A Flask of Sugar: Konpeitō and the Portuguese Gift to Nobunaga, 1569

The Contents of the Flask

What Did Luís Fróis Actually Give Oda Nobunaga in 1569?

On 1 June 1569, writing from Kyoto to his fellow Jesuit Belchior de Figueiredo, Luís Fróis set down what he had carried to an audience with Oda Nobunaga. A flask of confeitos, sugar confections. Some wax candles.

That is the entire inventory.

The passage survives in published Portuguese and Japanese editions identified by the National Diet Library's reference service, which is unusually firm ground beneath a confectionery anecdote. Fróis did give Nobunaga sugar sweets, on a datable day, in a city whose politics he was trying to survive. What the sweets looked like, what sat at their centers and who had made them are questions the letter does not answer, because the word he used covered a whole family of preparations and a man reporting to a colleague had no reason to itemize a present he had already handed over.

One detail is worth holding lightly. Fróis wrote only frasco, a flask; the glass bottle of the familiar telling comes from a Japanese rendering of the passage. It is a plausible reading of the object, not a detail the letter itself supplies.

The Japanese name konpeitō, written 金平糖, kept the Portuguese connection audible. Over the following centuries it settled onto the small pointed sugar sweets sold today, whose surfaces suggest stars, or flowers, depending on the viewer. The points were not designed. They grew during manufacture, and the colors that make a modern bowl of them look like confetti are largely the work of Japanese makers who came later.

Fróis's gift is a useful place to begin that history, because it fastens a material object to a documented occasion. It is a much less reliable place to end it. Nobunaga left no tasting note. Nothing in the passage says that a mouthful of sugar decided his religious policy. A missionary had brought a courtesy gift to an audience arranged for him by a Japanese intermediary, and protection still had to be negotiated afterward like everything else.

The flask also held more history than its contents could disclose. The sugar, the knowledge of how to coat a seed, and the vessel that carried the finished sweet may each have reached Kyoto by a different road. A Portuguese name can outlive the shipping arrangements that first carried it abroad. Once Japanese craftspeople learned to make the thing, its future belonged to their suppliers and their customers rather than to the priest who had presented it to a ruler.

A Way Back Into Kyoto

How Wada Koremasa and Brother Lourenço Arranged Fróis's 1569 Audience With Nobunaga

The shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru was killed in 1565, and Fróis left the capital for Sakai.

He had reached Japan in 1563 and Kyoto in 1565, arriving in time to watch the political protection he depended on evaporate. His return in 1569 was an attempt to recover a foothold in a city that had already demonstrated how temporary such footholds were. The Dictionnaire historique du Japon account of his career traces the movements.

Nobunaga had entered Kyoto in 1568 in support of Ashikaga Yoshiaki, and the new arrangement left the missionaries with several authorities to keep track of at once. Access to Nobunaga was worth having. It did not settle relations with the shogun, the imperial court, or the established religious opponents who had their own views about foreign priests. A favorable audience could improve the mission's position without making it secure against anything in particular.

Wada Koremasa steered the foreigners through these relationships. He had connections with both Nobunaga and Yoshiaki, and he could put a priest in front of men whom that priest could not simply go and visit. Brother Lourenço, the Japanese missionary who made the conversation possible at all, supplied the other indispensable half. The familiar image of a Portuguese priest facing a Japanese warlord leaves out both of the people without whom neither the admission nor the talk would have happened.

The spring 1569 audiences were associated with the shogun's Nijō residence. This was not the surviving Tokugawa Nijō Castle, which belongs to the next century. The later castle makes a far more imposing setting for the imagination, and using it moves the encounter into a building put up by a different political order for different reasons.

Gift-giving suited the practical needs of the visit exactly. The priest was approaching a man capable of protecting his work, and he offered goods that expressed courtesy while advertising access to unfamiliar things. Sugar sweets were compact evidence of that access. Their value lay partly in an expensive ingredient and partly in the labor that had turned the ingredient into a finished object fit to present.

The candles sat beside the confeitos in Fróis's own inventory, though later versions of the story understandably gave the candy the attention. Nothing in the passage required each item to perform a separate diplomatic function. They were presents, carried by a visitor whose cause needed goodwill.

Permission remained contested afterward. The research on the mission's dealings with the capital's authorities describes grants of protection, opposition, and renewed assurances, in that order and then again. Nobunaga's patronage did not establish his Christian conviction, and Fróis's gratitude did not make his account disinterested: he was writing from inside an organization, explaining its difficulties and its successes to other members of it. The letter preserved a transaction worth reporting. The political relationship went on long after the sugar was gone.

The Clock Nobunaga Declined

Why Oda Nobunaga Turned Down the Jesuit Clock Fróis Offered Him

Wada had seen a small striking clock, and he told Fróis to bring it, because Nobunaga wanted to look at it.

The ruler admired the mechanism. Fróis offered it to him as a present, repeatedly. Nobunaga declined, on the grounds that he would have difficulty adjusting it.

Then he spent roughly two hours asking the priest and Lourenço about Europe and India. Ryuji Hiraoka's study of Jesuit clocks reproduces the episode, and it matters for the confectionery story mainly because of what it explains: the long conversation about distant countries, so often attached to the candy, sits in Hiraoka's account with the clock. The two visits are usually told as one afternoon, and the letters read more easily as two.

The separation also preserves something worth noticing about Nobunaga. An unfamiliar object could hold his attention for two hours without persuading him to own it. He looked at the mechanism and calculated the work of keeping it useful, and the calculation came out against the clock. The mission's access to European craftsmanship gave it an opening. It did not oblige the recipient to find the gift convenient.

Confectionery made a different kind of demand, which is to say almost none. Its maker had already done the difficult part. A flask of sweets required no specialist to explain its regulation, although the technique buried inside each piece was quite as foreign as the clockwork. This is one reason food travels comfortably inside exchanges that also carry elaborate artifacts. It offers an immediate use, and it never asks the recipient to reproduce its manufacture.

The clock conversation showed the participants' interests overlapping without ever becoming the same interest. Fróis wanted support for the mission. Nobunaga wanted to know about Europe and India. Wada wanted the meeting to happen, and knew enough about the court to arrange it. Those three appetites gave everyone a reason to stay in the room, and none of them amounted to a warlord's assent to a European religion because he had enjoyed a European sweet.

Sugar belonged in that setting, among the things missionaries carried and patrons weighed up. It does not need to be credited with everything the audience made possible. Its real achievement came later and belonged to other people: they learned to make something like it, long after the original present had been eaten.

A Word for What Sugar Covered

What the Portuguese Word Confeito Really Meant Before It Became Konpeitō

Inside a confeito there was usually a seed.

The Portuguese word described a great deal more than the small pointed candy now sold in Japan. Infopédia's dictionary gives a seed or an almond coated in sugar syrup and dried with heat; the English equivalent of the period was a comfit. The center might supply substance, or aroma, or both, while successive coatings built the exterior up around it.

A seed was therefore never merely an economical way to start. Fennel or anise contributed its own flavor to the finish. An almond remained a substantial part of what was actually eaten. A small sugar grain, by contrast, could become the center of a confection that was essentially sugar the whole way through. All three belonged to one method and produced quite different mouthfuls when the coating finally broke.

The technique was not Portuguese property. Hugh Plat's Delightes for Ladies, first published around 1600, carried instructions for comfits among its recipes for preserving and preparing sweets, and the University of Exeter transcription of the 1602 text lists "Comfits of all sorts" in its contents, alongside candied flowers and the rest of the sugar work. That is near-period English evidence of a wider European craft, not a recipe recovered from Fróis's baggage.

The breadth of that repertoire is why the Portuguese word cannot settle what was in the 1569 flask. A historical name identifies a class of preparation far more readily than it identifies a product. The sweet could take a new center or a new finish and remain recognizably the same kind of thing, which means no modern example can be held up to supply the missing details of its ancestor.

Portugal had in any case inherited its sugar knowledge from an older intercontinental world. Cultivation and processing had traveled westward from India through the Middle East toward North Africa and Iberia, and eastward into China. Portuguese confectioners worked inside that accumulated history. Their contribution to Japanese confectionery never required them to have invented the ingredient, or the method, or anything else except the delivery.

The name still carries real historical information. Konpeitō was not a Japanese sweet that happened to resemble a European comfit. Its borrowed word ties it to Portuguese contact and its manufacture places it inside the family of layered sugar confections. What changed afterward was the balance between the center and its covering, the craft of a particular workshop, and the expectations of the people buying it. A useful foreign preparation became something recognizable under a Japanese name, without ever quite losing the sound of the older one.

The Route Ran Through Asia

Nobunaga's 1580 Gift of Three Thousand Kin of Sugar, and the Asian Trade Route Behind It

In 1580 Chōsokabe Motochika sent Oda Nobunaga three thousand kin of sugar, a unit of weight that the confectionery historian Bunzō Aida converted to roughly 1,800 kilograms. Aida cited the Shinchō kōki for it.

Nobunaga gave it away to his close retainers.

No missionary is required anywhere in that transaction. It belonged entirely to relations among Japanese rulers, who had their own reasons for moving a prized commodity in bulk, and it was not the only one: in 1569, the year of Fróis's visit, Nobunaga presented sugar to Emperor Ōgimachi. He appears on both sides of the exchange within a decade, receiving the commodity and passing it on, once upward to the emperor and once down to the men serving him.

The recorded weight also exposes how little the flask anecdote can bear as an economic comparison. Fróis named his confection and gave no measure of its sugar, no cost, no quantity beyond the vessel it came in. Aida's two examples can be set beside each other as uses of a valued ingredient. They cannot be ranked by expense from their descriptions alone, and the temptation to try is precisely what makes the candy story feel more significant than the evidence allows.

Aida placed such exchanges within the history of nanbangashi, the sweets associated with Iberian contact. The category held castella and other preparations alongside konpeitō, and what distinguished the repertoire was the sheer quantity of sugar it consumed. These things circulated through hospitality as much as through commerce.

The ships behind all of it did not run in a straight line from a Lisbon confectioner to a Japanese patron. Portuguese Asian commerce linked a chain of ports where cargoes, provisions and passengers changed vessels. Goa and Malacca were part of that network, and so were Macau and the anchorages of Kyūshū. The National Diet Library's account of European trade describes voyages from Chinese and Southeast Asian ports to Japan, and a Macau-based route joining Goa, Malacca and Japan from 1557. That was the infrastructure inside which missionaries and their baggage moved. Portuguese nationality did not make everything aboard a Portuguese vessel a European manufacture.

The conventional dates establish the setting and nothing more. The Portuguese reached Tanegashima in 1543 and Francis Xavier arrived in 1549, and neither date supplies a demonstrated year for the first confection Japanese people called konpeitō. Fróis's letter gives a secure occasion in 1569. It does not give an account of the sweet's earliest movements, and nothing else does either.

Sugar was already known in Japan. What gave it value in Nobunaga's time was the cost and the unreliability of supply, and what could be made with it once obtained. The encounter did not introduce the Japanese to sweetness. It introduced particular preparations into circumstances where imported sugar and skilled confectionery together made an effective gift.

A finished confection and its raw material offered different opportunities. Importing a flask made consumption possible immediately and taught nobody anything. Making the confection locally required a supply of sugar and knowledge of the process, and a merchant could move the first without carrying the second. The craftsman who eventually learned the method still needed ingredients, equipment, and enough control over the work to produce batches he could sell.

Where Fróis's gift was actually made remains unestablished. Assigning it to a European workshop tidies away a network that joined several Asian ports, and the Portuguese association identifies the immediate cultural channel of the presentation rather than the origin of its contents. That leaves the sugar, the preparation and the bottle with three separate and unrecovered histories, none of which a priest writing about the mission's affairs had any reason to itemize.

Growing the Points

How Konpeitō's Points Actually Grow: The Pan, the Syrup and a 2019 Crystal Study

The points are not cut, stamped or pressed out of a mold. They grow.

A small center is kept moving in a heated pan while the maker applies syrup in controlled amounts. Each coating enlarges what is already there, and the continued movement exposes the pieces to further applications and further drying, until the result is very much larger than the grain or seed the work began with. In modern Japanese production an inclined rotating pan supplies the movement. Heat, the concentration of the syrup and the way the contents tumble all shape the outcome. The points are built into the growing surface, and no prescribed number of them turns a piece into an authentic konpeitō.

The Kyoto maker Ryokujuan Shimizu describes a craft governed by adjustments to the syrup and the pan as conditions change, and its account dwells on the experience needed to read the moving sweets, including the sound they make against the vessel. The firm reports about sixteen to twenty days for its flavored varieties. That is a statement about its own production, not a waiting period attached to the name.

The difficulty was never the sugar. It was control. Pouring more syrup over a batch does not bring the finished sweet any closer; the maker needs the syrup to add to the pieces in the intended way, while the pieces keep moving and the surface stays right. A written list of ingredients can identify everything that went into the pan and convey nothing whatever about the judgment required at each stage of putting it there.

The structure attracted scientific attention eventually. In a 2019 article for Japan's Agriculture & Livestock Industries Corporation, the crystallographer Katsuo Tsukamoto described examining sections of konpeitō under microscopes. In a rapidly produced, sugar-centered sample he observed growth extending outward from the central crystal. He distinguished manufacturing methods and internal structures rather than treating every pointed sweet as the output of one identical process, which is more care than the confection usually gets.

The center has its own history. Japanese accounts mention sesame and poppy seeds, modern methods can start from a sugar grain, and other workshop practices have used different materials again. A seed provides a surface to build on. It does not commit the maker to preserving the same relationship between the amount of seed and the amount of sugar for the next four hundred years.

Color belonged to manufacture too. Some accounts of the early imported sweets describe plainer, whiter pieces, and the brighter Japanese versions came later. A bowl of modern pastel konpeitō therefore displays the work of subsequent makers quite as much as the survival of an older confection. The colored finish joined the seed and the coating method on the list of things a Japanese workshop was free to change.

A Nagasaki Man Made Money

Ihara Saikaku's 1688 Story of the Nagasaki Man Who Made Konpeitō for a Living

In 1688 Ihara Saikaku put konpeitō into a book about how to get rich.

Nippon Eitaigura is a collection concerned with money and worldly enterprise, and among its subjects is a Nagasaki townsman who prospered by making the sweet. The story mentions sesame and indicates that the confection had by then become widespread and cheap. An Agency for Cultural Affairs survey of food culture identifies the passage.

What Saikaku supplies is literary evidence that his readers could recognize a business opportunity in konpeitō. He was not keeping a factory register. His successful townsman is often taken as the first person in Japan to work out the method, and he may have been; the story cannot prove it, however convenient a founding date would be. The value of the story lies in the world it takes for granted: by the late seventeenth century a confection introduced as a diplomatic novelty had become something a man could manufacture and sell at a profit.

That is a considerable distance from the flask. Fróis's letter recorded a visitor's access to desirable goods. Saikaku described local enterprise. A sweet that could reward the labor of a Nagasaki maker no longer depended on the arrival of a finished imported batch, and once that was true, its price and its circulation could move for reasons that had nothing to do with Europe.

The Nagasaki connection was practical rather than sentimental. The port put imported ingredients and the people who handled them into contact with ordinary Japanese commercial life. Confectionery needs supplies at one end and customers at the other, and a trading city offered both, which is how knowledge of an unfamiliar preparation acquires a business use. The surviving literary notice does not explain a single step of that process. It does place the craft inside the town's economy, which is more than any other source of the period manages.

Recipes went on varying long afterward. The nineteenth-century Morisada Mankō recorded poppy-seed centers and a coating mixture that included sugar and starch-bearing ingredients, which is a late account of Japanese practice rather than confirmation of anything Fróis had carried. It also shows why the history collapses if it is reduced to a single pure recipe. The preparation kept its identity through repeated changes in the materials used to start it and to enlarge it.

The sweets moved out of Nagasaki into other markets and other workshops, and the familiar colors and forms developed across that longer commercial history. The borrowed name proved more durable than any particular combination of ingredients ever did.

Once the thing could be made locally, confectioners acquired reasons to guard what they knew and reasons to change it. A reliable method was an advantage worth keeping quiet about. A cheaper or prettier version reached a customer the reliable method had missed. Saikaku's inclusion of konpeitō among his accounts of prosperity located it squarely inside those ordinary calculations. The work that had once produced a suitable present for a ruler was becoming a way for a townsman to make a living.

Sugar After the Portuguese Ships

How Konpeitō Survived After the Portuguese Were Expelled in 1639

The Portuguese ships stopped coming in 1639. The sugar did not stop coming.

The restrictions of the 1630s and the exclusion of Portuguese shipping removed a commercial connection, not a commodity. Chinese and other Asian merchants went on supplying Nagasaki, and so did the Dutch, which is why a confection associated with Portuguese contact was able to outlive Portuguese contact entirely.

Thomas Monaghan's study of sugar-making knowledge in the East China Sea describes imports reaching Nagasaki from Chinese ports, from Taiwan and from what is now Vietnam, alongside smaller Dutch supplies out of Java. The traded sugars included brown sugar, white sugar and rock candy. "Sugar imports" was never one substance: it covered goods of different qualities destined for different uses, and a confectioner buying for a pan had preferences.

This makes Saikaku's chronology intelligible. He was writing nearly half a century after the Portuguese ships had been excluded, and a Nagasaki confectioner could still lay hands on the material for a sweet with a Portuguese-derived name. The knowledge of how to make it and the right to trade with Japan had come apart, and neither one any longer depended on the people who had brought the first flask.

Production inside the Japanese islands, when it came, drew on Chinese, Ryukyuan and local knowledge. Growing cane, extracting the juice and refining what came out of it is a different body of expertise from coating a seed in a confectioner's pan, and the two histories meet only in the supply of an ingredient. Progress in one solved nothing in the other.

The long survival of konpeitō consequently required a good deal more than the preservation of a foreign recipe. It required obtaining suitable sugar after the commercial arrangements had changed, teaching the manufacture to workers who had never seen a Portuguese, and finding customers willing to pay for the result. All three could be done under rulers whose policy toward missionaries had turned murderous.

The confection's Portuguese identity was strongest in its name and in the history of its introduction. Its material support scattered, year by year, among suppliers and makers with no connection whatever to the original mission. That is how an imported preparation stays recognizable while becoming local. The work of continuing it passes into other hands.

Relatives with Almonds and Fennel

Konpeitō's Portuguese Relatives: Moncorvo's Almond Sweets and Azorean Fennel Confeitos

At Torre de Moncorvo, in the northeast of Portugal, the traditional white amêndoa coberta carries conspicuous sugar points around a peeled, roasted almond. Put beside a konpeitō, the exterior is almost the same object. The almond is not: it gives the sweet a different center and a different scale.

Portugal's agricultural authority distinguishes several Moncorvo versions. The white one displays the characteristic points. A chocolate-finished version has a darker exterior. The thinly coated peladinha never develops the projections at all. Pointed and comparatively smooth forms coexist inside a single local tradition, which is worth remembering before treating spikes as a mark of authenticity anywhere.

The municipality's account describes slow additions of syrup in a gently heated copper basin, the almonds kept moving throughout, the makers' fingers protected by thimbles. The resemblance to Japanese production lies in the repeated building of a covering under heat and movement. The center grows a sugar body around itself as the work goes on, at Moncorvo as in Kyoto.

That is a useful comparison and not a genealogy. The local craft's beginnings are not securely dated in the municipal account, and nothing connects its workshops to Fróis's flask. The almond makes the shared method easy to see. It does not supply a missing shipping document.

Farther west, on São Miguel in the Azores, Ribeira Grande has another branch of the family. The regional development association ASDEPR identifies its confeitos as a specialty of sugar and fennel, with a recipe kept secret for many years. The aromatic center explains what a seed-based confection could offer beyond sweetness, and it extends the Portuguese comparison from mainland almonds to an Atlantic island's fennel sweets.

Set all of them beside modern sugar-centered konpeitō and the range the coating method permits becomes obvious. An almond stays a substantial mouthful under its sugar. A fennel seed contributes an aroma. A sugar grain lets the center and the covering approach the same material, until there is effectively nothing inside but more of the outside. The similarities come from construction. The differences decide most of what it is like to eat.

The survival of these relatives also changes how the Portuguese contribution can honestly be described. It was not a single recipe handed over and preserved. It was a continuing confectionery repertoire, with local forms that went on developing their own reputations and methods at both ends of the world. What Japan acquired was adaptable, and its makers proved it by changing the center, the size and the finish without ever severing the connection carried in the name.

A Box Worth Keeping

The Nabeshima Family's 146 Konpeitō Boxes, and How Osaka Tōka Got Its Start

After the war, a customer asked the founder of Osaka Tōka to obtain a konpeitō pan for him. The price could not be agreed. The founder was left holding the pan, and rather than stand about with it, he began making konpeitō himself.

The firm, which is the company behind the Konpeitō Museum, tells that story about its own beginnings, and it places a piece of equipment and a failed sale at the start of a manufacturing business. Nobunaga's audience it is not.

The contrast with an inherited secret is the useful part. A traditional product could draw in a new maker through an entirely ordinary commercial accident, and konpeitō's continued existence has depended on firms like that quite as much as on the workshops that emphasize long apprenticeship and transmission within a family. Different methods, different markets, one name.

Osaka Tōka describes miniature sweets and versions made with brown sugar or wasanbon, as well as salt-containing products. These treat the familiar form as something with possibilities still in it rather than a relic to be maintained.

Presentation kept a separate history of its own. In modern Japan, small bonbonnières, boxes for sugar sweets, were given to guests at celebrations, sometimes with konpeitō inside them. A French-derived word named the vessel. The confection within it went on carrying its Portuguese-derived one.

Cultural Heritage Online records 146 such boxes associated with the Nabeshima family: 99 of silver and 47 of wood. Their forms and decoration drew on auspicious motifs, on court tradition, and on the circumstances of the particular occasion each was made for. These were not containers designed to hold sweets together until somebody ate them.

The custom establishes no unbroken ceremonial line back to Fróis's flask. It shows a second setting in which sugar and its container acquired meaning through the act of presentation. The guests ate the contents and kept the box.

Ninety-nine of the Nabeshima boxes are silver, and the sweets they were made to hold are long gone. That is the usual arrangement. The vessel outlasts the sugar, which is why a flask carried into a Kyoto audience in the spring of 1569 can still be argued over, and why nobody will ever establish what was inside it.

Sources & Further Reading

Agency for Cultural Affairs. Food-Culture Survey. Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japanese-language report, n.d. Indexes the reference to Saikaku's 1688 account of the Nagasaki maker within a broader survey of Japanese food culture.

Aida, Bunzō. Oda Nobunaga and Sugar. Agriculture & Livestock Industries Corporation, 2011. Places sugar confectionery within the history of Nobunaga and the sweets associated with Iberian contact, and supplies the gifts of the raw commodity that bracket the Fróis presentation.

ASDEPR. Estratégia Local de Desenvolvimento. ASDEPR, n.d., p. 43. Identifies Ribeira Grande's sugar-and-fennel confeitos and the tradition of secrecy surrounding their recipe.

Direção-Geral de Agricultura e Desenvolvimento Rural. Amêndoa Coberta de Moncorvo IGP. Produtos Tradicionais Portugueses, n.d. Defines the confection's almond center and its three coatings, including the peladinha that never develops the characteristic points.

Fróis, Luís. Letter from Miyako to Belchior de Figueiredo, 1 June 1569. Portuguese and Japanese published passages reproduced in National Diet Library reference entry 1000044631, 2008. The direct evidence for Wada's mediation, the flask of confeitos and the wax candles, and for the flask that a Japanese translation of the passage renders as a glass bottle.

Hiraoka, Ryuji. Jesuits and Western Clock in Japan's "Christian Century" (1549–c.1650). Journal of Jesuit Studies 7, Brill, 2020, pp. 204–220. The account on pp. 206–207 reproduces the clock audience that the confectionery story tends to absorb, including Nobunaga's refusal of the gift and the two hours of questions that followed it.

Monaghan, Thomas. The Diffusion of Sugar-Making Knowledge in the East China Sea: Japan, Amami, and Ryukyu, 1609–1868. Itinerario, Cambridge University Press, 2026. Traces the Asian sugar imports that continued after the Portuguese exclusion and the several sources of Japan's later production knowledge.

Nabeshima Hōkōkai. Bonbonnière. Collection record, Cultural Heritage Online, n.d. Documents the ceremonial sweet containers and the surviving silver and wooden examples used in the closing passage.

National Diet Library. Trade with European Countries (Nanban Bōeki). Japan Search, n.d. Describes the Asian ports and routes that complicate any picture of a direct shipment from Portugal to Japan.

Osaka Tōka. Company History and Introduction. Konpeitō Museum, n.d. The company's own account of how it came to be making konpeitō at all, and of its subsequent product development.

Plat, Hugh. Delightes for Ladies. 1602 text, University of Exeter, Famine and Dearth selected transcription. Its contents list places comfits inside the English confectionery repertoire of the period, though the Exeter selection does not reproduce the full instructions.

Ryokujuan Shimizu. About Konpeitō. Ryokujuan Shimizu, n.d. Consulted for the maker's account of its own craft and production times rather than for its introductory historical anecdotes, which are undated and unsourced.

Tsukamoto, Katsuo. The Mystery of Konpeitō. Agriculture & Livestock Industries Corporation, 2019. Observations of manufacture and internal crystal structure; its introductory chronology is not adopted here as evidence for the sixteenth-century history.