16th-Century Japanese Historians Describe the Oddness of Meeting the First Europeans They Ever Saw
Go to Japan today, and the country will present you with plenty of opportunities to buy pan, tabako, and tempura. These products themselves — bread, cigarettes, and deep-fried seafood or vegetables — will be familiar enough. Even the words that refer to them may have a recognizable ring, especially if you happen to be a Portuguese-speaker. Japanese has more than its fair share of naturalized terms, used to refer to everything from the konbini on the corner to the riizanaburu prices found therein, but none of them are as deeply rooted as its terms imported from Portugal.
Relations between Japan and Portugal go back to 1543, when the first Portuguese sailors arrived in the southern Japanese archipelago. Impressions of this encounter are included in the video above, a Voices of the Past compilation of how actual sixteenth-century Japanese historians described their unexpected visitors. “A southern barbarian vessel came to our shores,” writes one of them, anonymously. From it “emerged an unnameable creature, somewhat similar in shape to a human being, but looking rather more like a long-nosed goblin, or the giant demon mikoshi-nyūdō.”
This grotesque, unintelligible creature turned to be a bateren; that is, a padre, a missionary priest come to spread the kirishitan religion in this distant land. In this primary task they faced severe, ultimately insurmountable challenges, but as the first Europeans to make contact with Japan, they also happened much more successfully to disseminate Western concepts and techniques in agriculture, science, and art (not to mention dessert culture). Their introduction of the gun, described in detail by another contemporary historian, also changed the course of Japanese history, doing its part to make possible the unification of Japan in the following century.
Kurusu in hand, these bateren argued that one should devote oneself to Deusu in order to avoid eternal condemnation to inheruno and gain admission to paraiso. There were converts, though perhaps not in numbers as large as expected. Then as now, the Japanese had their own way of going about things, but in the sixteenth century, they had rulers inclined to crack down hard on suspicious foreign influence. The last section of the video contains testimony of a showdown staged between Christianity and Buddhism, a debate in which the bateren seemed to have put on a poor show. Defeated, they were either expelled or executed, and not long thereafter, Japan closed the doa — as they now call it — for a couple more centuries.
Related content:
Hear the First Japanese Visitor to the United States & Europe Describe Life in the West (1860–1862)
The 17th-Century Japanese Samurai Who Sailed to Europe, Met the Pope & Became a Roman Citizen
Hear an Ancient Chinese Historian Describe The Roman Empire (and Other Voices of the Past)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.