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NANBAN
南蛮
“southern barbarian”
Europeans started arriving on Japanese shores in large numbers during the 1500s. They were dubbed nanban, or “southern barbarians” because their ships arrived from the south and made landfall on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. The Portuguese were the first to arrive. They were followed by the Dutch, Spanish, and other Europeans.
From the start, the Japanese felt a mixture of admiration and disdain for these foreign visitors. Japanese nanban art of the period depicts hirsute, outlandishly dressed ogres with large noses. The Europeans had body hair, wore beards, and bathed infrequently. To Japanese eyes, sixteenth century Europeans must have seemed like barbarians indeed.
At the same time, there was an immediate respect for European technology, especially their advanced weapons. The first recorded European visitors to the islands were a small group of Portuguese who were riding on a Chinese junk that ran aground on the island of Tanegashima. While the Chinese crew repaired the ship, the Portuguese passengers went ashore and began shooting ducks. Within a year of this incident, the Japanese were manufacturing crude firearms themselves.
The Nanban and Christianity
Most of the Europeans who came to Japan were merchants or priests. The Jesuits were arguably the single most influential group, and they were the only missionaries in Japan for the better part of a century. The Jesuits became the first Westerners to seriously study Japan and its culture. They produced a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary; and Father João’s Arte da Lingua de Ipan was the first book on Japanese grammar written in a European language.
At first, the Jesuits were welcomed. They were associated with beneficial European trade in guns and other Western items. (Although some gun manufacturing took place in Japan, the Japanese remained dependent on superior European firearms.) Moreover, some Japanese warlords saw them as a counterbalance to militant Buddhist sects, who perennially incited rebellions.
Oda Nobunaga was the most prominent warlord to embrace the Jesuits. Because of his patronage, the port city of Nagasaki became a center of Jesuit activity. The Jesuits converted around 150,000 Japanese in the Kyushu area, including many samurai.
Japan’s Warlords Turn Against the Foreign Missionaries
The next dominant warlord, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was less enthusiastic about the Jesuits. He feared that the Jesuits might start intervening in politics. He was troubled by a worst-case scenario in which a group of Christian warlords might summon European troops to fight in Japan. Hideyoshi knew that there would be no way to resist such a force, and he began to actively limit Christian influence.
In 1587 Hideyoshi issued a decree which forbid any of his vassals from converting to Christianity without his permission. He also declared that all European missionaries should leave Japan. The latter declaration was not enforced. The number of Christian missionaries actually increased for a time, because the Vatican decided to send the Franciscans to join the Jesuits in Japan. This further rankled Hideyoshi.
In 1597, Hideyoshi escalated his campaign against the Christians. He ordered twenty-six Christian to be crucified. To add humiliation to their pain, they were hung upside down like common criminals. This initial Christian martyrdom on Japanese soil was a precursor of worse times to come.
In the early 1600s, Tokugawa Ieyasu secured his grip on Japan as the shogun of Japan. The Tokugawa shoguns would rule Japan for more than 250 years. Under Tokugawa rule, Japan became a closed country. Foreigners were expelled from the Japanese islands, and Christianity was banned outright. To enforce the ban on Christianity, all Japanese were ordered to register at Buddhist temples. Existing Christians were ordered to renounce their faith or face execution.
Tokugawa authorities devised a number of bizarre rituals to verify the renunciations of Japanese Christians. One of these was known as fumi-e / 踏み絵). Literally, fumi-e means “stepping on pictures.” The authorities forced ex-Christians to walk on images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in order to prove that they had really parted ways with the Christian religion.
The Grassroots Backlash Against the Church
Although the ban on Christianity was handed down from the shogun, there was some grassroots support for the prohibition. While the Jesuits had won many converts, they had also angered much of the population. The Japanese view on religion was inclusive. Centuries earlier, they had imported Buddhism from China and Korea, and this mainland Asian faith created no conflict with the native Japanese religion, Shinto. However, monotheistic Christianity was exclusionary, and the Jesuits disdained Buddhism as pagan idolatry.
In Europe at the time, lending money for profit was forbidden as usury. (In most of Europe, only Jews were allowed to be moneylenders.) The Jesuits tried to extend the ban to Japan, but only succeeded in angering local merchants. Jesuit attempts to outlaw homosexuality, concubinage, and prostitution met with opposition as well.
Finally, the Vatican’s decision to send the Franciscans to the Jesuits’ domain proved a disastrous mistake. The two orders were competing factions within the Church, and there was nationalistic distrust between the Portuguese Jesuits and the Spanish Franciscans. The result was competition between the orders rather than cooperation. The subsequent turmoil and intrigues exasperated Japan’s Christian converts and rulers alike.
Widespread Christian Martyrdom in Japan
Japanese Christians were to bear the brunt of the backlash against their religion. In 1622, fifty-one Christians were martyred at Nagasaki. The following year, the newly inaugurated shogun Iemitsu burned another fifty to commemorate the start of his reign. And these incidents were only the beginning. The Roman Catholic Church estimates that more than 3,100 Japanese converts were systematically crucified or burned alive during the crackdown years from 1597 to 1660.
The worst singular tragedy occurred in 1637, when thousands of mostly Christian peasants rebelled against Tokugawa rule in the Shimabara area of Kyushu. The rebels took refuge in an abandoned castle, where they reportedly sang hymns and hung banners bearing the crucifix from the castle’s ramparts. The Dutch, not wanting to incur the growing anger of the Tokugawa authorities, intervened on the side of the shogun. They lent the authorities a ship, which the shogun’s troops used to bombard the castle. The castle eventually fell, and every last one of the inhabitants—men, women, and children—were slaughtered.
The Closing of Japan
As mentioned above, the Tokugawa campaign against Christianity was part of a wider effort to insulate Japan from foreign influence. In 1635, the shogun forbid Japanese to sail abroad, and later outlawed the construction of ships that were capable of navigating on the open ocean. Japanese who were already living abroad were forbidden to return. The children of mixed marriages were banished.
But the nanban still had their uses. To preserve the benefits of European trade without the nuisance of Europeans, the shogun set aside a small island—Dejima—in Nagasaki harbor. A small contingent of European traders was allowed to remain here. (This was acceptable because the island was technically not Japanese soil.)