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.