Hidden Kingdom: Japan's Christian Martyrs, the Englishman Who Could Never Leave, and Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Deliberate Isolation

In 1598, a Kent-born pilot named Will Adams sailed from Holland as chief navigator of a five-ship Dutch East India Company fleet heading for the East Indies by way of the Straits of Magellan. Of the five ships, two turned back at the straits. A third was captured by the Spanish. The remaining two — the Hope and the Charity — crossed the Pacific. The Hope disappeared. Its fate was never determined. The Charity, Adams at the helm, made it across, but barely. Scurvy had devastated the crew until the ship could no longer be properly handled. When it finally reached the Japanese island of Kyushu, only four men aboard could stand upright. Adams was one of them. Four more could move on hands and knees. The rest were helpless. The local governor received them with reasonable care, though much of their cargo was plundered by locals. Then some Portuguese traders arrived from Nagasaki — and rather than helping their fellow Europeans, the Portuguese, who were commercial rivals of the Dutch and bitterly hostile to them, told the Japanese governor that the Dutch sailors were pirates and should be put to death. The case was referred to the shogun Ieyasu, who summoned Adams to appear before him. Adams was then held in prison for thirty-nine days expecting at any moment to be crucified — the standard execution method for pirates. Ieyasu, however, questioned Adams at length, understood that the Dutch-Portuguese enmity was a European affair of no relevance to Japan, and declined to execute men who had done him no harm. He released Adams. Then he kept him.

Will Adams arrived in Japan in 1600 as the barely-surviving pilot of a Dutch ship, was held for thirty-nine days expecting execution, and then found himself kept at the shogun's court for the rest of his life — given a feudal estate, a Japanese wife, and the Japanese name Anjin-Sama: Mr. Pilot.

Anjin-Sama — Mr. Pilot, Lord of an Estate, and Never Going Home

Ieyasu was a practical man. He saw in Adams something useful: a skilled navigator, an honest informant about European affairs, and a man who could mediate between Japanese interests and the foreign traders increasingly appearing on the coast. He made Adams a court fixture and refused all requests to let him go. Adams built ships for the shogun — Western-style vessels that delighted Ieyasu. He acted as intermediary between the Japanese government and Dutch and later English traders. He had long conversations with Ieyasu about European politics and the state of the world. When Dutch ships appeared off the coast in 1609, Adams helped them gain trading rights, siding with his old Dutch employers against Portuguese attempts to block them. Two years later, English traders arrived and Adams helped them secure a charter to trade in any Japanese port. For all of this, he was well rewarded. Ieyasu gave him a substantial rural estate — described in Adams's own letters as a living like unto a lordship in England, with eighty or ninety husbandmen as servants. An English visitor who saw the estate in 1616 described it as having over two hundred farms, with Adams holding effective power of life and death over the people on it. He had a house in Edo near the shogun's court. A street there was called Pilot Street in his memory, and his Japanese name — Anjin-Sama, Mr. Pilot — became the name by which he was known throughout Japan. He married a Japanese woman and had children with her, while his English wife and the children he had left at home in Kent remained a source of grief he mentioned repeatedly in his letters. He never returned. He died in Japan in 1620. The Japanese honoured him as the founder of their naval tradition. He was made a Shinto divinity under the name Angin-Haka. Flowers are still placed on his tomb.

The Sealed Country — Japan's Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Chosen Isolation

The reasoning behind Japan's self-imposed isolation was not irrational. Japanese rulers had watched what European contact was doing to other parts of Asia: trade followed by missionaries, missionaries followed by political interference, political interference followed by colonisation. The sight of Portuguese and Spanish activities elsewhere in the Pacific was available to any informed Japanese observer, and what it suggested was not reassuring. The shogun Iemitsu, third of the Tokugawa line, made the definitive decision in the 1630s. Every port was closed except Nagasaki, where Dutch traders were permitted to operate from a small artificial island under strict conditions — kept separate from the Japanese population, their movements controlled, their activities monitored. No other European nation could approach Japan at all. Japanese subjects were forbidden from travelling abroad. Ocean-going vessels — ships capable of crossing open water — were destroyed. What remained were coastal craft that could creep along the shoreline, sometimes taking a year to cover a few hundred miles. For approximately two hundred and fifty years, this held. Japan developed in isolation — its feudal institutions intact, its culture continuing to evolve in its own direction, its technology frozen roughly where it had been when the gates closed. When the isolation ended in the mid-nineteenth century, the world that came through the door was carrying breech-loading rifles and rifled artillery. Japan had bows and matchlocks of fifteenth-century design. The gap this created, and the speed with which Japan then moved to close it, is one of the more striking stories in modern history — but that belongs to a different chapter.

The Feudal Rules — What You Could Wear, What You Could Eat, and Whether You Could Use an Umbrella

Inside the sealed country, the Tokugawa feudal system ran with a precision that touched every detail of daily life. The social hierarchy was fixed and enforced: Daimyo at the top, then Samurai, then farmers, craftsmen, merchants. Each class operated under rules specifying exactly what its members could and could not do, own, wear, eat, and give as gifts. A farmer whose land yielded a hundred koku of rice a year could build a house sixty feet long, but it could have no parlour and the roof could not be tiled. If he feared fire and wanted tiles instead of thatch, he had to apply for permission first. His family could not wear silk. If a child married someone of a class that permitted silk, the farmer was required to ask that person not to wear silk at the wedding. At funerals, no wine could be offered to visitors. The permitted wedding menu was specific and modest. Even grandparents giving presents to grandchildren at children's festivals were regulated: no dolls for the girls, no toy flags for the boys — small money gifts only. For labourers, the rules were stricter still. The house must be thatched, no exceptions. A feast might offer one dish and one soup, but not in cups. A wife might own a silk sash but could not wear it in public. And the labourer was not to use an umbrella except in genuine necessity, since a straw raincoat was, in the eyes of the law, sufficient for his station. The government accompanied these rules with an explanation of their intent — that they existed not to oppress but to prevent families from spending beyond their means, to maintain social order, and to encourage frugality. The explanation had the characteristic quality of all such explanations: it was not entirely false, and it was also not the whole story.

The Eta — Japan's Untouchables

Below the four official classes — Samurai, farmers, craftsmen, merchants — was a group not counted as part of the population at all. The Eta were Japan's outcast class, and their position in Japanese society was absolute in a way that made European concepts of the outcast look moderate. They were not permitted to live near other people. Their villages were excluded from road measurements — the highway simply did not officially pass by where they lived. Ground where an Eta had stood was considered polluted and had to be sprinkled with salt before a Japanese person could walk on it. A Samurai who killed an Eta for a slight thought no more of it than killing a dog. The poorest labourer in Japan considered it an insult to be placed in the same social category as an Eta. The work reserved for them matched their status: slaughtering and skinning animals, executing criminals, disposing of bodies. Many were tanners and shoemakers. Their own internal community had headmen and a chief who lived in Edo and, by tradition, was permitted the two swords that marked Samurai rank. Where they came from is not agreed upon. Theories include Korean prisoners of war, Mongol captives from Kublai Khan's defeated invasion force, or — the most widely accepted modern view — a class that gradually formed from those whose occupations under Buddhist doctrine involved taking life, rendered ritually impure by their work until the impurity became permanent and hereditary. In 1871, a legal decree placed the Eta formally equal to other Japanese citizens. In practice, the adjustment took longer. A school built with Eta money opened to no students the first day — no Japanese family would send their children. The breakthrough came when the local district governor — a Samurai — enrolled himself as a pupil and the night before opening slept at an Eta family's house. The school filled after that. Legal equality and social reality do not always travel at the same speed.