The Alvares Report: Europe’s First Portrait of Japan

Chapter One

Twelve Pages

Everything the West knew about Japan in December 1547 could fit on a Portuguese sea captain’s desk.

Jorge Alvares, not the earlier, more famous explorer who had reached China in 1521, but a different man of the same name, a shipmaster and merchant operating out of Malacca, had recently returned from a trading voyage to the southern tip of Kyushu. He had anchored his vessel in the port of Yamagawa, at the entrance to the bay of Kagoshima, in the domain of the Shimazu clan, and he had stayed long enough to observe, to ask questions, and to form opinions. He had also, during his stay, given refuge to a Japanese samurai named Anjiro who was fleeing a murder charge, a detail that would prove rather more consequential than the twelve pages of observations he was about to write down.

His friend Francis Xavier had asked him to produce the report. Xavier, co-founder of the Society of Jesus, tireless missionary, a man who had evangelised his way across India and Southeast Asia, wanted to know what Japan was like. Alvares, who had actually been there, was the best available source. Xavier was about to leave Malacca for India and needed the information before he sailed.

Alvares sat down and wrote. The result, completed in December 1547, roughly twenty entries organised across twelve handwritten pages, became the first detailed, firsthand European account of Japan. Xavier was so impressed that he sent copies to Ignatius of Loyola in Rome and to Garcia de Sá, the Portuguese Governor of India. The report circulated through the Jesuit network and the colonial administration simultaneously, shaping the expectations of missionaries and merchants alike. Within two years, Xavier would be in Kagoshima, launching the mission that the Alvares report had helped inspire.

The document survives in ten manuscript copies scattered across archives in Portugal, Rome, Spain, and the Vatican. It is twelve pages long. It changed the course of two civilisations.

Chapter Two

The Man and His Limits

Alvares was not a scholar. He was not a diplomat. He was a merchant sea captain, a man whose business was the movement of goods across the dangerous waters between Malacca, China, and the newly discovered islands to the northeast. He understood trade, navigation, weather, and the practical realities of operating in ports where you did not speak the language and could not be certain of your safety.

He was also, to his credit, honest about what he did not know. He admitted frankly in the report that he had never ventured more than three leagues, roughly nine miles, inland from his anchorage at Yamagawa. Everything he knew about Japan beyond that coastal strip he knew from conversations with local Japanese, mediated through whatever combination of gestures, pidgin, and the occasional literate intermediary was available to a Portuguese trader in 1546. His picture of the country was drawn from a porthole: vivid, immediate, and confined to the view from the harbour.

This limitation is also the report’s strength. Alvares did not try to construct a grand theory of Japanese civilisation. He described what he saw: the landscape, the agriculture, the houses, the clothing, the food, the weapons, the religion, the laws, and the people, with the observant, pragmatic eye of a man who needed to understand his environment well enough to survive in it and turn a profit. The result is not a philosophical treatise. It is a field report, and it is remarkably accurate.

Chapter Three

The Land Itself

Alvares began with geography, as a seaman would. He enumerated fourteen Japanese ports — Hakata, Akune, Kyōdomari, Akime, Bōnotsu, Yamagawa, Kagoshima, Neshime, Minato, Tonoura, and others — providing Europe with its first practical navigational index to the Japanese coastline. He noted that the country was high and hilly, cultivated along the coast but mountainous inland, with fine stands of pine, cedar, oak, chestnut, walnut, and laurel. The flowers were sweet-smelling. The pears were good. There were no lemons.

His agricultural observations were detailed and seasonal: in November, the Japanese planted wheat, barley, turnips, and greens. In March, millet, beans, cucumbers, and melons. In July, rice, yams, onions, and garlic. Everything was fertilised with horse manure, and the land was given a year’s rest after each cycle. The horses were small but strong. Cattle were few. Chickens were scarce and, he noted with the mournful precision of a man who had eaten them, tough.

He recorded a devastating typhoon that had struck during his stay, sinking seventy-two Chinese junks and one Portuguese vessel, a detail that reveals, almost in passing, the scale of Chinese maritime trade activity in the waters around Kyushu at the time, and the volatile environment in which all of it operated.

The houses were low, built of wood, roofed with tiles weighted with stones against the wind. They were not nailed, a construction technique that baffled a European accustomed to timber-frame carpentry, but rather fitted and jointed. The floors were covered with clean straw mats (tatami, though Alvares did not know the word). Each house had its own well. Each house had a rooster and a hen, and it was not customary to keep more. Each house had a loom and a stone mill for grinding wheat. The gardens were enclosed with stone walls, planted with fruit trees and vegetables, and fenced with bamboo. The interiors had no locks or bolts, a detail that astonished Alvares and that he attributed to the extreme severity with which theft was punished.

Chapter Four

A Proud and Curious People

Alvares’s portrait of the Japanese themselves is the most vivid section of the report, and the one that mattered most to Xavier.

The people were, he wrote, of medium build, strong, hardworking, and fair-skinned. The men of rank wore their hair long, tied up, and shaved across the crown, the sakayaki tonsure that Alvares described without knowing its name. Their clothing was short robes with wide sleeves, worn over a linen undergarment that was white, black, brown, or blue, with painted designs on the shoulders. Their trousers were wide and long, open at the sides, tied with cords. They wore straw sandals that left the toes exposed.

They were, Alvares observed, very proud and very warlike. Every male carried a sword from the age of eight. They possessed lances, halberds, and large bows, which Alvares compared to English longbows, as well as body armour of mail and iron plate, finely made and painted. They were excellent horsemen, though their horses were small and their saddles resembled Portuguese ones. The lords bred good horses and fought from horseback.

But the quality that Alvares emphasised above all others, the quality that would set Xavier’s pulse racing when he read the report, was curiosity. The Japanese were, Alvares wrote, intensely eager to learn about foreign lands and foreign customs. They would invite you into their homes to eat and sleep. They would question you about everything. They were not jealous people. They sat at home cross-legged. When they visited Portuguese ships, they wanted to be given food and drink and shown everything aboard.

They despised theft. A thief, if discovered, could be killed by anyone, and killing a thief was considered a point of honour. If news spread that a thief was hiding in the countryside, the local men would organise hunting parties, tracking the criminal through fields and brush and killing him as they would a wild animal. The punishment for a wife’s adultery was death, and a husband could carry out the sentence personally.

There were no public prisons. Justice was administered within the household. The head of a family held absolute power of life and death over his dependents, his wife, his children, his servants. He could execute them, justly or otherwise, without answering to anyone. Even his overlord had no jurisdiction over what happened inside his house. This was, Alvares wrote, “the most peculiar form of government in the world.”

Chapter Five

The Gods and the Bonzes

For Xavier, the most consequential section of the report was the account of Japanese religion, the first time a European had attempted to describe what the Japanese actually believed.

Alvares identified two kinds of religious establishment. The first, which he recognised as an imported faith, though he did not name it as Buddhism, featured large temples with gilded idols, resident priests he called “bonzes” who read from Chinese scripture, observed canonical hours, practised celibacy (he noted the exception of same-sex relations among the monks and their acolytes, recording the fact without visible shock), and lived in communities that he compared to European religious orders. Their temples had great enclosures with cedars and rose gardens, everything orderly and clean. The bonzes were highly respected by everyone, from the lowest peasant to the lords themselves.

The second faith, Shinto, though Alvares did not have a name for it either, featured small rural tabernacles housing idols that were kept closed and revealed only at festivals. The practitioners were wandering ascetics who carried weapons, wore distinctive square caps, and blew conch-shell trumpets. They had wives. They did not read Chinese. They practised what Alvares interpreted as magic.

He then described something that no European had ever witnessed: a Shinto sacrificial ceremony, complete with a kagura dance performed by an old woman in a red headdress who shook rattles and sang while the other participants played drums and bells. It is the earliest Western description of kagura in the historical record, a twelve-page merchant’s report capturing, almost by accident, a ritual tradition that predated the Portuguese arrival by a thousand years.

Most intriguingly for Xavier, Alvares noted that the Japanese used prayer beads, comtas, he called them, rosaries, in their daily devotions, rising each morning to pray before their household idols. The parallel to Catholic practice was unmistakable, and for a Jesuit audience it suggested a people whose existing devotional habits might be redirected toward the true faith with relative ease.

Chapter Six

What Alvares Missed

The report’s omissions are as revealing as its observations.

Alvares did not distinguish between the Emperor, the Shogun, and the regional daimyō. He described the political structure of Japan as a hierarchy of “kings”, a primary king with fourteen major lords under him, whom he compared to European dukes, each ruling absolutely within his domain. This was a reasonable simplification for a man who had spent a few months in a single port on the southern coast, but it flattened the extraordinary complexity of Sengoku-era politics — the powerless Emperor in Kyoto, the defunct Ashikaga shogunate, the dozens of warring daimyō who answered to no central authority — into a model that a Portuguese reader could understand by analogy with European feudalism.

He did not mention the civil war. This is perhaps the most striking absence in the report: Japan in 1546 was in the late, savage stages of the Sengoku period, a century of continuous military conflict that had shattered the archipelago into competing domains. Alvares, anchored in a harbour on the Shimazu clan’s territory, may have experienced a local peace that concealed the broader chaos. Or he may have understood the situation imperfectly, seeing the armed men and the martial culture without grasping the scale of the fragmentation.

But these are the absences of a man reporting what he could see from the deck of a ship. What he could see, he described with a fidelity that modern historians have repeatedly confirmed. The crops, the seasonal planting calendar, the construction of houses, the clothing, the weapons, the social hierarchy, the justice system, the religious practices — these are details that align with what we know from Japanese sources of the same period. Alvares was looking at a narrow slice of a vast country, and he rendered that slice with the precision of a man who needed to get it right because his life and his livelihood depended on understanding where he was.

Chapter Seven

The Fugitive in the Hold

The report’s most consequential detail is almost an aside. During his stay in Kagoshima, Alvares gave refuge to a Japanese samurai named Anjiro, a man who had killed someone (the circumstances are unclear, which usually means they were unsavoury) and needed to leave the country before the consequences arrived. Alvares took Anjiro and his servants aboard and sailed them out of Japan in January 1547.

When the ship eventually reached Malacca in December 1547, Alvares introduced Anjiro to Francis Xavier. The meeting was the hinge on which the next century of Japanese history would turn. Anjiro described his homeland in terms that inflamed Xavier’s ambitions: a rational people, hungry for knowledge, governed by honour, receptive to argument. Xavier cross-referenced Anjiro’s testimony with the written report he had commissioned from Alvares and arrived at the conclusion that would reshape both civilisations: Japan was the most promising mission field in Asia.

What would come next is covered in the article on “Francis Xavier and the Jesuit Mission in Japan”.