In 1565 a Spanish ship discovered the return route from the Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico. Thus began 250 years of Spanish trade and contact with Manila, and from there with the rest of Asia. Not long after, the King in Madrid began to receive reports of a nation of fiercesome warriors – the Japanese.
On 29 May 1592 the Governor of the Philippines, Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, heard that a Japanese ship carrying ambassadors from the “King of Japon” had anchored in Manila’s harbour. On 31 May the ambassadors delivered to him a “letter from that king, enclosed in a box of wood one and one-half varas in length and painted white. Inside this was another box of the same proportions, excellently painted, varnished, and polished in black, with some medium-sized gilded iron rings and some large cords of red silk. Within this box was another one painted in various colors—yellow and gold—with its large iron rings and cords of white and violet silk, both covered with damask. In this third box, wrapped in a stout, wide paper, painted and gilded, was the letter, written with Chinese characters in the Japanese language, on stout paper, illumined and gilded with great neatness. The letter is even larger than the sealed bulls from Rroma, on parchment, and is sealed with two painted seals stamped in red.” The letter coolly informed Dasmariñas that Japan planned to invade Great China, and the Japanese king had been minded to attack Manila on his fleet’s way to China. Instead, the monarch invited Dasmariñas to send an ambassador in sign of friendship, otherwise “I shall unfurl my banner and send an army against that country to conquer it with a multitude of men”.
Eleven years later, a group of captive Spanish mariners were directing the construction of a ship at Tsukinoura, a little more than 400km north of modern Tokyo. The Japanese had the shipbuilding knowhow to sail the seas as far south as the Philippines, but they did not know how to build a vessel that could withstand the rigours of a journey across the Pacific, still less did they have the navigational expertise successfully to reach Spanish territory in Acapulco. As the price of their freedom the Spaniards in Tsukinoura had been ordered to build a ship and to sail for Acapulco. Aboard would be an embassy from the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu. One of the ambassadors was a samurai, Hasekura Rokuemon (1571-1622), a member of the gun corps of Lord Date Masamune. Hasekura would be absent from Japan for seven years, during which time he and his companions were the first Japanese to cross the Pacific to Acapulco, where he arrived on 28 January 1614, to visit Mexico, to sail from Veracruz to Seville, to secure an audience with the Spanish King in Madrid and to meet the Pope in Rome. Given the technologies of the day and the perils of such a journey, Hasekura would be counted one of the most extraordinary travellers in history, were it not for the fact that remarkably little is reliably known about his embassy and its consequences.
Replica of the San Juan Bautista, in which Hasekura crossed the Pacific, Ishinomaki, Japan
The air of mystery that surrounds the story of Hasekura attracted the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endō (1923-1956) to write his brilliant novel, The Samurai. Working with the scant historical facts, and a visit to Mexico in 1974 when he travelled from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, Endō imagines how Hasekura and his three fellow samurai ambassadors must have felt and acted in response to unimaginable events, peoples and places. Since I finished the novel a few weeks ago, I have been thinking about the similarities and differences between the work of the historian and a historical novelist. All historians work with sources that are, to a greater or lesser extent, incomplete and apply their imagination to reconstruct a credible view of the past, but a historian who stretches imagination too far will be criticized. The skill of the novelist is to stretch imagination much further, but nevertheless to convincingly construct characters of the period that have a ring of truth and events that transport the reader to unfamiliar places. In this respect Endō’s novel succeeds briliantly.
On the journey across the Pacific the ship is enveloped for days in a thick fog that renders the instruments by which sailors navigated useless, and wracked by violent storms of the kind that not infrequently sank Spanish galleons. One of Hasekura’s faithful servants is crushed to death by falling cargo when seawater floods the hold. In the close confines of a crowded wooden ship the Japanese are repelled by the foul stink of the Spaniards. It was common knowledge in Spain that the despised Jews and Muslims bathed frequently. It was therefore an expression of Christian faith not to bathe. To stink was to be holy. The samurai gaze in wonder at a school of whales. Hasekura “watched motionlessly until at length the whales disappeared on the horizon. Rays of sunlight seeped through the clouds like sheaves of arrows, markedly tinging the edge of the now-deserted ocean with silver. It had never occurred to the samurai that there were so many new and different things to experience. He had not realized the world was so vast. His Lordship’s domain had been the only world of which he could conceive. But now a subtle transformation was taking place in his heart, and with it came a vague uneasiness and a formless fear.”
Hasekura in Rome 1615, attributed to Claude Deruet
For those who know something of the times and places that Endō depicts there are some minor missteps. When the “battered ship … now scarcely more than a hulk” finally reaches Acapulco it anchors in the inlet – in fact, ships anchored in Acapulco’s capacious bay. And the hills are covered in strange olive trees – in fact, the Pacific coast would have been covered in tropical forest; there was not an olive tree for thousands of miles. On the journey to Mexico City the samurai ambassadors and the scheming, ambitious Franciscan friar who accompanies them as an interpreter, spend the night in the village of Iguala (a real place) but avoid Taxco (another real place) when they notice in the mountains along the way smoke signals sent up by Indians still hostile to the Spaniards. This is very fanciful stuff imported from American westerns. In Endō’s imagination, the samurai enter Mexico City through the gate of a walled city. Although it is true that Spanish cities in the New World were modelled on the European cities from which they came, they had no walls and gates. Indeed, at this time Mexico City was located on an island in a great lake and connected to the mainland by long causeways that were easily defended. So walls and gates were not needed.
Endō’s challenge was to imagine very different societies - feudal Japan, colonial New Spain (as Mexico was known at the time), Spain and Italy. The opening chapters are set in a Japan ruled by daimyōs (feudal lords) to whom a samurai like Hosegawa owed allegiance and military service in return for the Lord’s favour and access to land. When summoned by his Lord he hurries to comply and humbles himself in the presence of his superior. Even a lowly samurai like Hosegawa in turn had servants and families who depended on his protection and land. Endō interprets the foundational institution of Spanish colonial rule, the encomienda as the equivalent of the daimyo system, describing the encomenderos of New Spain as feudal landed lords. In fact, they had rights to Indian labour and tribute, but no access to their encomienda’s land, and the Indians' obligations to their encomendero were limited by law, not feudal ties of loyalty.
In New Spain Hosegawa and his companions encounter a strange culture which they struggle to interpret, especially since their only interpreter is the scheming Spanish friar Velasco who tells the Japanese only what suits his own ends. Velasco tells the Japanese merchants who travelled to New Spain in search of profit that they will be allowed to do business there only if they become Christians. One of the Japanese tells Velasco that it makes no difference to most Japanese whether there is a God or not. “If the merchants on this ship are able to make money in Nueva España, they will probably become Christians. But if they find there is no profit in it, they will abandon your religion in an instant.” Nevertheless, Velasco arranges for the merchants to be baptized by the Archbishop of Mexico in a grand ceremony in the city’s cathedral. Hosegawa cannot understand how Spaniards could worship a miserable, emaciated man tortured on a cross. No man could owe allegiance to such a powerless figure. Moreover, the samurai felt bound by his duty to his lord Date Masamune to refuse offers of conversion.
The Japanese envoys are taken to meet the Spanish Viceroy who offers them his hand. But the Japanese are so busy bowing low that they do not notice the Viceroy’s gesture. Endō writes: “The contrast between this Japanese style of greeting and the Viceroy’s bombastic welcoming speech, done in typical Spanish fashion, made an amusing spectacle. Although essentially these two nationalities are utterly dissimilar, they are alike in their respect for formality and in their exaggerated mannerisms.” When I was in Japan on publishing business, it had often occurred to me that my student life in Mexico, with its respect for titles and hierarchy and formal methods of greeting, was a good training for the complex formalities of Japanese business and social life. Endō evidently formed a similar impression of Mexican society.
Diego Fernández de Córdoba, Viceroy of New Spain when Hasekura was there
Hosekawa and his fellow ambassadors journey on to Spain. In Madrid they meet the King who is suspicious of the motives of the Japanese. He has heard of the persecution of Christians in Japan and shows no interest in a commercial treaty. Desperate to save his mission, Velasco persuades the Japanese ambassadors that their mission will succeed only if they become Christians. Reluctantly, Hosekawa and his companions agree. Velasco then takes the Japanese to Rome where, on 3 November 1615 they have an inconsequential meeting with the Pope, who has also been informed of Japan’s persecution of Christians. His mission a wretched failure, Hosekawa undertakes the long journey back to Japan. He reached Manila in 1618 only to receive orders that he was to remain there until further notice. He finally received permission to return to his home in 1620.
Felipe III by Andrés López Polanco, c.1617
In Endō’s novel, Hosekawa’s reward for loyalty to his lord and seven years away from home, is execution for the crime of conversion to Christianity. In fact, his fate is not certain. Some traditions record that he renounced his new faith, others that he clung to it and was ordered to die. A letter of 1640 claims that Hasekura’s son Gonshirō furtively observed Christian rites, a crime for which Hasekura's eldest son Kanzaburō, guilty of tolerance, was ordered to disembowel himself. Endō’s novel is a superb exercise in historical imagination. Hosekawa’s adventure is a tragic tale of loyalty betrayed by scheming feudal lords and an ambitious cleric.
Pope Paul V, who met Hasekura in Rome
Note: I am grateful to Professor Van C. Gessel for supplying information about Endō and Hasekura in the Postscript to his excellent translation of the novel and in an email. Quotes from the novel are from Professor Gessel’s translation (Penguin Classics 1980).
