Through Barbarian Eyes: How the Japanese Saw the Portuguese

At some point in the autumn of 1543, on the small island of Tanegashima off the southern tip of Kyūshū, a local village chief named Nishimura Oribenojō stood on a beach and watched three men walk toward him from a Chinese junk anchored in the cove. They were not Chinese. They were not anything he had a word for. They were taller than anyone he had likely seen, with skin paler than any East Asian complexion, enormous noses that jutted from their faces like geological features, and patchy, unruly facial hair that no civilized person would have tolerated. They did not bow. They could not speak. They gestured, pointed, and made noises that resolved into no known language.

The Teppōki, the chronicle that records the arrival, notes that these strangers "do not understand the meaning of written characters." For an East Asian culture in which literacy in classical Chinese was the bedrock marker of civilization, this was not a minor observation. It was a categorical judgment. These men, whatever else they might be, were illiterate. They were, in the precise and loaded terminology that the Japanese borrowed from classical Chinese nomenclature, nanban-jin — Southern Barbarians.

The term would stick for a century. It would encompass wonder, revulsion, admiration, fear, and ultimately a hostility so deep that it sealed an entire civilization behind walls of policy for two hundred and fifty years. The story of how the Japanese perceived the Portuguese across the Nanban century — from 1543 to the final expulsion in 1639 — is a story about what happens when two societies that have developed in complete isolation from each other are suddenly forced to account for each other's existence. It is a story told not from the European perspective, which has dominated the historiography, but from the Japanese side of the beach.

The Grammar of Barbarian

What Does Nanban Mean? The Chinese Origin of Southern Barbarian

The word nanban did not originate in Japan. It was a loan from classical Chinese geopolitics, part of a four-directional taxonomy that the Middle Kingdom used to categorize the uncivilized peoples on its borders: dongyi (Eastern Barbarians), xirong (Western Barbarians), beidi (Northern Barbarians), and nanman (Southern Barbarians). The system was not geographical in any precise sense; it was cosmological. China sat at the center of the civilized world, and everything beyond its cultural sphere was, by definition, barbarous. The further from the center, the less human.

When the Japanese adopted this framework, they were making a statement about their own position within the East Asian civilizational order. Japan understood itself as a participant in the Chinese-derived cultural sphere — literate in Chinese characters, shaped by Buddhist and Confucian thought, governed by codes of propriety that were, in their essentials, refinements of continental models. The Portuguese arrived from the south, from somewhere beyond even the known southern seas, and they arrived without any of the markers that would have made them legible within this system. They could not read. They could not write. They ate with their hands. They smelled of things the Japanese did not want to identify.

The label was, in other words, the mildest version of what the Japanese actually thought. It was not, initially, a term of hatred. It was a term of classification, the kind of dispassionate sorting that a naturalist might apply to an unfamiliar specimen. The hatred would come later.

Fingers, Handkerchiefs, and the Limits of Table Manners

Why Eating With Fingers Offended the Japanese: The 1556 Bungo Banquet

Of all the ways the Portuguese offended Japanese sensibilities, the most immediate was the most mundane: they ate with their fingers.

This requires a moment of cultural calibration. In sixteenth-century Japan, the use of chopsticks was not a matter of personal preference. It was a marker of civilization itself, as fundamental to the definition of a properly functioning human being as the ability to speak or wear clothing. The elaborate rules governing how food was served, consumed, and cleared were embedded in a social grammar that governed everything from the arrangement of dishes on a tray to the order in which courses were eaten and the rituals of communal drinking. To eat with one's hands was not merely unrefined. It was a category error, a failure of species.

When a delegation of Portuguese merchants attended a formal banquet hosted by the daimyō of Bungo in 1556, the serving women openly laughed at them. The guests reached for food with bare fingers, raised meat to their mouths without any intermediary utensil, and then — in what the Japanese found especially revolting — wiped their greasy hands on cloth napkins, which they then folded up and kept on their persons.

The napkin was merely the warm-up. The handkerchief was worse. The Jesuit Luís Fróis, who spent decades in Japan and compiled a meticulous comparative treatise on European and Japanese customs around 1585, documented the Japanese reaction to what was, for Europeans, a perfectly civilized habit. The Portuguese blew their noses into cloth handkerchiefs, which they then tucked back into their clothing. The Japanese, who used disposable soft paper for the same purpose and discarded it after a single use, found this practice not merely unhygienic but actively nauseating. The notion of retaining one's own nasal discharge in a pocket, pressed against the body, as if it were a possession worth keeping — this was the kind of detail that confirmed every suspicion the Japanese harbored about the fundamental cleanliness of these visitors.

And the noses that produced this discharge were themselves a problem. But we will get to the noses.

The Unbathed

Bathing Every Day: The Hygiene Gap Between Japan and Europe

Beneath the specific offenses of table manners and handkerchiefs lay a deeper, structural incompatibility: the Portuguese did not bathe.

This is an overstatement, but only slightly. By the standards of sixteenth-century Japan, where daily or near-daily bathing was a near-universal practice that crossed class lines and carried both hygienic and spiritual significance, the Portuguese bathing habits were essentially non-existent. Fróis documented the gap with his usual forensic precision: the Japanese bathed frequently and considered the bath a ritual of purification as much as a practical measure, while the Europeans bathed rarely and viewed the practice as peripheral to personal maintenance. The gap was not subtle.

The consequences were olfactory. The Portuguese smelled. Their bodies smelled. Their clothing smelled. In a society that placed enormous emphasis on fragrance — where incense appreciation was a cultivated art form, where the scenting of sleeves and letters was a mark of refinement, where the kōdō ceremony elevated the act of smelling into a spiritual practice — the simple fact that the foreigners carried a perceptible bodily odor was a social catastrophe. It preceded them into rooms and lingered after they left.

The Problem of Feelings

Samurai Emotional Restraint and the Portuguese Who Showed Everything

The emotional expressiveness of the Portuguese was not a minor cultural footnote. It was, for the Japanese, a deeply unsettling revelation about the inner architecture of a foreign mind.

Sixteenth-century Japan was a warrior society in which the governing class — the bushi, the samurai — had elevated emotional suppression to a moral absolute. The ideal man did not show anger, grief, fear, or excessive joy. He governed his face as he governed his domain: with discipline and without visible disturbance. The elaborate codes of comportment that would later crystallize into bushidō were already operative in the late Sengoku and Azuchi-Momoyama periods, and they extended well beyond the warrior class. Merchants, artisans, and even farmers understood that emotional restraint was the price of social respect.

The Portuguese, to put it mildly, had not received this memo. They laughed loudly. They argued in public. They wept at religious services. They embraced each other. They gesticulated when they spoke, moving their hands and arms in ways that made them look, to Japanese eyes, like people who had lost motor control of their own limbs. Their faces registered every passing mood with a transparency that the Japanese found both fascinating and faintly alarming, in the way that one might be fascinated and alarmed by an adult who had never learned to control a bodily function.

The Jesuit João Rodrigues, who lived in Japan for over thirty years and became one of the most perceptive European observers of Japanese culture, noticed the dissonance from the other side. He recorded that the Japanese placed such emphasis on composure that they had developed what he described as an almost theatrical control over their facial expressions, maintaining an evenness of countenance in situations where a European would have been visibly distraught. Rodrigues understood that this was not indifference but discipline — that the apparent calm of a Japanese nobleman receiving catastrophic news was not a sign that he did not feel but that he had been trained since childhood to feel without showing.

The Portuguese had not been trained in this way, and the Japanese noticed immediately. It was one more entry in a growing catalog of deficiencies: these foreigners could not read, could not eat properly, could not wash themselves, and could not govern their own faces. Whatever else they were — and the Japanese were beginning to concede that they were something formidable — they were not, by any Japanese standard, fully civilized adults.

Merchants at the Bottom

Why Merchants Ranked Lowest: the Confucian Four Classes and the Portuguese

There was also the matter of social station. The Portuguese who arrived in Japan were, overwhelmingly, merchants. They had come to trade. They said so openly. They haggled over prices with an enthusiasm that bordered, in Japanese eyes, on desperation. They calculated profit margins aloud, compared goods, argued about exchange rates, and generally conducted themselves with the frank commercial energy of people who considered making money a perfectly respectable activity.

In Japan, it was not.

The Confucian-influenced social hierarchy that governed Tokugawa-era Japan — and that was already operative in the late Sengoku period — arranged society into four tiers: shi (warriors), nō (farmers), kō (artisans), and shō (merchants). The merchants sat at the bottom, beneath even the craftsmen who made things with their hands, because merchants, by definition, produced nothing. They moved goods that others had created, and they profited from the transaction without adding value. This was not merely a low-status occupation. It was, in the Confucian moral universe, a fundamentally parasitic one.

The Portuguese were therefore doubly damned. They were foreigners — already suspect — and they were merchants, the lowest category of productive human activity. The citizens of Kyoto, according to the Jesuit sources, initially judged the Portuguese to be "worthless and undeserving of respect." The assessment was not personal. It was structural. A society of traders was, in the Japanese moral framework, a society that had organized itself around its least admirable impulse.

This changed, dramatically and suddenly, when the Portuguese demonstrated that they were merchants who carried guns.

The Reversal: Weapons, Ships, and Celestial Beings

How Guns and the Black Ships Changed Japanese Opinion of the Portuguese

The technological dimension of the encounter scrambled every category the Japanese had established.

The firearms came first. When Tanegashima Tokitaka, the young lord of Tanegashima, saw the matchlock arquebuses that the three Portuguese carried, he did not merely admire them. He purchased two on the spot for a sum so large that it suggests the transaction was less a purchase than a transfer of power. He then ordered his swordsmiths to reverse-engineer the weapons immediately, inaugurating one of the most consequential technology transfers in military history. The gun changed Japanese warfare permanently, and the people who had brought it — however filthy, however illiterate, however emotionally unregulated — commanded a new and grudging respect.

The ships reinforced the point. The Portuguese carracks — the kurofune, the Black Ships, as the Japanese called them — were among the largest vessels afloat in the sixteenth-century world, displacing up to two thousand tons, carrying hundreds of crew, and bearing enough cannon to reduce a coastal fortification to rubble. The Japanese had nothing comparable. Their maritime tradition was built around coastal vessels designed for the inland seas and short-range trade routes of East Asia. The idea that human beings had constructed floating structures capable of crossing the open ocean from the other side of the world, navigating by instruments the Japanese had never seen, was a revelation about the scale of what was possible.

And then came the procession of 1591.

When a Portuguese delegation marched through the streets of Kyoto that year, dressed in full European finery — brilliant silks, ruffled collars, elaborate capes, tall plumed hats — the crowds lining the streets experienced something close to cognitive overload. These were the same people who had been described as worthless merchants and dirty barbarians. Now they walked in dazzling order, attended by servants carrying exotic goods, projecting an image of wealth and cosmopolitan reach that no Japanese lord could match. The reaction, recorded in the Jesuit sources, was astonishment verging on religious awe. Onlookers whispered to one another that these foreigners must be Bodhisattvas — enlightened beings descended from the heavens.

The arc from barbarian to Bodhisattva had taken less than fifty years. The arc from Bodhisattva back to something much worse would take even less.

Noses, Beards, and the Iconography of the Alien

Why the Portuguese Were Drawn With Long Noses and Became Tengu

The physical body of the Portuguese became, over time, a kind of text on which the Japanese inscribed their entire relationship with the foreign.

The nose was the centerpiece. The Nanban screens — those extraordinary painted folding panels that recorded the arrival of the Southern Barbarians in gold and mineral pigment — render Portuguese noses with an exaggeration that pushes observation into caricature. The noses are long, sharp, curved, projecting from the face at angles that suggest the painters found them not merely distinctive but physically implausible. Every Portuguese figure in the screens is nose-first, as if the organ were leading the rest of the body into the composition. (The screens are treated in detail in "Nanban Screens: Imagining the Foreign" elsewhere on this site; what matters here is what the painters' choices reveal about perception rather than aesthetics).

The beard compounded the problem. The Japanese upper classes of this period plucked or shaved their facial hair. A clean face was a mark of grooming, status, and self-respect. The Portuguese, arriving with full beards that they not only tolerated but apparently cultivated, looked, to Japanese eyes, like men who had given up on a fundamental aspect of personal maintenance. The beard was unkempt nature where civilization demanded control.

As the political relationship deteriorated, the physical descriptions darkened. What had been curiosity hardened into xenophobic caricature. Late Tokugawa-era texts began to merge the Portuguese with figures from Japanese demonology. The long nose became the nose of the tengu, the mythological bird-like mountain goblin with an elongated proboscis. The tall, robed figure of the Catholic padre became the mikoshi nyūdō, a supernatural being with an unnaturally long neck dressed in priestly garments. The chronicle Raichō jikki added that the foreign priests had "nails on their hands and feet as long as those of bears" and faces that were green and monstrous. The Portuguese were no longer merely unattractive. They were no longer even fully human. They had been reclassified as yōkai — supernatural creatures from the dark margins of the Japanese imagination.

A New Sect of Buddhism

Why Xavier Translated God as Dainichi in 1549, and What It Cost

Japanese observers were initially no better equipped to process Portuguese religion than Portuguese bodies. When Francis Xavier and his companions arrived in Kagoshima in 1549, they made a strategic decision that would have consequences far beyond what they intended: they translated the Christian God using Buddhist terminology, rendering the supreme deity as Dainichi, the cosmic Buddha Mahāvairocana at the center of Shingon Buddhist theology.

The effect was immediate and, for the Jesuits, gratifyingly productive. Christianity was understood by its first Japanese audiences not as a foreign religion but as a previously unknown sect of Buddhism. This was not a failure of Japanese comprehension. It was a perfectly rational deduction from the available evidence. A group of robed men had arrived from a distant land, professing devotion to a supreme being, performing rituals involving chanting, incense, and holy images, and organizing themselves into a hierarchical community of celibate practitioners. In every external particular, they looked like monks. The Japanese categorized them accordingly.

Xavier himself would eventually realize the error and switch to the Latin Deus, but the damage — or rather, the initial advantage — was done. The deception, whether intentional or accidental, bought time.

The unmasking was correspondingly brutal. As the exclusive and intolerant nature of Catholic doctrine became apparent — the insistence that Dainichi was a demon, that the Buddha was a fraud, that every competing faith led to damnation — the Buddhist establishment reacted with the fury of an institution that felt itself betrayed. The monks had tolerated what they thought was a new sect. They discovered it was an invading ideology that demanded their annihilation.

Buddhist clerics began to warn the daimyō that the Portuguese were not what they seemed. The missionaries, they argued, were merely the forward scouts of a conquering army, using spiritual conversion to soften a country for military conquest. They pointed, with increasing effectiveness, to the Portuguese colonial record in Goa, Malacca, and the Moluccas, where missionary activity had preceded territorial seizure. And they noted, with perfect accuracy, that zealous Japanese converts had begun destroying Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines across Kyūshū with a fervor that looked less like religious devotion than cultural warfare.

The warning was amplified enormously by the arrival of the Protestant Dutch and English after 1600. The argument landed with devastating force on a regime that was already calculating the risks of foreign religious influence.

The Moral Collapse: Slavery and Subversion

The Slave Trade and Hideyoshi's 1587 Confrontation With Gaspar Coelho

The deepest wound to the Portuguese reputation in Japan was not about chopsticks or bathing or noses. It was about human beings in chains.

The Portuguese trade in Japanese slaves — the subject of a dedicated article elsewhere on this site — was the single most explosive issue in the entire Nanban encounter. Portuguese merchants, working alongside Siamese and Cambodian intermediaries, had for decades been purchasing Japanese men, women, and children and shipping them to Macau, Goa, Lisbon, and as far as the Americas. The traffic was not secret. Japanese observers recorded the conditions with a precision born of horror: captives shackled in irons, crammed into the holds of the kurofune, enduring what contemporary accounts described as "tortures exceeding those of hell." Some captives mutilated themselves. Others threw themselves into the sea.

When Toyotomi Hideyoshi confronted the Jesuit Vice-Provincial Gaspar Coelho on the matter in 1587, Coelho's defense was as revealing as it was inadequate: it was the Japanese themselves who were selling their compatriots. The blame-shifting did not work. Hideyoshi ordered the slaves freed from Portuguese ships and promulgated legislation banning the trade outright. He also had several Japanese slave brokers executed in Nagasaki.

The slave trade did more than offend Japanese sensibilities. It destroyed the moral framework within which the Portuguese had operated. A merchant could be tolerated, even a dirty and illiterate one, if his goods were worth having. A missionary could be tolerated, even a theologically alien one, if he brought learning and technology alongside his prayers. But a people who trafficked in human beings — who stole children, who used "a thousand ways of deception" to acquire captives, who allowed even their low-ranking servants and African slaves to purchase Japanese subjects — had forfeited any claim to moral standing.

The Portuguese had arrived as curiosities. They were leaving as threats.

The Fashion Paradox

Why Samurai Wore Portuguese Capes, Rosaries and Bombachas

And yet, in one of those contradictions that make cultural history endlessly more complicated than political history, the Japanese simultaneously adopted Portuguese fashion with an enthusiasm that bordered on mania.

The same Portuguese whose hygiene was reviled and whose manners were mocked became the subjects of an elite fashion craze that swept through the upper echelons of Japanese society. Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself — the man who issued the expulsion edict against the missionaries, who freed the slaves, who confronted Coelho with the litany of Portuguese offenses — dressed up in Portuguese clothing for the sheer pleasure of it. Samurai appeared in public wearing bombachas pantaloons, capes, crucifixes, and rosaries, not as expressions of Christian faith but as exotic accessories, the sixteenth-century Japanese equivalent of wearing a foreign designer label.

The Nanban screens captured this with precision, depicting not only the Portuguese in their strange garments but also Japanese figures wearing hybrid costumes that blended European and Japanese elements. The four-legged folding chair, an object that the Japanese had never encountered in a culture where people knelt at low tables, became a token of exotic prestige. The Western hat, the ruffled collar, the swinging cape — each was absorbed into the visual vocabulary of Japanese elite display.

There was also the matter of swords. Japanese observers noted with great interest that the Portuguese wore their cutlasses with the convex side of the blade facing downward — the exact inversion of how a samurai wore his katana. This was the kind of detail that fascinated a warrior culture: not the weapon itself, which the Japanese could evaluate and improve upon, but the way the weapon was carried, the bodily grammar of its use, which spoke to a fundamentally different martial tradition.

The Japanese did not adopt Portuguese fashion despite their contempt for Portuguese culture. They adopted it alongside their contempt, without apparent contradiction. A samurai could find the Portuguese personally revolting and their clothing irresistibly stylish. The distinction was between the person and the artifact, and Japanese culture had always been comfortable separating the two. Chinese civilization was admired and its products enthusiastically adopted even during periods of political hostility toward the continent. The Portuguese were merely the latest case of a very old pattern: cultural absorption without cultural surrender.

The Fifth Column

How Japan Came to See the Portuguese as a Security Threat, 1614 to 1640

The final stage of Japanese perception was the most consequential, and the most dangerous.

By the early seventeenth century, under the consolidating rule of the Tokugawa shōgunate, the Portuguese had been fully reclassified in the Japanese political imagination. They were no longer barbarians. They were no longer exotic. They were no longer even merchants. They were a fifth column — a foreign conspiracy that used religion as a weapon, trade as a lever, and conversion as a strategy of conquest. The nanban-jin had become something the early observers on the beaches of Tanegashima could never have imagined: an existential threat to the Japanese state.

This perception was not delusional. It was an exaggeration of real evidence, processed through the strategic logic of a regime obsessed with domestic security. The Jesuits had governed Nagasaki as a sovereign territory. Christian daimyō had conducted foreign diplomacy independent of central authority. Japanese converts had destroyed indigenous religious sites. The slave trade had demonstrated that the Portuguese were willing to treat Japanese subjects as commodities. And the Protestant rivals — the Dutch and the English — had confirmed, from their own colonial experience, that Catholic missions and military conquest were structurally intertwined.

The Tokugawa response was systematic and total. The expulsion edicts of 1614 ordered all missionaries out of Japan. The sakoku decrees of the 1630s sealed the country to Portuguese shipping. The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38, a massive uprising by predominantly Christian peasants and masterless samurai on Kyūshū, confirmed, in the regime's eyes, everything it had feared about the subversive potential of the foreign faith.

When the final Portuguese embassy arrived from Macau in 1640, pleading for the resumption of trade, the Tokugawa authorities executed sixty-one of the seventy-four envoys and sent the survivors home with a message: any Portuguese who returned would die. The century of contact was over.

What the Gaze Reveals

What the Japanese Record Reveals, and Its Legacy Down to Perry in 1853

What is remarkable about the Japanese sources is not their hostility — every culture produces hostile descriptions of foreigners — but their granularity. The Japanese did not merely dislike the Portuguese. They studied them, with an observational precision that rivals anything in the European ethnographic tradition of the same period.

They noted how the Portuguese blew their noses. They noted how they wore their swords. They noted the texture of their beards and the shape of their fingernails. They counted the ways the Portuguese differed from the Japanese norms of eating, drinking, bathing, dressing, emoting, praying, and dying. And they fitted every observation into a coherent cultural framework — one built on Confucian hierarchies of social worth, Buddhist codes of bodily purity, and warrior-class ideals of emotional self-governance — that allowed them to locate the Portuguese precisely within a Japanese moral universe. The answer, after a century of evidence, was unambiguous: the Portuguese were outside it.

The legacy of these perceptions outlived the encounter by centuries. The tengu-nosed priest, the predatory slave merchant, the ship full of stolen children — these images became embedded in Tokugawa-era propaganda and popular culture, reinforcing the sakoku policy long after the last Portuguese had departed. When Commodore Perry's American "Black Ships" arrived in 1853, they inadvertently echoed the kurofune of the Nanban century, and the Japanese response — a dense mixture of technological admiration, cultural defensiveness, and fear of foreign domination — carried unmistakable echoes of an encounter that had begun, three centuries earlier, with three men who could not use chopsticks walking off a boat on Tanegashima.

Sources & Further Reading

Boxer, C.R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650. University of California Press, 1951. The foundational English-language history of the Nanban period, indispensable for understanding the political context that shaped Japanese perceptions.

Cooper, Michael, ed. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640. University of Michigan Press, 1965. A primary source anthology that includes many of the Jesuit observations of Japanese reactions to the Portuguese cited in this article.

Elisonas, Jurgis (George Elison). Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 1973. Essential for the evolution of Japanese anti-Christian ideology, including the demonization of Portuguese priests in late-Edo literature.

Fróis, Luís, S.J. The First European Description of Japan, 1585: A Critical English-Language Edition of Striking Contrasts in the Customs of Europe and Japan. Ed. Daniel T. Reff, Richard K. Danford, and Robin D. Gill. Routledge, 2014. Fróis's systematic comparison of European and Japanese customs is the single richest primary source for understanding how each culture perceived the other's daily habits.

Lach, Donald F. Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol. I: The Century of Discovery. University of Chicago Press, 1965. Provides the broader European intellectual context for the encounter and the reception of Japanese observations in Europe.

Lidin, Olof G. Tanegashima: The Arrival of Europe in Japan. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2002. A detailed study of first contact, including analysis of the Japanese chronicles (Teppōki, Yaita-ki) that record initial impressions of the Portuguese.

Massarella, Derek. A World Elsewhere: Europe's Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Yale University Press, 1990. A comprehensive study of the Nanban encounter from both European and Japanese perspectives, with strong treatment of the evolution of mutual perceptions.

Rodrigues, João, S.J. This Island of Japon: João Rodrigues' Account of 16th-Century Japan. Trans. and ed. Michael Cooper. Kodansha International, 1973. Rodrigues's extensive observations of Japanese culture are a key primary source.

Screech, Timon. The Lens Within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan. University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. Important for understanding the later Tokugawa-era visual culture that inherited and transformed Nanban-period imagery of the foreign.

Toby, Ronald P. State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu. Stanford University Press, 1991. Essential for the political logic of sakoku and the evolving Tokugawa perception of foreign presence as a security threat.

Turnbull, Stephen. The Kakure Kirishitan of Japan: A Study of Their Development, Beliefs and Rituals to the Present Day. Japan Library, 1998. Useful for understanding how the post-expulsion perception of the Portuguese shaped the experience of hidden Christian communities.