Era
Sekigahara to the eve of prohibition: Ieyasu’s pragmatic trade diplomacy, Dutch and English rivals, and the gathering storm over the mission.
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Tokugawa Ieyasu was a pragmatist. He wanted trade — Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, anyone’s — and for a decade Japan’s doors stood wider open than ever before or after. The shogunate licensed its own red-seal ships to Southeast Asia, welcomed Dutch and English factories at Hirado in 1609 and 1613, and tolerated the mission as the price of the Macau carrack.
The tolerance was thinner than it looked. The burning of the Madre de Deus in Nagasaki harbor in 1610 showed the trade could survive violence; the Okamoto Daihachi affair of 1612 — a bribery scandal implicating Christian retainers at the heart of the shogunate — convinced Ieyasu that the faith itself was a political danger. In 1614 the bakufu ordered every missionary out of Japan and every church closed. This time the edict was meant.
A boy of 16 pardoned at Hirado, executed anyway, his body cut afterward to test a blade. Between a Jesuit's tidy comparisons and a farmer's word for thinning seedlings lay a harder question than Europeans ever asked: not whether life was cheap in Japan, but who held the power to end one.
A parish register in Lisbon, a collar-presser's shop in Lima, a Japanese painter decorating a Macanese altarpiece: the Nanban century scattered Japanese people across every Iberian port on earth. Within 100 years they had ceased to exist as a distinct people anywhere.
For 43 years, a vermilion stamp on a sheet of paper was the most valuable object in the South China Sea. Then the regime that created it decided the ocean was more trouble than it was worth.
Two Japanese Jesuits ordained at Nagasaki in September 1601, a seminary run inside the bishop's own house, a sacrament manual printed in red and black with the music written out, and a short book telling Christians what to do when no priest could reach them. Japan's second resident bishop spent 16 years building a church that would not need Europeans.
On a fog-choked morning in October 1600, Japan’s feudal warlords staked everything on a single engagement. When the smoke cleared, one man controlled the archipelago, and the fate of every Christian, Portuguese merchant, and Jesuit priest hung on his next move.
A baptized governor of Nagasaki charging a baptized lord, a general who could not open his own belly, and 100,000 Christians in a domain that changed hands in a month. The Christian lords fought on both sides at Sekigahara, and the ones who won lost almost as completely as the ones who lost.
Born a hostage and forged into the most patient political mind in Japanese history, the man who ended a century of civil war, shut the door on the Christian mission, and built a state that lasted 250 years.
In 1600, a dying English pilot washed ashore in Japan and quietly destroyed a 60-year Catholic monopoly. William Adams became a samurai, an advisor to the shōgun, and the man who proved that European trade could be separated from European God.
The world’s first multinational corporation was built to destroy an empire, monopolize a spice, and wage a private war across three oceans. That in Japan it ended up confined to a three-acre artificial island in Nagasaki harbor was not part of the original plan.
Three Portuguese ships, all named for the patron of lost things, fell to Dutch privateers between 1605 and 1618. The capture off Meshima in 1615 forced Tokugawa Ieyasu to arbitrate the first international legal case in Japanese history.
How the most boring man in Japan built the most effective authoritarian state in the early modern world, and drove Christianity underground in the process, one bureaucratic edict at a time.
Two Dutch warships sailed halfway around the world to capture the richest Portuguese carrack afloat. They missed it by two days and a fog bank. What they found instead was a trade permit that would underpin two centuries of Dutch commerce in Japan.
A 1,000-ton Spanish galleon broke up on a Kazusa beach in September 1609 and put the former governor of the Philippines on the wrong side of a law that gave every wreck to the shogun. Tokugawa Ieyasu waived the law, sent William Adams to fetch him, and spent the winter trying to buy the secret of Mexican silver.
A message to Fujian, a treaty in Pusan, and a shadow diplomacy run on forged letters and altered seals. In a single year, the retired shogun tried to rebuild Japan's relationships with its two great continental neighbors, and almost no one involved was telling the truth.
A brawl in Macau, a siege in Nagasaki harbor, and a captain who chose to detonate his own carrack rather than surrender, the destruction of Portugal’s richest ship set off a chain of events that ended the Christian Century in Japan.
After the explosion of the Madre de Deus, Portugal and Japan had to rebuild their trade from the paperwork up. Letters, edicts, red-seal permits and one embassy whose three demands were comprehensively refused show how two empires who did not trust each other, and could not quite replace each other, kept doing business anyway.
A bribery scheme, a forged shogunal seal, and an assassination plot, perpetrated by Christians inside the Tokugawa administration, gave Ieyasu the pretext he needed to destroy the Church in Japan.
On a June afternoon in 1613, a ship called the Clove anchored in a small Kyushu harbor and a captain named John Saris stepped ashore carrying a letter from King James I, a cargo of unsold broadcloth, and a grudge against the only Englishman in Japan. 10 years later, the English would sail away in debt, in disgrace, and in tears.
In 1613, a one-eyed northern warlord sent his retainer across three oceans to negotiate with Philip III of Spain and Pope Paul V. The mission spanned seven years, three continents, and ended in failure, martyrdom, and a galleon sold off as a Spanish warship.