: A Study of Their Development, Beliefs and Rituals to the Present Day. Japan Library, 1998. The fullest English account of the surviving Hidden Christian organizations of Hirado and Ikitsuki, their leadership structures, their ritual calendar and their twentieth-century dissolution.