The Scattered Kingdom: The Japanese Diaspora of the Iberian World

In the summer of 1584, the Tenshō Embassy paid a visit to the Palace of the Dukes of Braganza. The Duchess, wanting a theatrical moment, dressed her own small son in Japanese clothing and presented him to her visitors. The Jesuit priests accompanying the delegation glanced at the child and misread the scene entirely. They assumed, without surprise, that the boy was simply a Japanese slave who happened to live in the palace.

This was not the reaction of men unfamiliar with Japanese people. It was the reaction of men for whom the presence of a Japanese child in an aristocratic Portuguese household was so ordinary as to require no explanation. The priests were correct about the social register — small Japanese boys were often to be found in the palaces of the Iberian nobility — and incorrect only about the specific identity of this particular small boy.

By 1584, Japanese people were a recognizable if minority presence across much of the Portuguese and Spanish world. They were in Lisbon and Coimbra. They were in Goa and Cochin. They were in Macau and Manila and Malacca. They would soon be in Mexico City, Lima, Guadalajara, and a cattle town in the Argentine interior called Córdoba. One of them, according to a shipwreck survivor's account of 1593, died crossing the Natal desert in what is now South Africa, somewhere between a ruined Portuguese East Indiaman and the horizon. They had arrived as slaves and mercenaries, as Christian refugees and diplomatic envoys, as merchants and artisans and seminarians, and — in the case of that anonymous man in Natal — as passengers on a ship that never reached its destination.

They formed, collectively, the first global diaspora the Japanese archipelago ever produced. And within a century, they had ceased to exist as a distinct people anywhere on earth.

The Lisbon Parish Records

Japanese in Lisbon: Parish Records of Marriage and Manumission, 1557 to 1598

The earliest named Japanese person ever to set foot in Europe died in a Dominican convent in Coimbra in March 1557. His name — or at least the one he answered to by the time the friars recorded his burial — was Bernardo of Kagoshima. He had traveled from Japan in the care of Francis Xavier, who had judged him a promising Christian convert and arranged for him to be sent to Portugal for further instruction. Bernardo reached Lisbon in 1553, was presented to the young King João III, and then settled into what was meant to be a long ecclesiastical education. His lungs had other plans. The Portuguese winters and the cramped refectories of sixteenth-century religious houses killed him, like they killed so many others, and he was buried in Coimbra under a name that gave no hint of the thirty-thousand-mile journey that had brought him to that grave.

Bernardo was a curiosity. The Japanese who came after him were a demographic.

The mechanics that produced the Lisbon community are traced in the article on the Portuguese slave trade. The Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti, writing from Lisbon in 1579, observed that Japanese slaves arrived at the Lisbon docks every year. Their numbers, compared to the torrent of Africans and Indians, were small. But they were consistent, and they were visible, and by the 1570s they had produced something remarkable: a generation of Japanese Portuguese who married, baptized their children, worked at trades, and lie under stone floors in a half-dozen Lisbon parish churches.

They are still there. You can read their names.

On 5 February 1573, at the Church of the Conceição in Lisbon, a Japanese woman named Jacinta de Sá married a Japanese man named Guilherme Brandão. Both were forros — former slaves, emancipated and legally free. Their wedding is the earliest recorded marriage of Japanese people anywhere in Europe. Neither bride nor groom appears to have been more than a few years out of bondage; neither would ever see Japan again; and the parish register records the event with the same impassive clerical formula it used for every other couple who passed through the Conceição that month. The clerk was not making a historical note. He was simply doing the paperwork.

Thirteen years later, on 10 June 1586, a freed Japanese man named Nuno Cardoso married an African-born slave named Constantina Dias at the Church of Our Lady of Loreto. On 31 January 1593, Ventura Japam married a Portuguese woman, Maria Manuel, at the parish of Pena. On 18 January 1595, another Japanese man — Gonçalo Fernandes — married another Portuguese woman, Catarina Luís, at the same Pena church. The marriage records do not describe these unions as extraordinary. Ventura and Gonçalo were homens do Japão in the same unremarkable way that their brides were women of Portugal. The city was used to them.

What had made this integration possible was, of all things, an early experiment in royal humanitarian legislation. King Sebastião's 1570 decree, issued from the palace at Sintra, had flatly forbidden the enslavement of Japanese people anywhere in the Portuguese empire. In Asia, the decree was ignored with the practiced indifference of colonial traders who knew Lisbon was eighteen months' sail away. But in Lisbon itself, where the king's writ actually ran, the law was enforced. Japanese captives arriving at the Tagus docks were, at least in principle, entitled to their freedom, and the emancipation documents surviving in the Torre do Tombo show that principle was frequently honored.

The most telling of these is dated 25 September 1598. A widow named Margarida Fernandes — her late husband had been a pilot on the India Run — formally freed a twenty-year-old Japanese man in her service. The wording of the emancipation is worth attending to. It states that Manuel Ferreira, the young man in question, is being released because, by law and custom, the natives of Japan could not be kept as captives. The document reads less like a gift of freedom than a delayed compliance with a rule that had been gathering dust for twenty-eight years.

Some of the stories are specific enough to follow. Damião de Lima was brought to Portugal as a child in 1582 by a sea captain named Ignácio de Lima. He was freed in Lisbon, educated in his master's household, became the captain's heir, was granted an annual stipend of nine thousand reis, and eventually left for Macau in 1618 to set himself up as a merchant. He died around 1642, sixty years after he had arrived as cargo. Diogo, whose 1590 emancipation document notes approvingly that he had a "white face," had belonged to a Viceroy of India and was freed by the Viceroy's wife on 23 May 1590.

Not every story ended well. A Japanese woman named Maria Pereira served the nun Filipa de Guerra at the Santos Monastery for more than two decades, her arrival datable to the early 1570s and therefore squarely in the period when Sebastião's decree should have freed her on the gangplank. The nun eventually wrote a will ordering Maria to be freed upon her own death — a gesture rather undermined by the two decades of enslavement it closed. Manumission after the owner's death was common in Lisbon wills of the period. It was also the mechanism by which many slaves spent their entire productive lives in bondage, emancipated only in time to face old age without a household to shelter them.

The Lisbon community had no dedicated quarter, no confraternity, no Japanese priest. Its members melted into the broader Afro-Asian population of the city, appearing in the records when they married, were baptized, wrote a will, or died. Their descendants, by the second generation, were simply Lisboetas. Somewhere under the stones of Alfama and Mouraria, a thin stratum of sixteenth-century Japanese DNA quietly joined the gene pool of the Portuguese capital and disappeared.

Goa, Where the Law Was Negotiable

Japanese Slaves in Goa: How the City Defeated the 1603 Ban

If Lisbon was the place where Japanese slavery was theoretically illegal and occasionally enforced, Goa was where it was legally debatable and practically universal.

The capital of Portuguese Asia was the second great reception point for the trade. The French traveler François Pyrard de Laval, passing through in the early seventeenth century, noted a "good number of Chinese and Japanese" among the city's bewilderingly polyglot population. Official documents of the Portuguese administration had begun listing japões as a distinct demographic category as early as 1560. Japanese women, in particular, were prized in the Goan market and commanded prices that substantially exceeded those paid for African or Indian captives; they worked as domestic servants in the households of wealthy merchants, as street vendors under the category known as escravos de ganho — "earning slaves" who kept a percentage of their daily takings — and, in some number that the records decline to specify, as prostitutes in the brothels that surrounded the harbor.

The casual brutality of the system produced, in 1610, one of the most harrowing incidents recorded in any European traveler's account of early modern Asia. The French merchant-adventurer Jean Mocquet, staying in Goa as the guest of a Portuguese household, watched the lady of the house respond to her suspicions of a sexual relationship between her husband and a newly purchased Japanese slave by having the slave's teeth broken out with a hammer, her body later mutilated, and her death accomplished by the insertion of a red-hot iron. Mocquet recorded the episode in the flat voice of a man who has seen many terrible things in many countries. The slave's name is not preserved. No one was charged.

In the face of this, the attempt by Madrid to enforce the spirit of Sebastião's old law failed more spectacularly in Goa than anywhere else. In 1603, King Philip III — ruling both Spain and Portugal under the Union of the Crowns — ordered the Viceroy to crack down on the Japanese slave trade. The response was not quiet evasion but formal, public, institutional rebellion. The city's High Court lodged protests. The municipal council argued that freeing the Japanese slaves would strip Goa of its domestic workforce, its manual labor, and — perhaps more pointedly — its defensive capacity, since a substantial number of the city's Japanese were male mercenaries whose martial reputation was worth several garrisons. The Crown, confronted with an entire colonial establishment refusing to comply, backed down. It would take the 1598 Jesuit council's appeal another four years to produce a workable enforcement mechanism, and even then the trade merely shifted.

The named individuals in the Goan records are fewer than in Lisbon, but the patterns are clear. A slave called Diogo appears in a 1546 testimony concerning an escape attempt with a Chinese companion named Hompeo. A woman called Domingas de Paixão arrived around 1605 and was placed in charge of the gates of the convent of Santa Monica, where she served for thirty years. Two Japanese children, Tomás and Marta, were born in Goa around 1600 and shipped onward to Lima in 1606; Tomás, the son, had been branded on the face with a hot iron to mark him as property. In 1595, a Jesuit freed six Japanese slaves and a group of merchants, in a gesture of piety, freed three Japanese girls. These gestures were real, and so was everything they could not change.

Manila: The Quarter Called Dilao

Japanese Traders, Mercenaries and Exiles in Manila, 1606 to 1632

Of all the cities in the Iberian world that received Japanese migrants, Manila was the one where the migration became a community. It had a name — Dilao, from the Tagalog word for yellow, though which association was intended has been politely contested ever since. It had a neighborhood. It had a population that modern estimates put at three thousand at its peak. And it had a political existence that the Spanish colonial administration tracked, feared, manipulated, and periodically tried to destroy.

The establishment of the Dilao quarter itself, in 1585, and its militarized reorganization by Governor Dasmariñas in 1591 under the shadow of Hideyoshi's threatened invasion, are covered in the dedicated articles on those episodes.

The population swelled in waves. Traders came with the monsoons and sometimes stayed. Refugees came from Kyushu as Hideyoshi's edict bit into the Christian population. Mercenaries came seeking employment in the Spanish military. Exiles came after 1614 when the Tokugawa shogunate began expelling its Christian aristocracy. In June 1606, the crown attorney of the Audiencia, Rodrigo Díaz Guiral, inspected the settlement and counted ninety-one shops and lodgings. By 1621, Archbishop Serrano was counting more than fifteen hundred Japanese Christians in the community alongside a broader Japanese demographic that the colonial officials regarded with a mixture of commercial enthusiasm and strategic dread.

The commercial enthusiasm was justified. The pancada, the bulk price-fixing system that the Spanish imposed on the Chinese galleons, was written for Sangley cargoes and was not applied to the Japanese, who sold in their own quarter. Japanese traders paid the almojarifazgo, the customs duty, like everyone else. They imported wheat flour, salted meats, folding screens, lacquerware, and — until the colonial authorities lost their nerve about it — katanas, lances, and armor. They exported Chinese silk, gold, wax, and deer hides out of the province of Pangasinan, where a report of 1618 counted between sixty and eighty thousand deer killed a year; the skins went to Japan, whose leather industry turned them into armor, scabbards, and lacquered cases.

By the 1630s, Japanese women and mestizas were holding commercial licenses in their own right. Potenciana de Salazar sold wine and food; Dominga Lopez kept a shop; Catalina de la Cruz dealt in edible goods. They were not aristocrats. They were small businesswomen in a colonial port, managing inventories and paying tariffs, their names entering the record precisely because they had registered with the municipal authorities and paid the fees that entitled them to do so.

The strategic dread was also justified, and the Spanish colonial administration never really learned to manage it. The Japanese community repeatedly proved its military value: in 1596 and 1598, Japanese mercenaries served in Spanish expeditions to Cambodia; in 1603, when the massive Chinese population of Manila rose in the Sangley Rebellion, the heavily outnumbered Spanish owed their survival to a Japanese militia of somewhere between three hundred and eight hundred men who helped them suppress the revolt with a thoroughness that the Chinese survivors remembered for generations; in 1615, Governor Juan de Silva's fleet against the Dutch in the Strait of Malacca relied on five hundred Japanese soldiers. Japanese officers — men the records call Luis Gómez, Juan Tete Manso, Miguel Yamat, Miguel Sánchez, Miguel de la Cruz — commanded detachments, earned pensions, and died in Spanish service.

And then, in 1606 and 1607, the same community rose in armed rebellion against the Spanish authorities who had been deporting them without warning. The revolts were put down; the Dilao quarter was burned; many Japanese were shipped back to Nagasaki in what the Spanish called repatriation and their victims called exile. In 1619 and 1620, groups of Japanese mercenaries switched sides altogether and fought for the Dutch. The Spanish had never quite decided whether the Japanese were their praetorian guard or their next insurrection, and the Japanese, looking at the evidence, had never quite decided either.

The religious history of Manila's Japanese community is inseparable from the expulsion edict of 1614. Ships that year brought the deported Christian aristocrats, thirty-three clerics, and more than a hundred prominent lay refugees, including Takayama Ukon, the most famous Christian samurai in Japanese history, who died of fever forty days after his arrival. Alongside him came Naitō Tokuan — baptismal name Juan — and his sister Naitō Julia, who led a small convent of Japanese nuns called the Miyako no bikuni. Julia's group, exiled from Kyoto, re-established their religious life at the settlement of San Miguel. The community they served included a floating population of Japanese Christians who had arrived not in a single dramatic wave but in the trickle of persecution: families escaping edicts, priests in hiding, lepers expelled by a Japanese authority that did not want to pay for their upkeep.

The last of these is perhaps the most extraordinary episode in the city's history. In 1632, the Governor of Nagasaki, in a stroke of administrative brutality that even the Spanish found bewildering, loaded a hundred and thirty Japanese Christian lepers onto a ship and dispatched them to Manila, apparently on the principle that if the Spanish were so attached to their coreligionists they could pay to feed them. The Spanish, to their credit, welcomed the arrivals, housed them in a specially prepared hospital, and recognized two of their number — Juan Quiuso and Luis Sanguiche — as community leaders. It was the kind of thing you could not make up. It had, in the records of both cities, really happened.

The 1630s ended the story. The sakoku edicts cut off migration. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the neighborhood had a new name, and its Japanese origins survived only in the older citizens' memories and in the occasional family surname.

Macau: Rearing Tigers Within the Walls

Macau's Japanese Community: Slaves, Seminarians and the 1613 Deportation

If Dilao was the largest Japanese community in the Spanish world, Macau was the largest in the Portuguese one — and the one the local Chinese authorities most actively feared.

In 1613, a visiting Chinese official found ninety-eight bonded Japanese in the city — wōnú, "Japanese slaves," in the Chinese phrase — and had them summarily deported; the order was repeated in 1617. The Chinese provincial officials warned Beijing, in prose that lost none of its force in translation, that the Portuguese harbored Japanese and kept them as slaves, oblivious of the fact that they were rearing tigers. The charge was not unreasonable. The Japanese in Macau were armed, trained, and numerous enough to give any imagined Chinese siege a very long afternoon indeed. King Philip II, responding to Chinese diplomatic pressure, banned Japanese in Macau from carrying swords or weapons in 1597. The ban was imperfectly enforced, for reasons the Portuguese Senate never put in writing.

The Japanese population of Macau was, like Manila's, a mosaic. There were female domestic slaves — women called Inês, Maria, Senhora Amarição, Guiomar, Águeda, Mariana — raised in Portuguese households, some of them eventually freed, some passing into the twilight trade that historians politely describe as prostitution. There were male escravos de ganho working the harbors, among them a man called Joan Japan whose daily earnings put silver into a master's pocket he would probably never meet. There were merchants, mercenaries, and — uniquely among the Iberian cities — an entire community of Japanese seminarians preparing for clandestine missionary return to their homeland.

The Santo Inácio Seminary, attached to the Jesuit college, was the central institution of this community. Constantino Dourado, who had traveled to Europe as one of the servants of the Tenshō Embassy and who had personally learned the European printer's craft in Macau under the Jesuit press before its installation at Katsusa, served as the seminary's rector from 1618 until his death in 1620. He died a respected priest in the most important Catholic institution east of Goa, and his printed books are still in the libraries of Rome.

The seminary continued to produce Japanese-ancestry clergy for generations after the direct contact with Japan had ended. The last known student was João Pacheco, born in Macau in 1668 — three decades after the last Portuguese ship had been allowed into Nagasaki harbor — and ordained in 1694. His Japanese-ness was, by that point, a genealogical fact rather than a living culture, but the institutional memory held.

The artistic community was almost as striking. Mâncio Taichiku and Pedro Chicuan, two Japanese painters trained in Japan by the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Niccolò — the man who had imported European oil painting into the archipelago — settled in Macau after the expulsion and made careers decorating the churches of the Portuguese colony. A woman called Maria of Kyoto rose to become the acknowledged head of the Japanese women's community in Macau, her influence sufficient that when she died her funeral was attended by the civic elite of the city. She had probably arrived as a slave. She died as a matriarca, and the gap between those two words describes the entire trajectory of what Macau did to — and for — its Japanese residents.

Then came the final transplantations. In 1636, the Tokugawa regime, refining its policy of ethnic-religious purification, banished to Macau two hundred and eighty-seven Japanese women and children whose only crime was marriage to, or descent from, Portuguese men. They arrived in a city that was itself entering crisis: the final sakoku edicts would close Japan three years later, the embassy of 1640 would lose its head on Nishizaka hill, and among the thirteen sailors spared to carry the message back, one would be a forty-seven-year-old Macanese-born man called Miguel Carvalho, born in 1593 to a Korean slave mother, whose Japanese ancestry — and Korean, and Portuguese, and colonial — was precisely the kind of polyglot identity that the Tokugawa were trying to eliminate and that Macau, for a few more decades, would continue to produce in defiance of everybody's edicts.

Malacca, Africa, and the Long Coastline of the Empire

Japanese Mercenaries in Malacca and the First Japanese in Africa

Malacca was primarily a transit port — the hinge between Macau and Goa through which the human cargo of the slave trade moved — but it also hosted a substantial free Japanese mercenary community. When the Dutch besieged the city for three months in 1606, the captain André Furtado de Mendonça held the fortress largely on the strength of his Japanese garrison, whose discipline reportedly impressed even the attackers. By 1614–1615 the Japanese contingent had become the Governor's personal bodyguard. In 1618, an incident of remarkable pettiness finally forced King Philip III to forbid Japanese mercenaries from holding military positions in Malacca. The captain of the city, Dom João da Silveira, had got into a quarrel with the local Bishop; to resolve matters, he had his armed Japanese guards storm the cathedral. The Bishop survived, wrote to Madrid, and the Crown — confronted with the image of Japanese samurai invading a Catholic church at the orders of a Portuguese nobleman — decided that perhaps the Japanese should no longer be employed in quite such directly armed capacities. The Japanese continued to live in Malacca. They simply stopped holding official commissions.

Further flung than Malacca, the diaspora dwindles to individual shadows. Japanese slaves and mercenaries appear in the records of Arakan on the Burmese coast and in Ayutthaya, the Siamese capital, whose Japanese colony is traced in the article on the red-seal ships. And then, in the most unexpected of the records, a Japanese man died in the desert of Natal — modern South Africa — in 1593, one of the survivors of the Portuguese East Indiaman Santo Alberto, which had broken up on the southeastern African coast. He perished on the overland march toward a Portuguese fort, alongside a Javanese slave and two Africans. The survivor's account names him only as o japão. He is, as far as the records allow us to say, the first Japanese person ever to set foot on the African continent, and very nearly the last for three centuries.

The Americas: Collar-Pressers, Bridge-Builders, and a Merchant of Guadalajara

Japanese in Colonial Mexico and Peru: Freedom Suits, Shops and Luis Encío

The Japanese who reached the New World arrived by two routes: the Manila galleon across the Pacific, and the Portuguese slave networks crossing the Atlantic from Lisbon by way of Brazil. In the Spanish colonial records they were often filed under the omnibus term chinos, which in the seventeenth-century Americas meant not Chinese in the modern sense but Asians in general, with Japanese specifically distinguished in better-kept registries as indios de Japón.

The first Japanese woman in the Americas whose name survives was Catalina de Bastidos, who reached Mexico City in the 1590s and married a Portuguese trader called Francisco Leitão. The most extensively documented early case is Gaspar Fernandes — Gaspar Japón in the Mexican records — a child kidnapped in Bungo around 1590 and sold to a Portuguese merchant called Rui Pérez, who brought him to Mexico City in 1599. When Pérez died, the Mexican Inquisition seized Gaspar as part of the estate. Gaspar, now a young man, sued for his freedom on the grounds that, as a Japanese, he could not legally be enslaved. The lawsuit dragged on for five years. In June 1604 the Inquisition released Gaspar and two fellow Japanese servants, Ventura and Miguel Jerónimo, as free men. The judgment cited, across eight thousand miles of ocean, the 1570 decree of a Portuguese king who had died fighting Moors on a Moroccan plain a quarter-century before.

The most remarkable Japanese life in colonial Mexico, though, was not a freed slave's but a merchant's. Luis Encío — Soemon, in his Japanese name — was born in Sendai in 1595 and arrived in New Spain as a young man with the Keichō Embassy, that extraordinary diplomatic mission dispatched by Date Masamune across three oceans. When the embassy returned to Japan in failure, Soemon stayed behind. He settled in Guadalajara, married a local indigenous woman, Catalina de Silva, and opened a series of shops in the city between 1634 and 1647. His son-in-law, Juan de Páez — born in Osaka in 1608 and himself a refugee from the Tokugawa persecutions — became one of the wealthiest merchants in Guadalajara. He also, in the precise moral geometry of the colonial economy, became a significant slave-owner in his own right. The man whose father had been an exile and whose father-in-law had been a diplomatic refugee owned African slaves, traded in sugar, and died in the 1670s a patriarch of the city.

Further south, in the viceroyalty of Peru, the pattern was smaller in scale but just as varied. A twenty-six-year-old man identified in the Lima records only as Xapón, born in Nagasaki in 1587, ran his own collar-pressing shop on San Agustín Street. In 1613 he purchased, for three hundred silver pesos, the freedom of his Indonesian wife — Andrea Ana, who had been enslaved by a Spanish household. A builder called Miguel de Silva, also Japanese, helped construct the Puente de Piedra across the Rímac River in Lima between 1608 and 1610; his stonework supports that bridge to this day. Juan de Baeza, an impoverished mender of socks, died in the port of Callao in 1625, too poor to pay for the Mass that would ordinarily have accompanied his burial.

The furthest point of the diaspora — geographically, biographically, morally — was the eight-hundred-peso Japanese slave of 1596 whose story opens the dedicated article on the Portuguese slave trade. He was sold in a Córdoba parish house, lived, sued, won his freedom, and died somewhere in the interior of Argentina. The ruling that freed him rested on the same ghost of King Sebastião's decree that had rescued Gaspar Japón in Mexico — a law that had died in Lisbon, migrated east on every carrack, and finally caught up with the empire it was meant to regulate at the foot of the Andes.

The Closing Door

What the 1635 Ban on Return Did to Japanese Communities Overseas

The edicts of 1635 were not directed at the diaspora. They were directed at Japan. But they had, on the Japanese who lived outside the archipelago, the single most consequential demographic effect of the entire Nanban century. Under the new law, no Japanese subject could travel abroad, and no Japanese abroad could return. The penalty for attempted return was death.

At a stroke, every Japanese community in the Iberian world was cut off from its source. The merchant networks linking Nagasaki to Manila, the refugee flows from Kyushu to Dilao, the seminary pipeline moving young men from the Jesuit colleges of Japan to the Santo Inácio in Macau — all of it went dark. The Japanese towns of Southeast Asia were stranded by the same edict; their end is told in the article on the red-seal ships.

They chose self-sufficiency, for as long as they could, and then they chose assimilation. The second generation is bilingual; the third generation, monolingual in Spanish or Portuguese; the fourth generation, indistinguishable in the records from any other colonial family of mixed ancestry. By the early eighteenth century, the only visible Japanese communities left in the Iberian world were the descendants of the Macau seminary, the shrinking congregation of Dilao, and a handful of family names in Guadalajara and Lima that carried stories the family might or might not still remember. By the middle of the century, even those had faded.

It is tempting to read this as a tragedy — the disappearance of a people — but the disappearance was almost always a matter of absorption, not loss. The Japanese of Lisbon became Portuguese. The Japanese of Dilao became Filipino. The Japanese of Guadalajara became Mexican. Their bloodlines are still there, braided into dozens of national populations, occasionally surfacing in a family document or a surname or a piece of DNA analysis. What disappeared was not the people. What disappeared was the sense that they were Japanese at all.

And that, in turn, is a reminder of what the Nanban century actually was. It was not simply a story about two nations meeting and then parting. It was a brief, intense, globally distributed migration that produced — in the parish records of a Lisbon church, in the stonework of a Lima bridge, in the deer-hide shipments of a Manila warehouse, and in the painted altarpiece of a Macanese cathedral — a first rehearsal of what a globally connected Japan might someday look like. It took two hundred and fifty years, the forced opening of the archipelago, and the twentieth century's second and much larger Japanese diaspora for that rehearsal to become, finally, a performance.

The first cast had scattered by then. But their names were still in the registers, waiting, if anyone cared to look.

Sources & Further Reading

Boxer, Charles R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650. University of California Press, 1951. Still the foundational English-language synthesis of the entire Nanban period, indispensable for the demographic and political context of the diaspora.

de Sousa, Lúcio. The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves. Brill, 2019. The most thorough modern study of the slave networks that produced the involuntary component of the diaspora, drawing heavily on the Portuguese and Macanese archival record.

de Sousa, Lúcio, and Mihoko Oka. Daikōkai jidai no Nihonjin dorei: Ajia, Shintairiku, Yōroppa [Japanese Slaves in the Age of Discovery: Asia, the New World, Europe]. Tokyo: Chūōkōron-Shinsha, 2017; expanded edition, Chūkō Sensho 116, 2021. The reconstruction of the lives and legal trajectories of the Japanese who reached Mexico, Peru, and Argentina, including the chapter on Fukuchi Gen'emon of Guadalajara — the Luis Encío of the section above. In Japanese; there is no English edition, and Oropeza and Seijas below cover the same ground.

Fonseca, Jorge. Escravos e senhores na Lisboa quinhentista. Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2010. The parish-register demographic analysis that underpins the Lisbon section of this article — baptisms, marriages and manumissions across the Conceição, the Loreto, Santa Ana da Pena and the city's other parishes, read against the notarial deeds of the Torre do Tombo. The Japanese appear in it as a countable handful within the whole enslaved population of the city.

Nelson, Thomas. "Slavery in Medieval Japan." Monumenta Nipponica 59, no. 4 (2004): 463–492. The essential article on the indigenous Japanese institutions of bondage that supplied the Portuguese trade with its human cargo.

Iwao, Seiichi. Early Japanese Settlers in the Philippines. Foreign Affairs Association of Japan, 1943. The classic Japanese-language study of the Dilao community, in translation. Though dated in its framing, the documentary groundwork remains indispensable.

Gil, Juan. Hidalgos y samurais: España y Japón en los siglos XVI y XVII. Alianza Editorial, 1991. The standard Spanish-language history of Hispano-Japanese contact, particularly strong on the Manila and Acapulco ends of the diaspora.

Oropeza, Déborah. La migración asiática en el virreinato de la Nueva España: Un proceso de globalización (1565–1700). El Colegio de México, 2020. A comprehensive study of the Asian diaspora in colonial Mexico, with substantial treatment of the Japanese component.

Seijas, Tatiana. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. Cambridge University Press, 2014. The indispensable modern study of how the Spanish colonial system racially reclassified its Asian slaves — including the Japanese — and eventually emancipated them.

Mocquet, Jean. Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes Orientales et Occidentales. Paris, 1617. The primary source for the Goa atrocity of 1610, and a rich if uncomfortable guide to the textures of daily life in the Portuguese Asian empire.

Pinto, Paulo Jorge de Sousa. The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka, 1575–1619: Power, Trade, and Diplomacy. NUS Press, 2012. The standard modern treatment of the Malaccan theater, including the Japanese mercenary presence.

Borao Mateo, José Eugenio. The Spanish Experience in Taiwan, 1626–1642. Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Useful for the broader context of Japanese movement through the Spanish Pacific world, particularly in connection with the Dilao community.

Pyrard de Laval, François. Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval contenant sa navigation aux Indes Orientales. Paris, 1615. The eyewitness description of Goan demography in the early seventeenth century, including the Japanese community.