CHAPTER XXV
Policy of the Dutch—Affair of Nuyts—Haganaar’s Visits to Japan—Caron’s Account of Japan—Income of the Emperor and the Nobles—Military Force—Social and Political Position of the Nobles—Justice—Relation of the Dutch to the Persecution of the Catholics—The Dutch removed from Hirado and confined in Deshima—Attempts of the English, Portuguese, and French at Intercourse with Japan—Final Extinction of the Catholic Faith—A. D. 1620-1707.
Throughout the whole of the long and cruel persecution of the Catholics, the Dutch had striven by extreme subserviency to recommend themselves to the favor of the Japanese, in hopes of exclusively engrossing a trade which appears at this time to have been more extensive and more lucrative than at any former period. The Japanese, however, seem not to have been insensible to the advantages of competition; and, so long as the Portuguese commerce continued, they extended to the vessels of that nation a certain protection against the Dutch, and even preference over them. The danger from Dutch cruisers appears to have caused the substitution, for the single great carac of Macao, of a number of smaller vessels; nor were the Dutch, however urgent their solicitations, allowed to leave Hirado till such a number of days after the departure of the Portuguese from Nagasaki as would prevent all danger of collision.
Yet, however cringing the general policy of the Dutch East India Company, their trade, through the folly of a single individual, was near being exposed to a violent interruption. In the year 1626, Conrad Kramer, the head of the Dutch factory, was extremely well received on his visit to Yedo, and was allowed to be present at Miyako during the visit of the emperor to the Dairi,—an occasion which drew together an immense concourse, and which, according to the account that Kramer has left of it, was attended with vast confusion[116]. The annual visit to Yedo was made the next year by Peter de Nuyts, who gave himself out as ambassador from the king of Holland, and at first was treated as such; but the Japanese having discovered that he had no commission except from the council of Batavia, sent him away in disgrace.
Shortly after, Nuyts was appointed governor of Formosa. The Dutch, following in the footsteps of some Japanese adventurers, had formed an establishment on that island, about the year 1620, with a view to a smuggling trade with China; and, by erecting a fort at the mouth of the harbor, had speedily obtained the exclusive control of it. Not long after Nuyts’ appointment as governor, there arrived two Japanese vessels, on a voyage to China. They merely touched at Formosa for water, but Nuyts, to gratify the spite he had conceived against the Japanese nation, contrived to detain them so long that they missed the monsoon; and having required them, as the sole condition on which he would allow their entrance, to give up their sails and rudders, upon one pretence and another, he refused to return them, till at length the patience of the Japanese was entirely exhausted. They numbered five hundred men; and at last, all their reiterated and urgent applications for leave to depart being refused, they attacked the governor by surprise, overpowered his household, and made him prisoner; nor did the garrison of the neighboring fort dare to fire upon them for fear of killing their own people. Thus the brave Japanese extorted liberty to depart and indemnity for their losses, to which the Dutch assented, notwithstanding their superior force, for fear of reprisals in Japan. These, however, they did not avoid, for, as soon as the Japanese reached home, the emperor put under sequestration nine vessels with their cargoes, then at Hirado, belonging to the Dutch East India Company, and forbade any further trade with their agents. Things remained in this state for three years, the Japanese, however, receiving as usual Dutch vessels which came from Batavia, under the assumed character of belonging not to the East India Company, but to private merchants. At last it was resolved to seek an accommodation by surrendering up Nuyts to the mercy of the Japanese, which was done in 1634.
Having obtained his unconditional surrender, they treated him with great clemency; for, though detained in custody, he was not kept a close prisoner; and, in return for this concession, the Company’s ships were released and their trade reëstablished. The liberation of Nuyts was granted two years afterwards as a mark of the emperor’s satisfaction, with a splendid chandelier among the annual presents of the Company, and which was used as an ornament for the temple-mausoleum of the emperors of the race of Gongen-Sama [at Nikkō], completed about that time.
In the solicitation for the release of Nuyts both Haganaar and Caron were employed, to each of whom we are indebted for some curious memoirs of the state of Japan in their time. Haganaar made three visits thither. The first included the last four months of 1634. The second extended from September, 1635, to November, 1636; during which he made a visit to Yedo, and was at the head of the factory. The third was limited to three months in the autumn of 1637. Of each of these visits he has given brief notes in his printed travels[117], besides adding some observations of his own to Caron’s account of Japan. Hirado, which he describes as a town of thirty-six streets, had grown up suddenly, in consequence of the Dutch trade,—a single street producing more revenue to the lord than the whole town formerly had done; yet there were hardly any merchants in the place, except those who lodged at the factory, and who were drawn thither from all parts by the Dutch trade.
During Haganaar’s second visit, the Dutch were called sharply to account for having presumed to sell their silk at a higher rate than that asked by the Portuguese, and a price was prescribed, which they were not to exceed. Being deputed to visit Yedo, on the business of Nuyts’ release, Haganaar proceeded thither by sea, and took lodgings at the house of a Japanese bonze, who was the usual host of the Dutch. The agency of the lord of Hirado and of his secretary was employed with several of the imperial counsellors, but owing, as it would seem, to a deficiency of presents, without success. Caron arranged this matter more successfully the next year. From Yedo to Ōsaka Haganaar travelled by land, and from Ōsaka by water to Hirado, where, during his absence, thirteen or fourteen persons had suffered death because they belonged to Catholic families. He notes that the Japanese whale fishery for the season of 1636 resulted in the capture of two hundred and seventy-four whales; which, however, were much smaller and less fat than the Greenland whales, and were taken more for food than oil. Shortly after his return to Hirado, news came of an order from court that all the Portuguese half-castes—that is, descendants of Portuguese by Japanese women—should be shipped off with their wives and children to Macao.
Returning to Japan a third time, in 1637,—in the seventh Dutch ship which arrived that year,—Haganaar heard that Admiral Weddell was at Nagasaki with four richly laden English ships. They had been refused entrance into Macao, and had come thence to Japan, but could not obtain permission to trade, nor even to land. Six Portuguese galliots had also arrived from Macao with full cargoes of rich silks, which were sold, however, at little profit. Yet they were reported to have carried back, in return, two thousand six hundred chests of silver, or more than three millions of dollars.
To relieve the necessities of the Dutch governor of Formosa, who was engaged in hostilities with the natives, and had been obliged to borrow of Chinese traders, at the rate of three per cent a month, Haganaar was despatched thither with four ships and four hundred and fifty chests of silver, of which two hundred had been borrowed at Miyako of Japanese capitalists, at twenty-four per cent per annum. The following year he returned to Holland, where he soon after printed his voyages, and along with them the answers made by Francis Caron to a series of questions which had been submitted to him by the director of the Company, and which throw not a little light upon the condition of Japan at this time.
Caron, born in Holland of French parents, had originally gone to Japan quite young, Kämpfer says, as cook of a Dutch ship. Bad treatment caused him to quit the ship in Japan, where he was presently taken into the service of the Dutch factory, and taught reading, writing, and accounts. He gave evidence of remarkable abilities, and rose in time to the head of the establishment. He spoke the language fluently, had married a Japanese wife, and from the liberty of intercourse then allowed, and his long residence in the country, enjoyed means of information which no European has since possessed.
In describing the political state of Japan, Caron gives the names, residences, and revenues of thirty-two princes, that is, rulers of one or more provinces (spoken of in the earlier relations as kings), of whom the prince of Kaga, who was also ruler of two other provinces, had a revenue of one hundred and nineteen mankoku, and the others revenues varying from seventy to eighteen mankoku. He adds the mimes, residences, and incomes of one hundred and seven other lords, twenty of whom had revenues of from fifteen to seven mankoku, and the others of from six to two mankoku. Another list contains the names of forty-one lords, with revenues of from one to two mankoku; and in a fourth list he enumerates sixteen lords attached to the imperial court, of whom the first four had from fifteen to nine mankoku, and the others from six to one mankoku. The total revenues of these one hundred and ninety-six great nobles amounted to nineteen thousand three hundred and forty-five mankoku, exclusive of nine thousand mankoku of imperial revenue, of which four thousand
Dutch Candelabrum at Nikkō
were employed in the maintenance of the court, and the remainder in the support of the imperial guard, all of whom were nobles, many of them children of the concubines of the emperors and great princes, and excluded on that account from the prospect of succession[118]. Thus the total annual revenues of the great landed proprietors of Japan amounted to twenty-eight million three hundred and forty-five thousand koku of rice, equal to about ninety million cwt., or one hundred and thirty-three million five hundred thousand bushels; nor is it probable that in this respect there has been much change from that time to this[119]. Caron gives as the current value of the koku, or, as he calls it, cokien, ten guilders (or four dollars), which would make the mankoku equal to one hundred thousand florins (forty thousand dollars), or what the Dutch called a ton of gold. The prince of Satsuma, who was lord also of four other provinces, is put down in the above lists at sixty-four mankoku, the prince of Hizen at thirty-six, and the lord of Hirado at six[120].
These revenues arose in part from mines of gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, and lead, from timber, hemp, cotton, and silk, and from fisheries; but chiefly from the rice and other crops. There were no taxes or duties in Japan, except ground rents for lands and houses, payable in produce or money and in personal services. All these nobles had residences at Yedo, in the precinct of the imperial palace, in which their children resided as hostages for their fidelity. For each thousand koku of revenue these lords furnished on demand twenty foot-soldiers and two horsemen, and maintained them during the campaign, exclusive of the necessary servants and camp followers. The whole of their quotas, or of the feudal militia of Japan, thus amounted to three hundred and sixty-eight thousand foot and thirty-eight thousand eight hundred horse, in addition to a standing army of one hundred thousand foot and twenty thousand horse, maintained by the emperor from his own revenues, as garrisons and guards. The princes, however, prided themselves on keeping up many more troops than their regular quotas. To every five men there was an officer. Five of these sections composed a platoon, which had its commander. Two platoons made a company, which had its captain. Five of these companies, of fifty privates and thirteen officers, composed a battalion of two hundred and fifty rank and file, with its special officer; and ten battalions, a division of two thousand five hundred men. The civil division was much the same. Every five houses had an inspector, who kept a register of all births and deaths, and every street its magistrate and watch.
Though the revenues of the nobles were great, their expenses were still more so. They were obliged to pass six months at the imperial court; those of the northern and eastern provinces during one half the year, those of the southern and western provinces during the other half. They travelled in great state, some of them with not less than four or five thousand men in their suite, and, on their arrival and departure, gave great entertainments. The prince of Hirado, though one of the lesser class, was always attended in his journeys by at least three hundred men, and entertained in his two houses at Yedo more than a thousand persons. What with their households, the clothing of their followers, their women, of whom they entertained a great number, their children,—the prince of Mito, the emperor’s uncle, had fifty-four boys, and daughters still more numerous,—presents and festivals, their expenses generally exceeded their incomes; and, besides, they were often required to furnish workmen, at the demand of the emperor, for building new castles, temples, or anything he might undertake. The honor of a visit from the emperor was very highly esteemed. He seldom paid more than one to the same house. No expense was spared, and years were spent in preparations, which often ruined those who enjoyed this honor. The visit made by the emperor to the Dairi at Miyako, once in seven years, was a still more magnificent affair.
The emperor maintained on the estate of each noble a secretary, in fact a spy, sent nominally to assist and advise him in the management of his affairs. Those selected for this service were generally persons educated at court, and of known fidelity, who, before their departure, signed with their blood a promise to keep the emperor fully informed of the affairs and actions of the prince to whom they were sent.
The marriages of the nobles were arranged by the emperor. The wife thus given was entitled to great respect. Her sons alone succeeded to the lordship, which, in case she had none, was generally transferred to some other family. The children by the numerous concubines of the nobles had no share in the inheritance, and were often reduced to beggary. Besides concubines, free indulgence was allowed with the courtesans maintained by the lords of each district for public use. The lawful wives lived in splendid seclusion, attended by troops of female servants. Of women’s rights the Japanese nobles had no very high idea. Not only the strictest chastity was expected from them, but entire devotion to their husbands, and abstinence from any intermeddling with business or politics; the Japanese opinion being—in which Caron seems fully to coincide—that women are only made for the pleasure of the men and to bring up children. The children, though treated with great indulgence, were exceedingly respectful to their parents.
The emperor had in every city and village officers for the administration of justice; but every householder had the right to dispense punishments in his own family. Justice was very strict and severe, especially in cases of theft; and for crimes against the state the punishment extended to the whole family of the offender. The nobles and military, in case they were convicted of crimes, enjoyed the privilege of cutting themselves open. Merchants and mechanics were held in mean esteem,—the former as cheats and tricksters, the latter as public servants. The cultivators were little better than slaves.
The account which Caron gives of domestic manners corresponds sufficiently well with the more extended observations to be quoted hereafter from subsequent observers. He did not regard the Japanese as very devout. The persecution against the Catholics he describes as equal to anything in ecclesiastical history. He particularly admired the steadiness and constancy of many young children of ten or twelve years. All the inhabitants were required once a year to sign a declaration that they were good Japanese, and that the Catholic religion was false. The Catholics had amounted to four hundred thousand; and their number was still considerable[121].
The Dutch had all along stimulated the Japanese against the Portuguese. All missionaries bound for Japan, found on board of Portuguese and Spanish prizes taken in the neighboring seas, had been delivered into the hands of the Japanese authorities. The Dutch had even assisted at the siege of Shimabara, for which they had furnished a train of artillery, conducted thither by Kockebecker, the head, at that time, of the Dutch factory. But they were far from realizing all the advantages which they had expected from the expulsion of their rivals. They, too, had excited suspicions by replacing their dilapidated wooden factory at Hirado by a strong stone warehouse, which had something of the aspect of a fortress. In spite of their submissiveness in pulling down[122] this erection, their establishment at that place was suddenly closed, and in 1641 the Dutch factors were transferred to Nagasaki, where they were shut up in the same little artificial island of Deshima, which had been constructed to be the prison-house of the Portuguese. And to this narrow island they have ever since been confined, with the exception of some occasional visits to Nagasaki and its environs, and an annual journey, by the chief officers of the factory, to pay their homage to the emperor at Yedo,—a ceremony which seems to have been coeval with the first arrival of the Dutch. Hitherto the Portuguese and the Dutch also had freely intermarried with the Japanese; but this intimacy now came wholly to an end, and even the Dutch were thenceforth regarded rather as prisoners than as friends.
What contributed to increase this jealousy of the Dutch was the peace between Holland and the Portuguese, which followed the assumption of the crown of Portugal by the house of Braganza, and the separation of Portugal from Spain, in the year 1640.
Evidence of this very soon appeared. In the year 1643 the Dutch sent two ships from Batavia, the “Castricoom” and the “Breskens,” to explore the yet little-known northern coast of Japan, the island of Yezo, and the adjacent continent, and especially to search out certain fabled islands of gold and silver, whence the Japanese were said to derive large supplies of those metals. These vessels, when off Yedo, were separated in a storm, and the “Breskens,” in need of supplies, touched at a fishing village in about forty degrees of north latitude. The lord of the village, and a principal person of the neighboring district, visited the ship with great show of friendship, and having enticed the captain, Shaëp, and his chief officers on shore, made them prisoners, bound them, and sent them off to Nambu, near by. They were permitted to communicate with the ship, and to obtain their baggage, but at first were treated with much rigor on suspicion of being Spaniards or Portuguese. It being found, however, that they paid no respect to the sign of the cross or to pictures of the Virgin, it was concluded that they were Hollanders, and they were treated with less severity. At Nambu they were splendidly entertained, and in their twenty days’ journey thence to Yedo, in which they passed through a hundred well-built villages, they had nothing to complain of except the inconvenience of the crowds that flocked to see them. In every village they saw rewards posted up for the discovery of Christians. Not being willing to reveal the true object of their voyage, they stated themselves to have been driven to the north in an attempt to reach Nagasaki. It was plain, however, that their story about having come from Batavia, and being in the service of the East India Company, was not believed. It was suspected that they had come from Macao or Manila for the purpose of landing missionaries, and they were subjected in consequence to numerous fatiguing cross-examinations, in which a bonze assisted, who spoke Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Flemish, and whom they conjectured to be some apostate European. What increased the suspicions of Japanese was, that five Jesuits from Manila had recently, in an attempt to reach Japan, been arrested at the Lew Chew Islands, and sent thence to Yedo. The Dutchmen were confronted with these Jesuits, to their great alarm. They also feared, if the true object of the voyage came out, being exposed to punishment not only for undertaking unauthorized explorations, but for falsehood in concealing and misrepresenting their object; but when the Japanese had learned from Nagasaki that two Dutch ships had been sent on a voyage for the exploration of Tartary, of which the factors represented theirs as probably one, they excused their silence on that subject on the ground of not having been properly understood and interpreted. The factors at Nagasaki had been not less careful than themselves to say nothing about the search for mines.
New interpreters were brought from Nagasaki, among them another apostate, whom there are grounds for supposing was the ex-provincial Ferreyra, between whom and the Jesuit prisoners they witnessed a bitter scene of mutual reproaches. A great many rigorous cross-examinations followed. The Dutchmen were required to sign a paper by which all the Company’s property was pledged for their reappearance before the imperial tribunals at any time that it might be discovered that they had landed missionaries. Their having discharged some pieces of artillery from the ship was insisted upon as a crime; also their ship having sailed off without waiting for them. The recent peace between Holland and Portugal was pointedly alluded to, and even the search for mines seems to have been suspected. The appearance of a ship on the east coast of Japan, which proved to be the “Castricoom,” some of whose people who landed were seized and sent to Yedo, gave rise to many new interrogations. Elserak, the director, at length arrived, and, after a separate examination, was confronted with them and signed the paper above described, when the Dutch were finally released, after an imprisonment of upwards of four months[123].
The “Castricoom,” more successful, discovered the Kurile Islands, Yetorofu and Uruppu, to which were given the names of State’s Islands and Company’s Islands, and made some explorations of the east coast of Yezo, and of Sakhalin, taken to be a part of it. The information thus obtained, together with the two relations of Father de Angelis, written in 1616 and 1621, was all that was known of these regions till the explorations of Broughton and La Perouse, towards the close of the last century. Golownin’s adventures and experience there, as related in a subsequent chapter, bear a very remarkable and curious resemblance to those of Captain Schaëp and his companions. Their release was acknowledged in a solemn embassy from the Company,—that of Frisius. About the same time, in 1647, a Portuguese embassy arrived in Japan, in hopes, since the separation from Spain, of reviving the ancient commercial intercourse; but, though the ambassador was treated with respect, his request was peremptorily declined.
A new emperor, a minor, having succeeded in 1651, the Dutch Company sent Waganaar to congratulate him. Among other presents he brought a Casuar, a strange bird of the ostrich kind, from Banda, but the officers at Nagasaki would not suffer it to be forwarded. During this visit there happened a terrible fire at Yedo, by which two-thirds of that city were laid in ruins. Some violent disputes having arisen, and the Japanese having gone so far as to take away the rudders of the Dutch ships, Waganaar went on a second embassy to Yedo, in 1659[124].
The establishment of the French East India Company by Colbert led to some projects for a French trade with Japan, especially as Caron in some disgust had quitted the Dutch service, and enlisted into that of France. A letter from Louis XIV to the emperor of Japan, dated in 1666, was prepared, and instructions for Caron, who was to be the bearer of it; but the project does not appear to have been prosecuted[125]. [See Appendix, Note 1.]
In 1673, the English East India Company made an attempt at the renewal of the trade with Japan, by despatching a ship thither. The Japanese, through the medium of the Dutch, kept themselves informed, as they still do, of the affairs of Europe; and the first question put to the new-comers was, how long since the English king (Charles II) had married a daughter of the king of Portugal. Though otherwise courteously enough received and entertained, the vessel was not allowed to sell her cargo. This refusal of intercourse the English ascribed to Dutch jealousy; but it probably was a step, as will be seen in the next chapter, to which the Japanese did not need any urging.[126]
Though the Catholics of Japan were effectually cut off from all intercourse with Europe, the Catholic faith still lingered for a good while in those parts of Shimo in which it had taken the deepest root. So late as 1690, there were, according to Kämpfer, fifty persons, men, women, and children (of whom three had been arrested in 1683), imprisoned at Nagasaki for life, or until they should renounce the Catholic faith and conform to the religious usages of the country. These were peasants who knew little more of the faith which they professed except the name of the Saviour and the Virgin Mary, which, indeed, according to the Dutch accounts, was all that the greater part of the Japanese converts had ever known.
To land in Japan, to strengthen and comfort the faithful there, or at least to secure the crown of martyrdom in the attempt, long continued an attractive enterprise to the more romantic spirits among the religious orders of the Catholic church. Most of those who undertook this adventure were known to have been seized and executed soon after landing. The last effort of this sort appears to have been made in 1707. From that time, and notwithstanding the great revival, within fifty or sixty years past, of the missionary spirit, Japan has remained even less attempted by missionary than by mercantile enterprise.