The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (51 page)

33
  
Iori no nomi kawai ya ware to inurunari
(shack's flea/s cute! me-with sleep-become).

34
  Frois used the word
arca
for both leather and cedar furniture. (In Portuguese, the word encompasses chest, large box, treasure and the ark). Another interesting note is that Frois spells Flanders as “Frandes” rather than “Flandres.” One might assume that the loss of ‘r' in the final syllable and the substitution of ‘r' for ‘l' in the initial syllable are a reflection of Frois' lengthy contact with the Japanese language, particularly given the well-known phenomenon of Japanese speakers who confuse the liquid consonants ‘r' and ‘l' when they speak European languages. Such an assumption would be mistaken, however, as this substitution of ‘r' for ‘l' is a common feature in the historical development of Portuguese. There are many such examples, so while Latin
fluitare
‘to flow' is the root of Modern Portuguese
flutuar
‘to float,' we also find examples such as
frota
‘fleet (of ships)' from the Old French
flote
, as well as
branco
‘white' from the Old Germanic
blank
.

35
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 127.

36
  Esther Singleton,
Furniture
(New York: Duffield and Company, 1911), 102.

37
  
Jinriksha Days in Japan
, 375.

38
  Thomas,
The Ends of Life
, 117.

39
  Sarti, “The Material Conditions of Family Life,” 5–6.

40
  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), 19.

41
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 123–127.

42
  Alice Mabel Bacon,
A Japanese Interior
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1893), 42.

43
  Although Schütte has suggested that Frois intended “
canga
,”
cana
, which can be translated as reeds or rushes, seems to make more sense in the context of stuffing for a bed pillow.

44
  
Japan Day By Day
, I, 62.

45
  
Cayas
[
kaya
].

46
  
Nuno
.

47
  Alcock,
Capital of the Tycoon
, II, 423.

48
  
Senhores
.

49
  
Tem antre si por primor
.

50
  Thomas,
The Ends of Life
, 83.

51
  Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones,
The Medical World of Early Modern France
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 188–189.

52
  Cleanliness was so celebrated in Holland that Dutch warships had brooms atop their masts, signaling that they would sweep the sea of their enemies.

53
  Captain Vasilĭi Mikhăilovich Golownin,
Memoirs of a Captivity in Japan during the years 1811, 1812, and 1813
(London: Henry Colburn & Company, 1824), III, 135.

54
  
Vaza to
. We noted with surprise in the previous chapter Frois' use of this Japanese expression that means “on purpose” (see Chapter 10, #15).

55
  
Liteiros ou tomentos muito grossos
. The term
liteiro
refers to a wool-blend fabric typical of the Alentejo region of Portugal, and
tomento
refers to the coarsest fibers taken from the flax plant.

56
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 141.

57
  Hiroshi Aramata,
Nihon Gyôten Kigen
[Japan-shocking-origins] (Shûeisha, 1994), 80.

58
  Englelbert 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, 293–294.

59
  Aramata,
Nihon Gyôten Kigen
, 102.

60
  Morse,
Japan Day By Day
, I, 23. Note that in his later book,
Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings
, Morse qualified his remarks, admitting that the runoff from the fertilizer might sometimes cause cholera in the southern part of Japan.

61
  Ibid., 42.

62
  
Caquegos
[
kakego
].

63
  
The Soul of the Far East
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), 111.

64
  
Japanese Girls and Women
(London: Kegan Paul, 2001[1892]), 79.

65
  Ibid, 250.

66
  See the “Prince's Panel” in particular, In
Museum With No Frontiers Exhibition “The Manueline: Portuguese Art During the Great Discoveries,”
pp. 48–49 (Lisbon: Programa de Incremento do Turismo Cultural, 2002), 30–31.

67
  Anne Fitzpatrick,
The Renaissance
(Mankato, MN: Creative Education, 2006), 38.

68
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 254.

69
  Carolyn Wheelwright, “A Visualization of Eitoku's Lost Paintings at Azuchi Castle.” In
Warlords, Artists, & Commoners
, eds. George Elison and Bardwell Smith, pp. 87–112. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981), 96.

70
  
Nivas
[
niwa
].

71
  Valignano,
De Missione Legatorum Iaponen
, Dialogue 17.

72
  See Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, “Cherry Blossoms and Their Viewing.” In
The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure
, eds. Sepp Linhart and Sabine Fruhstuck, pp. 213–237 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998).

73
  
Kotatsu
.

74
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 134–135.

75
  
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1987[1880]), 254.

76
  Richard A. Goldthwaite,
The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 126.

77
  Oda Nobunaga employed thousands of laborers for three years (1576–1579) on the construction of “Azuchi castle,” which included not simply a magnificent residence for himself, but an entire castle town.

78
  In Iberian homes
patios
refers to a walled space within the structure of the residence itself, separated from the street.

79
  
Vazato
.

80
  
Nivas
[
niwa
].

81
  Golownin,
Memoirs of a Captivity in Japan, III
, 157.

82
  
Jinrikisha Days in Japan
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897), 12.

83
  Alessandro Valignano,
De Missione Legatorum Iaponen
, trans. Duarte de Sande (Macao [Lima Library Collection], 1590).

84
  
Vazato
[
waza to
].

85
  
Capital of the Tycoon
, 324.

86
  
Taray
[
tarai
].

87
  Beer, which is made with hops, apparently became more popular than ale (made without hops) over the course of the sixteenth century. Richard Unger,
Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

12   Ships, seafaring and
dogus
1

1. Among us, there are naos, galleons, caravels, galleys, fustas, catures, brigantines, etc.; in Japan they have absolutely none of these
.

Frois was a proud son of Portugal and had difficulty acknowledging Japanese ships and seafaring, which admittedly were not on a par with the Portuguese maritime tradition. At the time Frois wrote, his native land boasted more than a century of excellence at sea (Henry the Navigator died in 1460). By leading the way in the age of exploration, Portugal and Spain not only gained the prestige that the United States received for making it to the moon, but enormous wealth that made them the envy of Europe.
²
Well over 1,000 ships sailed to and from Portugal and Asia during the sixteenth century.
³

Frois here mentions a handful of the many types of Portuguese ships that plied the seas during his lifetime.
⁴
The
nao
(today spelled
nau
) was the Airbus A-380 or Boeing 747 of sixteenth century shipping. This three or four-mast ship had three or four decks and a capacity ranging from an ideal of 450 to over 1,000 tons. The
nao
was Portugal's mainstay ferrying people and goods back and forth between Portugal and Asia. The Nossa Senhora dos Mártires that sailed from India and sank in sight of Lisbon in 1606 was carrying 450 people and 250 tons of peppercorns, not to mention a host of other commodities.
⁵
From the Japanese perspective, the
nao
was the typical “southern barbarian boat.” It was lightly armed compared to its look-like, the galleon, but still outgunned anything in the East (see
#9
below). The closest Japanese analog to the
nao
was the
bezaisen
or
kitamae-bune
—a cargo ship with a capacity of only ninety-eight tons that had a
flat keel and a single mast (hardly an ocean-going vessel) that plied the Inland Sea and occasionally the Sea of Japan.
⁶

A galleon's guns were legend. In
De Missione Legatorum Iaponen
(Dialogue 14) one of the Japanese ambassadors to Europe commented that it had “one large cannon for every day of the year.” Another of the ambassadors noted that the Republic of Venice could boast a galleon with 500 large cannon. By contrast, the Japanese warship, or
atake-bune
, was relatively small (20–65 feet in length), propelled by two-dozen oarsmen, and featured a wooden tower at the stern, whence bowman and later harquebusiers fired volleys of arrows and shot, respectively.

The lateen-sail caravel was what got the West around the world. Lateen sails were found on small boats in the Mediterranean for centuries (maybe a millennium).
⁷
Triangular, they let a boat tack into the wind. The three-mast caravel was light, strongly built, and streamlined because the cabins were put fore and aft and the central deck was low and clear. In 1520 King Manuel of Portugal made it a crime to sell a caravel to a foreign country or to go abroad for the purposes of building a caravel.
⁸

During the second half of the fourteenth century the Portuguese Crown made a significant investment in building, equipping, and maintaining squadrons of galleys,
⁹
which were powered by multiple rows of oarsman (mostly slaves, criminals, or prisoners of war), who sat on benches and worked oars of varying length (from thirty to fifty feet). Galleys were mostly used in the Mediterranean, not infrequently for ramming in war, but equipped with sails, they also served for North Africa trade. Over 400 galleys took part in the famous naval battle of Lepanto (1571), when a combined European force under Don Juan of Austria defeated an Ottoman armada lead by Ali Pasha.
¹⁰

Fustas
and
caturs
were smaller vessels built by the Portuguese in India, principally at their shipyard in Goa. Both were powered by oars and sails. The brigantine was likewise a smaller, two-masted ship that got its name (brigand's ship) from the fact that it was a favorite of pirates in the Mediterranean.

2. Our ships have ribs and decks; Japanese ships do not
.

Then what, one wonders, did Japanese boats have if not ribs and decks? Okada, citing Ishii Kenji's
Nihon-no Fune
(“the Japanese boat”) goes into great technical detail, but suffice it to say that Japanese boats were more like an insect—all shell—while more seaworthy European vessels had shell-based hulls reinforced with posts and frames.
¹¹
For this reason, the size of Japanese ships was severely
limited. However, lest “we” get uppity, it should be pointed out that the Chinese seagoing junks of the fifteenth century—the largest of which were over 400 feet in length and 165 feet wide—dwarfed Western ships from the age of exploration.
¹²
The ships, which regularly sailed to east Africa and possibly around the world, were not only large, but were also technical marvels, with water-tight bulwark compartments (something the West “invented” in the late eighteenth century), prows that handled heavy seas, and a balanced rudder.
¹³

3. Many of our vessels are powered only by sail; all Japanese boats are powered with oars
.

Generally speaking, the Japanese did not rely on sails as much as Europeans. Japanese boats, while they may have had a sail, were relatively small and poor at going into the wind. Moreover, the Japanese often operated near convoluted, rocky coasts and islands, with fickle winds; most of the time they very wisely relied on manpower.

4. Ours ships are treated on the outside with tar or pitch to keep them from taking on water; the Japanese use no pitch at all, relying solely on the tight fit of their wooden boards
.

When Commodore Perry's four ships sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853, insisting that Japan have relations with the West for the first time in two centuries, the Japanese disparagingly hailed the arrival of “the black ships” (
kurofune
). As was the case in Frois' day, the ships' hulls were black with tar; at least two of the four ships, which were steamers, also belched black smoke.

According to Okada, the Japanese
did
use caulking to stop a leak; they just did not treat the whole bottom of the boat with tar or pitch. If anything, the Japanese were likely to have imitated the Chinese in accentuating the natural look of the wood by applying dammar or some other oil.
¹⁴
As Frois indicates, the precision of Japanese workmanship ruled out significant shrinkage and a need for filling cracks with thick coatings. The straight lines of Japanese naval architecture also helped: