The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (43 page)

Okada points out that eating, especially rich food, was thought to reduce the efficacy of Chinese medicine. Arguably, what is eaten without an appetite or even in the presence of nausea may exhaust an already stressed gastro-intestinal system, increasing putrefaction and flatulence and perhaps hastening death. Fasting may allow organs to recoup enough to make eating beneficial.

13. Our sick lie on beds or cots with mattresses, linens, and pillows; the sick among the Japanese lie on mats on the floor using a wooden pillow
,
²⁰
with their kimono over them
.

This is simply the ordinary sleeping arrangement described elsewhere in separate contrasts regarding beds, bedspreads, and pillows (see
Chapter 11
). Perhaps Frois felt repetition was worthwhile, for the soft versus hard contrast might be more poignant in the context of the sickbed.

14. In Europe, chickens and young cocks are considered medicine for the sick; the Japanese consider them poison, and they instead feed fish and pickled radish to the sick
.

It is tempting to think that Frois is referring in the first half of this distich to a light chicken broth (ironically not unlike Japanese
miso shiru
). Although Europeans at least as far back as the Middle Ages considered chicken broth healthful, Frois does not explicitly refer to soup or broth. As we saw in
Chapter 6
(
#7
,
#24
), Europeans were apt to boil a fat and succulent chicken and then add rice flour, sugar, rose water, almonds, and goat's milk, producing a dish that had the consistency of melted white cheese. Serving such a dish to somebody who was sick is suggested by Valignano's comment that, “… they regard hens, chickens, sweet things and practically all the foods we would give patients as unwholesome
for them; on their part they prescribe fresh and salted fish, sea snails and other bitter, salty things, and they find from experience that they do patients good.”
²¹

One reason the Japanese rejected domestic birds, as Alvarez noted, was because they were considered a taboo food (“… they never eat anything they breed”
²²
), and for a sick person to eat their meat would be to tempt fate. As Valignano acknowledged, the Japanese found from experience that fish and slightly fermented pickles worked quite well.

15. We pull teeth using dental pincers, dental forceps, the parrot's beak, etc.; the Japanese use a chisel and mallet, or a bow and arrow tied to the tooth, or a blacksmith's tongs
.

Dentistry in sixteenth-century Europe was practiced mostly by barbers and by itinerant tooth-pullers who extracted dental roots and broken or rotten teeth using various pliers-like tools such as the “duck bill,” “goat's foot,” and “pelican.” Tooth-pullers advertised their experience and expertise by wearing strings of extracted teeth.
²³
Although dentistry in sixteenth-century Europe bordered on torture,
²⁴
some of the tools mentioned by Frois (or modern variants of the same), such as the parrot's beak, are still in use by dentists, albeit with anesthesia.

It is fun to imagine a tooth tied to a ten-foot string, which in turn is attached to an arrow, shot from a bow. However, as Okada suggests, Frois' mention of a bow and arrow probably is a reference to Japanese use of a bow drill.

16. Our spices and medicines are ground in a pounder or mortar; in Japan they are ground in a small copper vessel with an iron disk that is held between both [
hands
]
.

In medieval and early modern Europe, spices such as saffron, basil, and pepper were considered powerful medicine (not just seasoning), and thus Frois' mention of spices along with [other] medicines that were ground with a mortar and pestle (e.g. bezoars, relics, coral, salts).
²⁵

The Japanese variant of the pestle and mortar seemingly entailed an iron disk of some thickness that was rolled alternately left to right in a copper vessel.

17. Among us, pearls and seed pearls are used for personal ornamentation; in Japan they serve no other purpose than to be ground for the making of medicines
.

Europeans may not have used pearls as medicine, but they did use various “stones” (i.e. bezoars) found in the stomachs of animals, not to mention ground-up
relics and mummies from Egypt!
²⁶
In Chinese-style medicine, pearl dust served to relax the spirit, settle the soul, brighten the eyes, and cure deafness.
²⁷
That is to say, it was considered good for the nerves (pearls contain zinc, selenium, and calcium; inferior pearls are used today by pharmaceutical companies to make high-quality calcium).

18. Among us, a doctor who is not certified is punished and cannot treat patients; in Japan, anyone who wants to may take up practicing medicine as a way to make a living
.

The thirteenth and later centuries in Europe witnessed the growth of cities and the establishment of hospitals and universities that awarded medical degrees. A medical degree, in the case of physicians, and practical knowledge and experience, in the case of surgeons and apothecaries, were generally required before an individual could legally practice medicine in a given locale, especially in cities.
²⁸
Because a medical degree entailed years of study, there were relatively few university-trained physicians in sixteenth century Europe and most were employed by the rich and powerful.
²⁹
In Frois' Portugal, a shortage of university-trained physicians led to an influx of doctors from Spain.
³⁰
Finding a doctor was one thing; paying for it was another. At the time Frois wrote, the cost of seeing a university-trained doctor in England was a gold coin or ten shillings; in today's money this would be close to 100 pounds or 150 US dollars.
³¹
Professionalization was costly in another sense: while it may have reduced the number of “quacks” practicing medicine, it also drove experienced and knowledgeable midwives and other lay practitioners from the field, leaving the vast majority of Europeans to fend for themselves.

In Japan, there is an old saying that “a hundred men must die to make a good doctor.” The Japanese were keenly aware of the presence of quacks, which they called
yabu-isha
or “bush-doctors.”

19. Among us, it is always a dirty and shameful thing for a man to suffer from venereal disease
³²
;
Japanese men and women see this as a common occurrence and are not at all ashamed of it
.

In 1493 syphilis appeared for the first time in Europe (gonorrhea, buboes, and genital ulceration had been a problem for centuries) and within two years raged throughout Europe, infecting one in five people.
³³
However shameful the “French disease”
³⁴
may have been, it became a chronic endemic disease of Europe during Frois' lifetime.

Syphilis may have reached Japan as early as 1512 and spread rapidly owing in part to the “casual” Japanese attitude toward prostitution.
³⁵
Writing in 1576, the Jesuit Vice-Provincial of Japan, Francisco Cabral, noted that the Jesuits had treated Japanese with the “French evil” at their hospital in Funai.
³⁶

In this distich, Frois reveals an unspoken bias to the effect that only Christians were moral enough to feel shame (not that shame stopped many from having sex with strangers). Actually, while the Japanese may not have picked out sexually transmitted diseases for approbation, they long have been very ashamed of all incurable and visually distressing diseases. They were, until very recently, unrelenting in their attitude about leprosy, preserving a far more stringent segregation than found in the West.

1
  
Alporcas
(referred to in English as scrofula) is a swelling or tuberculosis of the lymph nodes of the neck.

2
  Brian Pullan, “The Counter-Reformation, Medical Care and Poor Relief.” In
Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe
, eds. Ole P. Grell, Andrew Cunningham, and Jon Arrizabalaga, pp. 18–40 (London: Routledge, 1999), 21–22; Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones,
The Medical World of Early Modern France
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 37–80.

3
  J.D. Oriel,
The Scars of Venus
(London: Springer-Verlag, 1994), 11–23; Daniel T. Reff,
Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764
(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991), 170–172.

4
  William E. Deal,
Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 63.

5
  Ann Bowman Jannetta,
Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 281; Linda Newsom,
Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009), 17; William H. McNeill,
Plagues and Peoples
(Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1976):124–127, 201.

6
  Constitutions from late medieval monasteries in Portugal prescribed preventative bleeding every two to six months. A.H. De Oliveira Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 149.

7
  Cheng Xinnong,
Chinese Acupuncture and Moxibustion
(Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1999), 361.

8
  Engelbert Kaempfer,
The History of Japan, Together with a Description of the Kingdom of Siam, 1690–92
. 3 Vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906[1690–92]), II, 282.

9
  Kaempfer,
The History of Japan
, II, 282.

10
  Ibid.

11
  
Com sanbixugas ou c
[
om
]
faca na testa, e aos cavalos com lanceta
.

12
  Michael Cooper,
They Came to Japan
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 240.

13
  Ibid.

14
  Ibid.

15
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 151.

16
  Ibid., 150.

17
  See
Cartas que os Padres e Irmãos da Companhia de Iesus Escreuerão dos Reynos de Iapão & China aos da Mesma Companhia da India & Europa, des do Anno de 1549 Até o de 1580
. 2 Vols. Facsimile edition by José Manuel Garcia (Maia: Castoliva Editora, 1997), I, 213–224.

18
  Deal,
Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan
, 234.

19
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 241.

20
  
Makura
.

21
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 240.

22
  Ibid., 191.

23
  Andrès Pérez de Ribas,
History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Fierce and Barbarous Peoples of the New World
, trans. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard Danford (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999[1645]), 97.

24
  James Wynbrandt,
The Excruciating History of Dentistry
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

25
  Jack Turner, “Spices and Christians.” In
Encompassing the Globe, Portugal and the World in the 16th & 17th Centuries
, ed. Jay Levenson (Washington, D.C.: Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2007), 48.

26
  “Mummy,” or ground up corpses preserved with bitumen, was in great demand in Europe ever since the days of the Crusades. When French physician Guy de la Fonteine investigated the mummy trade in Alexandria in 1564, he found that fresh corpses were being dug up to satisfy Europe's demand for this “medicine.” Brian Fagan, “Mummies, Or the Restless Dead,”
Horizon
XVII (1975):64–82.

27
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka to Nihon-Bunka
.

28
  Brockliss and Jones,
The Medical World of Early Modern France
, 188–195.

29
  Charles Webster,
Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

30
  Isabel Mendes Drumond Braga, “Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Portugal: The Case of Misericôrdias.” In
Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe
, eds. Ole P. Grell, A. Cunningham, and J. Arrizabalaga, pp. 201–215 (London, Routledge, 1999), 206.

31
  See Andrew Wear,
Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

32
  
Mula
, a colloquial expression in Portuguese for venereal disease

33
  Oriel,
The Scars of Venus
, 11.

34
  The epidemic of 1493 seemingly began among the army of the French King Charles VIII. The epidemic was understood as punishment from God for the French armies' wanton destruction of Naples. Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Magdalens and Jezebels in Counter-Reformation Spain.” In
Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain
, eds. A.J. Cruz and M.E. Perry, pp. 124–145 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 131.

35
  Brett Walker, “Epidemic Disease, Medicine, and the Shifting Ecology of Ezo.” In
Race, Ethnicity and Migration in Modern Japan
, Michel Weiner ed., pp. 397–424 (London: Routledge, 2004), 405.

36
  James Murdoch,
A History of Japan
. 3 Vols. (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1964), II, Pt. I, 77. Note that there is no mention of syphilis or the “French evil”—perhaps edited out!—in the version of Cabral's letter that appears in
Cartas … de Iapão & China
, I, 357.

10   Japanese writing and their books, paper, ink and letters