The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (60 page)

During the tumultuous sixteenth century Japanese
daimyo
and nobility engaged in mining operations for gold and silver, which were made into gold and silver coins that went to finance armies and purchase weapons. Because
daimyo
often were at war with each other, few efforts were made to standardize coinage. The earliest and perhaps the most widely accepted gold coins were issued by the
daimyo
of the Kai region (an area famous for its gold mines) and were called
koshu kin
. Each
koshu kin
was stamped with its weight and an indication of its corresponding value. This system was adopted by the Tokugawa shogunate at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
⁴⁵

17. We in Europe always use a balance; the Japanese use a dachen
.
⁴⁶

The Portuguese empire (and thus a Jesuit enterprise in Japan) was made possible by profits from the pepper trade and the duties that the Portuguese crown
collected at its forts and customs houses (
alfándegas
) that were strategically located in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans.
⁴⁷
The weight of many items dictated their value and tax assessment and so something as simple as a scale was of great importance in the sixteenth century.
⁴⁸

The European “balance” mentioned here by Frois should be familiar to those who have been to a courthouse and seen a statue or plaque of “Lady Justice,” who wears a blindfold and holds a sword in her left hand and an uplifted balance scale in her right hand.

The
dachen
is a “beam” scale, originally from China, which functioned a lot like the scale once common in a doctor's office (where a patient's weight was determined by sliding weights out on a beam, so to speak). The Chinese made beam scales in a variety of sizes, including small scales with a notched fish-bone for a beam, which merchants carried in their pockets. The scales often were used to weigh
sycee
—silver ingots used as currency—or coins that looked suspicious (i.e. counterfeit).

[17A]. Our copper coins are solid; in Japan they have holes through the center
.

This is another of Frois' unnumbered contrasts. During the early sixteenth century copper production in central Europe increased significantly and solid copper coins, particularly in small denominations, were widely used for everyday transactions (e.g. buying a loaf of bread).
⁴⁹
From circa 1500 through 1550 Portugal imported roughly a half-million kilograms of copper each year from Antwerp.
⁵⁰

The Japanese used copper coins for various purposes (e.g. estate rents, temple donations, prayers,
⁵¹
merchandise), although those mentioned by Frois were probably not Japanese but rather Chinese. The
kobusen
was a round copper coin with a square hole that was minted in five different denominations in China during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
⁵²
The
kobusen
as well as a still earlier Chinese copper coin (
sosen
) circulated widely in Japan. One reason for the popularity of the
kobusen
was that it bore an auspicious inscription that promised its owner good luck. During the sixteenth century some regions of Japan began issuing their own copper coin (
bitasen
), modeled after the
kobusen
.

18. In Europe copper coins are widely accepted; in Japan only selected ones are, and they must be old and have the right color and markings
.

Apparently counterfeit copper coins were not a major concern in Europe during Frois' lifetime, unlike the seventeenth century, when they created a major monetary crisis in Spain and elsewhere.
⁵³

As early as the fifteenth century counterfeit coins had become a serious problem in Japan.
⁵⁴
The
bitasen
minted in different parts of Japan were made of copper as well as varying amounts of lead. It therefore made sense for the Japanese to check out color and markings and to prefer older coins such as the Chinese
sosen
or
kobusen
.

19. In Europe one does not ordinarily give copper coins as a gift; in Japan they present caxas
⁵⁵
as a formal gift
⁵⁶
to lords
.

Copper coins obviously were not worth as much as gold and silver coins and in some parts of Europe (e.g. England) they were not even minted. That the Japanese gave them as gifts reflects the fact that they were considered lucky (as per
#17a
). Today, they are sometimes given to children or as prizes in neighborhood lotteries, in their reincarnation as freshly minted five-yen coins. They do not have the aforementioned lucky words printed on them, but their denomination has an intrinsically auspicious value:
go-en
(five yen) happens to be a homophone for “good fortune!”

20. We bestow honor through titles; the Japanese bestow it all through the use of honorifics
.

With far more grammatical inflections for etiquette (levels of politeness) than for verb tenses, it is true that speakers of Japanese can do more with their verbs than can speakers of English or Romance languages. The Japanese language even has different verbs with identical meanings, where usage depends on who one is speaking to or what is being discussed. But the Japanese do not rely
only
on the verb, as Frois' Portuguese original implies. For some words they also have different levels of nouns, and they have honorific prefixes and suffixes that can be added to nouns or even adjectives. Moreover, it would have been more accurate for Frois to have spoken of “honor and humility,” because one can talk
up
another and talk oneself
down
with equal ease in Japanese.

The subject of honorifics admittedly is difficult to discuss in a Western language, because it is hard for “us” to imagine that the verb “be” may have various forms depending on levels of formality, politeness and whatnot (the term honorifics does not really cover the half of it!). If we were Frois, we might have written:

We demonstrate politeness and respect through our choice of words; in Japanese, the grammar of the language itself incorporates markers of politeness and respect that can be used at the appropriate time.

Today, when equality is idealized around the world, including Japan, some people have mixed feelings about language that invokes notions of rank (in the sixteenth century neither Europeans nor Japanese were concerned because few people believed that everyone was equal). Moreover, the complexity of such a language (strictly speaking, the redundant ways of “saying the same thing” that take time to learn) is thought of as a barrier to global understanding.

21. We wash our hands before touching something precious; the Japanese wash them to examine the implements of their tea ceremony
.

It is not clear what Frois intended with this contrast. Was he highlighting the fact that it was surprising—from a European perspective—that the Japanese would bother to wash their hands before picking up their rustic implements of the tea ceremony? In
Chapter 11
(
#9
), Frois wrote that, as gems are precious to “us,” the tea service (
dogu
) is precious to the Japanese. With this second contrast Frois seems to abandon his cultural relativism. Whatever his intent, Frois' fellow Jesuit, Rodrigues, provided a “thicker description” (
à la
Geertz) of the “hand washing” associated with the tea ceremony:

Then as they walk along the path through the wood up to the cha house, they quietly contemplate everything there—the wood itself, individual trees in their natural state and setting, the paving stones and the rough stone trough for washing the hands. There is crystal clear water there which they take with a vessel and pour onto their hands, and the guests may wash their hands if they so wish …
⁵⁷

This prelude to the tea ceremony bears much resemblance to visiting a Shinto shrine or a Buddhist temple, for they often resemble shrines in this respect: one takes a nature walk and cleans one's hands in spring water ladled from a trough bored into a boulder, or better yet, a natural concavity in the boulder. The main difference is that the tea practitioners are conscious of the masterfully arranged, generally small (if not miniature) natural elements and savor them and their choreography, whereas the shrine-goers are just enjoying their walk to the shrine and may or may not enjoy incidental moments of natural epiphany in the face of a grander nature of cedar, boulder, mountain peaks and perhaps a glimpse of the sea.

Although it is true that
dogu
will be handled and drunk from, we hear nothing of soap here; the intent is, again, analogous to that which is sought by shrine- or temple-goer: spiritual purification. As previously suggested, in both sacred grounds and the tea hut there was a spirit of equality not present in the extremely rank-conscious outside world. The washing was also, then, a temporary removal of the trappings of difference.

22. Europeans kill wild boars with spears, guns, and hounds; the Japanese often beat the woods to drive them out so that they can kill them with swords
.

As noted in
Chapter 6
, the Portuguese are still particularly fond of boar. While tasty, the wild relative of domesticated pig can be ferocious, particularly when cornered. As Frois indicates, by 1585 Europeans were hunting boar with guns (matchlock) as well as spears and greyhounds; the latter figure prominently in Francesco Salviati's sixteenth-century watercolor “Boar Hunt.”

According to Blackmore, Japanese prints of deer and boar hunts show the hunters wearing “the traditional samurai sword,” presumably the
katana
as opposed to the longer
tachi
.
⁵⁸
Of course, doing battle with a wild boar using only a sword is incredibly dangerous, but consistent with the
macho
mindset of the samurai of the warring-states era.

23. Among us, to kill a fly with your hand is considered filthy; in Japan princes and lords do it, pulling their wings off and throwing them outside
.

Avoidance of pollution was foundational to Erasmus' sixteenth-century bestseller,
Manners for Children
(1530),
⁵⁹
which aimed to remake not only children, but all of European society.

In Japan, to be “so old you can only chase a fly with your chin” was a common conceit, so it seems that fly-catching by hand was a national pastime.
⁶⁰
One can imagine that guilt, occasioned by Buddhism, was behind the practice, for there are thousands of haiku on the subject; indeed, the very category of “(summer) fly” is sometimes called, or at least subtitled,
hae-o utsu
, or “hitting flies.”

24. Most monkeys in Europe have tails; in Japan, even though there are so many monkeys, none of them have tails, and the fact that there are monkeys with tails is novel to them
.

Portuguese raiding and commerce along the west coast of Africa during the fifteenth century increased the flow of
exotica
from Asia and Africa into Europe, including various species of Old World monkeys (Cercopithecoidea) that were kept as pets or curiosities by European nobility. Albrecht Dürer kept a collection of monkeys apparently for study purposes. By the sixteenth century many European cities also were home to street performers who wore orientalized costumes and entertained passerby with trained monkeys.
⁶¹

Then, as now, Europeans found monkeys and apes intriguing because of their human-like qualities (primates behave foolishly just like people). The Japanese were similarly taken with the Japanese macaque—a native of Japan that has a human-like face and lives in troops of anywhere from several dozen on up to one hundred individuals, led by an alpha male. Macaques appear tailless, having a stump that can be as short as two centimeters. Japanese folk tradition held that monkeys could cure equine illness and often monkeys were kept at Japanese
stables as “guardians.”
⁶²
Presumably, Portuguese sailors introduced the guenons or other Old World monkeys with long tails that the Japanese found so novel.

25. We do accounting by writing numbers down using a quill or marks; the Japanese do so with a soroban calculator
.
⁶³

The Chinese abacus—a wooden, square-shaped device consisting of rows of beads on wooden rods that are slid back and forth—was first introduced to Japan sometime during the early sixteenth century and before the Jesuits arrived on the scene.
⁶⁴
As with so many introduced items, the Japanese modified the abacus, now called a
soroban
, making it smaller and streamlining mathematical computation. People still use it in small stores and sometimes post offices in Japan.

26. Among us, giving someone a greater number of gifts signifies greater love; in Japan, the fewer the gifts, the greater the show of esteem
.

In the absence of department stores and mass-produced goods, gift-giving in early modern Europe entailed mostly items of food, particularly game or fish or sweet things, or handcrafted items like socks or maybe a new spoon.
⁶⁵
As is the case today in the West, the principle governing gifting was: the naughty get little, the nice get a lot.

In Japan gift giving was and to a degree still is
very
formalized.
⁶⁶
Every gift, no matter how small, must be matched at some time or another. If the Japanese were not big on gifting, as Frois indicates, it probably was because giving a gift could set off a dangerous cycle of exchange every bit as hard on the pocketbook as a potlatch. Indeed, like a potlatch, it could be used to embarrass and thus undermine the authority of a rival.

Westerners residing in Japan today find it hard to simply give people things because it inevitably becomes stressful, particularly for the recipient, who usually feels compelled to buy an equally expensive return gift. Indeed, one of a wife's traditional duties is keeping tabs on the value of every present and matching it with a return gift. Wealthy professionals who are showered with gifts by clients have special recycling arrangements worked out with a specialized business, which might be called a gift broker, who takes back some gifts and recycles or resells others.