Era
The high tide of the encounter: Nobunaga’s patronage, the rise of Nagasaki, the mission at its peak, and the first great reversals under Hideyoshi.
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Under Oda Nobunaga the encounter reached its high tide. The unifier patronised the Jesuits — partly from curiosity, partly as a counterweight to the Buddhist establishments he was crushing — and the mission grew boldly: Nagasaki was founded as a Portuguese port of call in 1571 and ceded outright to the Society of Jesus in 1580, the year Alessandro Valignano’s reforms gave the mission seminaries, a printing press, and an embassy of four Japanese boys bound for the courts of Europe.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Nobunaga’s successor, kept the trade and turned on the faith. His 1587 edict ordering the missionaries out — issued overnight from his camp in Kyushu — went largely unenforced, but it marked the turn. A decade later the point was made in blood: twenty-six Christians, missionaries and Japanese converts alike, were crucified at Nagasaki in 1597.
Yet commerce barely flinched. Silver flowed out, silk flowed in, and when Hideyoshi died in 1598 the mission counted its largest flock yet. The battle of Sekigahara in 1600 — the same year a battered Dutch ship named the Liefde reached Kyushu — handed Japan, and the encounter’s final act, to Tokugawa Ieyasu.
He threw incense at his father’s funeral, dressed like a vagrant, and befriended a Jesuit. From provincial fool to the man who nearly unified Japan, the life of the warlord who embraced Portuguese firearms, patronized the Jesuits, and declared himself a living god.
A Portuguese soldier turned Jesuit priest was given command of the most culturally complex mission in Christendom. He responded by trying to make Japan more like Portugal. The results were catastrophic.
A sixteenth-century Portuguese fish-pickling technique, four centuries of dormancy, a postwar restaurant kitchen running out of ideas for leftover chicken breast, and a tartar sauce argument that split a city in two. This is how Japan got its favorite fried chicken.
From a small fishing village to the nexus of global trade, Nagasaki's transformation under Portuguese influence was dramatic. Ceded to the Jesuits, rebuilt by the Tokugawa, its story encapsulates the entire arc of the Nanban encounter.
Nine dishes, from castella and tempura to konpeitō and fios de ovos, reconstructed from the earliest Iberian and Japanese cookbooks, with period measurements converted and the historical circumstances of their transmission for each.
A reference guide to the weights, distances, volumes, and currencies that made the Portuguese-Japanese trade possible, and profitable. The cheat sheet that makes the stories make sense.
From the burning of Mount Hiei to the decade-long siege of the Ishiyama Honganji, how Nobunaga systematically dismantled the most powerful religious institutions in Japan, and why the Jesuits cheered him on.
From the markets of Nagasaki to the streets of Goa, the docks of Lisbon, and the textile mills of Puebla, how the Nanban encounter produced one of the least-known slave trades in early modern history.
Pan, tabako, koppu, botan, dozens of Japanese words are direct borrowings from Portuguese. This linguistic excavation traces the paths by which European vocabulary entered the Japanese language and what it reveals about the nature of the encounter.
Some of Japan's most beloved foods trace their origins to Portuguese kitchens. The linguistic and culinary fingerprints of this exchange remain visible today, from the golden sponge cakes of Nagasaki to the battered delicacies served across the country.
One of the finest generals of the Sengoku age, a master of the tea ceremony, and Japan’s most powerful Christian lord, Takayama Ukon chose faith over everything, and lost everything.
A peasant boy from rural Portugal mastered Japanese so completely that two successive rulers made him their confidant, and spent thirty-three years as the indispensable man between two civilizations.
A Neapolitan aristocrat who slashed a woman’s face in his twenties became the most consequential European in sixteenth-century Asia, reshaping the Jesuit enterprise across three decades, three continents, and three visits to a country he could barely comprehend.
In 1579, Oda Nobunaga staged a theological debate between two Buddhist sects in his castle town. It was a farce, a bloodbath, and, for the Jesuit missionaries watching from the wings, the best thing that ever happened to them.
Alessandro Valignano chose him because he seemed docile. For nine years, as Vice-Provincial of Japan, Gaspar Coelho proved he was nothing of the kind, a would-be daimyō who stockpiled weapons, paraded his private warship, and brought the 1587 expulsion edict down upon the Church he was meant to shepherd.
In 1582, four young Japanese nobles embarked on an extraordinary journey to Europe, meeting Philip II of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII. Their voyage is one of the most remarkable episodes of early modern global diplomacy.
Born a nameless peasant, he talked, fought, and schemed his way to the summit of Japanese power, the most improbable biography in pre-modern Japan and one of the most extraordinary tales of social mobility in the early modern world.
On a July night in 1587, the most powerful man in Japan issued an order that gave the missionaries twenty days to leave. They didn’t leave. He didn’t enforce it. The consequences took a century to play out.
When Toyotomi Hideyoshi marched a quarter of a million men onto the island of Kyūshū, he came to crush a Japanese clan. What he found instead was a fortified Jesuit port city, an armed Portuguese galley, and a priest who thought he could broker a deal. The consequences would reshape the Nanban encounter.
In 1592, the most powerful man in Japan sent a quarter of a million soldiers to conquer China. Korea was in the way. The seven-year catastrophe involved Christian crusaders, a genius admiral, and Portuguese arms dealers.
A Spanish ex-soldier who fought in the tercios, a Dominican Sinologue killed by headhunters in Formosa, and a Castilian lay brother who jumped ship in the middle of the Pacific, the story of how the Spanish mendicant orders crashed into a Japanese mission that the Portuguese Jesuits had built and the Pope had reserved for them alone.
The celebrated byōbu depicting the arrival of the 'Southern Barbarians' are among the most striking artifacts of this era. Produced by Kanō school painters, they reveal how the Japanese perceived and processed the astonishing novelty of European visitors.
In 1596, a Spanish galleon limped into a Japanese harbor and a pilot opened his mouth. The wreck of the San Felipe, and the boast that followed, triggered the first state-sponsored execution of Christians in Japan and poisoned European-Japanese relations for a generation.
On a September morning in 1598, the most senior Jesuits in Japan gathered in a room in Nagasaki to answer a question their institution had spent fifty years avoiding: were they complicit in a crime against humanity?