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
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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.
Arriving in Kagoshima in 1549, the Navarrese co-founder of the Society of Jesus launched one of the most ambitious evangelization campaigns in history. His two years in Japan set the course for decades of religious and cultural transformation.
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.
The annual carrack from Macau to Nagasaki was the lifeline of Nanban commerce. Carrying Chinese silk, European curiosities, and Jesuit missionaries, these vessels, among the largest afloat, shaped the economic and cultural fabric of the exchange.
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A Spanish galleon broke apart on a sandbank in Tosa in October 1596, and four months later twenty-six men and boys stood in a line of crosses on a hill above Nagasaki harbor. Between those two facts lie an empty treasury, a careless remark about missionaries and armies, and a police commissioner who quietly cut a death list of one hundred and seventy names down to fifteen.
A drug shop in Sakai, a printing press hidden in the Amakusa islands, and a forged letter of surrender that fooled the Ming court for three years. Konishi Yukinaga rose from merchant's son to Toyotomi commander, and died in 1600 refusing the one death his class expected of him.
Four Japanese teenagers went to Rome to be shown to the Pope and came home with a printing press, which spent the next twenty-four years printing a language its European designers could not read, in an alphabet that did not fit it. Roughly a hundred books were made and about thirty survive, and inside them is the only recording anyone has of how Japanese was actually spoken in the 1590s.
Cosme de Torres left Yokoseura burning behind him, in a small boat, at night, and came ashore at a fishing village under a volcano. For a quarter of a century the mud basin at Kuchinotsu was where Europe landed in Japan, until Nagasaki took the ships and the law settled the argument.
What this project is, how it treats its sources, and why it exists in English, Portuguese, and Japanese.
About the project →The books behind the articles — an annotated reading list of the essential scholarship on the Nanban century.
Browse the bibliography →Occasional updates on new articles and research findings. No spam.