Portugal · Japan · 1543–1650
A trilingual reference work on the Nanban century: every event, person, and turning point of the Portuguese-Japanese encounter, 1543–1650.
Background: Kanō Naizen, Nanban byōbu (detail), c. 1600 — Kobe City Museum
The Spine
The Archive
From the accidental landing on Tanegashima to the final expulsion after Shimabara, a comprehensive chronology of the key events, treaties, and turning points that defined a century of contact between two civilizations at opposite ends of the known world.
When Portuguese merchants introduced the matchlock arquebus in 1543, they unknowingly handed the warring daimyō a tool that would reshape Japanese warfare. Within decades, Japan possessed more firearms than any European nation.
In 1613, a one-eyed northern warlord sent his retainer across three oceans to negotiate with Philip III of Spain and Pope Paul V. The mission spanned seven years, three continents, and ended in failure, martyrdom, and a galleon sold off as a Spanish warship.
A 16th-century Portuguese fish-pickling technique, four centuries of dormancy, a postwar restaurant kitchen running out of ideas for leftover chicken breast, and a tartar sauce argument that split a city in two. This is how Japan got its favorite fried chicken.
Research
Guided Reading
Latest
The 'second sakoku decree' of 1634 was several documents rather than one: a recopied maritime code for new Nagasaki magistrates, a three-article warning posted in Japanese and in Chinese, and an order to build the island that became Dejima. Folding the three into one decree produces a single law that no surviving document contains.
Baptized at Kagoshima and sent west by Francis Xavier to see Christian Europe and report back, Bernardo reached Lisbon, Rome and Coimbra. He died at Coimbra in 1557 without seeing Japan again, and the testimony Xavier had wanted for the mission was never given.
In the spring of 1633 Tokugawa Iemitsu's senior councilors handed Nagasaki's two new magistrates a code of instructions that still let licensed Japanese ships sail and allowed some emigrants to return under conditions. The harsher text often quoted under that year turns out to belong to 1635.
What this project is, how it treats its sources, and why it exists in English, Portuguese, and Japanese.
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