The Price of a Person: The Portuguese Trade in Japanese Slaves

In 1596, a priest in Córdoba, Argentina, a city eight thousand miles from Japan, on the opposite side of the planet, at the foot of the Andes, purchased a man named Francisco Xapón. The price was eight hundred silver pesos: a small fortune, roughly equivalent to the annual income of a skilled artisan. The transaction was notarised. The paperwork was filed. And Francisco, whose Japanese name no surviving document records, became one more line-item in the vast ledger of the Portuguese slave trade.

How did he get there? How did a Japanese man end up being sold as property to a Catholic clergyman in a landlocked South American city connected by mule track to the silver mines of Potosí? The answer involves a slave route that stretched from the civil wars of Kyūshū to the harbour of Nagasaki, through the Portuguese entrepôt of Macau, across the South China Sea to Manila, over the Pacific on a Spanish galleon, down the coast of Mexico to Acapulco, then south through Lima and into the interior of the continent. It is one of the longest forced journeys in the history of human bondage.

Bondage Before the Barbarians

The Portuguese did not invent slavery in Japan. They arrived in a country that had been buying and selling human beings for centuries, and they exploited what they found with the efficiency of men who had been doing the same thing across three continents.

Medieval Japan operated a system of unfree labour that was both deeply entrenched and remarkably diverse. People fell into bondage through half a dozen routes: birth, debt, criminal conviction, wartime capture, famine, or the desperation of families who sold their own children to avoid starvation. The legal classifications were layered and arcane. The oldest category, nuhi, derived from seventh-century Chinese-style legal codes and had largely become a historical curiosity by the time the Portuguese arrived. The most common term in active use was genin, literally “lower person”, a classification that covered hereditary servants bound to a single master, lacking the right of free movement, subject to sale or bequest, forbidden to seek justice in the courts, and killable at their owner’s discretion. They could, in a legal nicety that must have offered limited comfort, own personal property.

By the late sixteenth century, a newer and somewhat less absolute form of servitude had gained ground. Nenki hōkō, time-limited bondage or indentured servitude, allowed individuals or their families to contract a fixed period of service, typically ranging from a few years to several decades, in exchange for an upfront payment or to settle debts. It was, in theory, a temporary arrangement. In practice, the distinction between a ten-year indenture and perpetual slavery could be purely academic, particularly when the indentured person was a child and the master had a ship.

The Portuguese, when they arrived, looked at this system and saw opportunity. What the Japanese treated as a domestic institution with its own internal logic and cultural constraints, the Portuguese treated as a supply chain.

First Contact, First Sales

The trade began almost immediately. Within a few years of the first Portuguese merchants reaching Japan in 1543, they were buying people. The Sengoku period, Japan’s century of civil war, had created exactly the conditions that slave traders thrive on: endemic military conflict producing a steady supply of war captives, economic dislocation producing desperate families willing to sell their children, and a fragmented political landscape in which no central authority existed to stop them.

In 1547, the Portuguese merchant Jorge Álvares wrote one of the earliest European accounts of Japan, and he noted, with the clinical eye of a man assessing a market, that the Japanese already possessed slaves, war captives and debt pawns, and that these people were available for purchase. It was an observation, not a moral judgement. The Portuguese had been buying and selling enslaved Africans since the 1440s; the idea that an entire category of human beings existed primarily as commodities was not, for them, a novelty requiring comment.

The earliest complaints about the trade surfaced not in Japan but in Portugal itself. In 1555, the Catholic Church protested that Portuguese merchants were acquiring Japanese slave girls, transporting them back to Lisbon, and, here was the sin that actually bothered the Church, living with them outside of marriage. The sexual exploitation was the afterthought; the cohabitation without being married was the outrage. That Japanese women were being kidnapped and shipped halfway around the world to serve as concubines warranted less ecclesiastical attention than the fact that their owners had neglected to formalise the arrangement with a wedding.

By 1560, the trade had become systematic enough to attract the attention of thieves. Captain Manuel de Mendonça, transporting a group of young Japanese men and women to the port of Yokoseura for sale, was robbed on the road. The bandits took his cargo, which is to say, they took the people, and vanished. Whether the captives gained their freedom through this intervention or simply changed owners is not recorded. The incident is revealing not for what it tells us about the bandits but for what it tells us about the trade: it had become so routine, so established as a feature of overland commerce in Kyūshū, that robbing a slave convoy was a viable criminal enterprise.

The Jesuit Paradox

The role of the Society of Jesus in the Japanese slave trade is one of those historical episodes that resists easy characterisation. The Jesuits were, at various points and sometimes simultaneously, the trade’s facilitators, its legal architects, its theological apologists, its most anguished critics, and its most effective opponents. They managed to be both the problem and the solution, often within the same generation of missionaries, occasionally within the same individual.

Initially the Jesuits had argued that the rampant human trafficking conducted by Portuguese merchants was causing significant scandal and acting as a major impediment to the conversion of the Japanese people to Christianity. In response, King Sebastian of Portugal enacted a charter outlawing the enslavement of Japanese people on September 20, 1570, and updated on March 12, 1571. The revised 1571 decree arrived in Goa in September and but failed to end the slave trade. The text contained a crucial legal loophole, stating that the enslavement of Japanese people was forbidden because there were no “justified causes” for such captivity.

This loophole gave the Jesuits in Japan full control over the process. Drawing on the Japanese custom of nenki hōkō, the Jesuits devised a system of “limited-time ballots”, essentially permits authorising the purchase of Japanese individuals under the legal fiction of temporary, time-limited service. Cosme de Torres, the Superior of the Jesuit mission from 1551 to 1570, was the first to authorise these permits, which gave Portuguese merchants a document that looked, on paper, like a contract for indentured labour rather than a bill of sale for a human being.

The theological justification was the “lesser of two evils” doctrine. The Jesuits argued, and one can almost hear the casuistic gears grinding, that since they could not prevent the Portuguese from buying slaves, it was better to impose a temporal limit on the bondage than to allow the victims to be condemned to perpetual slavery. If a merchant was going to buy a Japanese woman regardless, was it not more merciful to ensure that her servitude had an expiration date?

The problem, of course, was that no one enforced the expiration dates. Once a time-limited Japanese servant was loaded onto a ship and transported to Macau, or Goa, or Malacca, or Lisbon, the ballot was a piece of paper in a world that ran on violence. Portuguese merchants routinely tore up the contracts, ignored the expiry date, and treated their supposedly temporary servants as permanent property. The Jesuits had created a laundering mechanism: a way to transform what even sixteenth-century Portuguese law recognised as legally dubious enslavement into something that looked like a voluntary labour arrangement. That the arrangement dissolved the moment the ship cleared Nagasaki harbour was a detail the system was designed not to notice.

Some Jesuits went further than bureaucratic complicity. Father Gregorio de Céspedes was caught helping a Portuguese merchant smuggle a kidnapped Japanese girl onto a ship. The girl had been hidden inside a locked crate. The scandal had to be quietly suppressed by the Jesuit hierarchy, which tells us two things: that individual missionaries were willing to participate directly in human trafficking, and that the institutional Church understood this to be a scandal.

The theological rationalisation grew more elaborate as the moral discomfort deepened. When the Jesuits in Japan wrote to Spain asking how they should handle the murky legality of enslaving people captured in civil wars whose justice they could not evaluate, the Spanish theologian Gabriel Vázquez advised them to rely on the concept of bona fides, good faith. As long as the Japanese followed their own customs.

The Geography of Suffering

The primary artery of the slave route ran from Nagasaki, which had become the nexus of the trade after the first Portuguese ship from Macau visited in 1571 and, critically, after the local lord Ōmura Sumitada ceded jurisdiction of the port to the Jesuits in 1580. Nagasaki attracted slave hunters known as hitokadoi from across Kyūshū. The city that other articles in this series describe as the centre of Nanban commerce was simultaneously the centre of Nanban human trafficking. The silk, the silver, the firearms, and the people all moved through the same harbour, loaded onto the same ships, managed by the same merchants.

From Nagasaki, the route ran to Macau, the Portuguese entrepôt on the South China coast that served as the hub for the entire Asian slave network. From Macau, enslaved Japanese were distributed across the Portuguese maritime empire: through the Strait of Malacca to Goa and Kochi on India’s western coast. Goa, the capital of the Estado da Índia, operated a bustling slave market on the Rua Direita, the main commercial thoroughfare, where enslaved Japanese were sold alongside Africans, Malays, Chinese, and Indians. Japanese slaves were prized in Goa. The men were valued as personal guards and mercenaries, their martial training in a country that had been at war with itself for a hundred years made them formidable. The women were valued as domestic workers. Some were forced into prostitution.

Then there was the Atlantic route. Japanese slaves appeared in Portugal itself, the 1573 marriage of Jacinta de Sá and Guilherme Brandão in Lisbon, both former Japanese slaves, confirms their presence in Europe.

And then there was the longest route of all: the Pacific crossing.

Across the Pacific: The Chino Trade

Enslaved Japanese entered the Americas through the Manila Galleon, the annual Spanish trading vessel that connected Manila to Acapulco. After being purchased in the slave markets of the Philippines, captives endured a transpacific voyage that could last six months, crammed into ships that were overcrowded by design and plagued by disease, starvation, and mortality rates remarkable even by the catastrophic standards of the Atlantic slave trade.

Upon arrival at Acapulco, the survivors were marched overland along the route known as the “China Road”, named for the people who travelled it, to Mexico City, Puebla, and points south. Once in the Americas, a vast flattening occurred. Spanish colonial administrators, confronted with people whose origins they could not distinguish and whose languages they could not understand, collapsed the entire diversity of Asia into a single bureaucratic category: chino. Whether a person had been born in Kyūshū, Bengal, Siam, or the Visayas, they were classified as chino and processed accordingly. The word, which technically means “Chinese”, became a catch-all.

The numbers are contested, one estimate places 3,360 Asian slaves arriving at Acapulco between 1565 and 1673. Another suggests up to 10,000 over the entire history of the Manila Galleon. A census conducted in Lima in 1613 by the notary Miguel de Contreras recorded 114 “Indians from the East”, a category that specifically included twenty people identified as being from Japan. Twenty Japanese, documented by name in Lima in 1613, confirm a pattern even if it is not enough to confirm its full scope.

Unlike enslaved Africans, who were predominantly directed toward plantation agriculture, chino slaves in the Americas were absorbed into the urban economy. Spanish masters favoured them for domestic service, skilled artisanal work, and labour in the obrajes, the colonial textile mills, essentially urban prisons where workers were locked in.

The Ruler’s Rage

Toyotomi Hideyoshi first confronted the slave trade directly in 1587, during his campaign to bring Kyūshū under central control. On July 23, 1587, Hideyoshi issued an eleven-article memorandum regulating foreign trade and religious activity. Article 10 criminalized the sale of Japanese people to China, to the “South Barbarians” (the Iberian nations), and to Korea. To underscore his seriousness, he had Japanese slave dealers and brokers executed, crucifying a dock official at the very pier where Portuguese ships loaded their human cargo.

The effect on the Jesuits was immediate and clarifying. Terrified by the crucifixions and the threat of ryōseibai, collective punishment that could fall on all Portuguese merchants if any of them were caught slaving, they severely restricted the issuance of their time-bondage permits. Hideyoshi’s violence did what a decade of Jesuit moral theology had failed to do: it made the trade unprofitable enough to discourage.

But there was an irony, and it was a savage one. Hideyoshi’s prohibition applied specifically to the trafficking of Japanese people. When his subsequent invasions of Korea (1592–1598) produced thousands of Korean prisoners of war, neither the letter of the law nor the spirit of the edict prevented their sale. Portuguese slave ships departing Nagasaki simply swapped one source population for another. The holds that had carried Japanese captives now carried Korean ones. The system adapted. It always does.

The Church Reverses Course

Gaspar Coelho, the Jesuit Vice-Provincial, wrote a scathing letter to Rome in 1587 describing what he had seen: slavers kidnapping children, the conditions aboard slave ships driving Japanese captives to suicide. The letter reached the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Claudio Acquaviva, who issued a stern reprimand forbidding Jesuits from participating in the trade. It was a significant institutional shift, the order that had created the permit system was now ordering its members to stop using it, but it relied on Jesuit obedience, and the Jesuits in the field were operating at the farthest edge of the known world, months of travel from any authority that could enforce compliance.

The next blow came from Bishop Pedro Martins, who arrived in Nagasaki in 1596 and saw the trade for himself. Martins did not write letters to Rome. He issued a blanket excommunication: anyone buying or selling Japanese or Korean slaves without his express written permission was cut off from the sacraments. In a Catholic community, this was the nuclear option. The excommunication paralysed the Jesuit permit system overnight. But Martins died shortly after, and his excommunication died with him.

The decisive figure was Bishop Luís de Cerqueira, who arrived in 1598 and set about demolishing the entire moral and legal architecture that had sustained the trade. In a landmark consultation held in Nagasaki, Cerqueira convened the senior Jesuits and other clergy and obtained a unanimous vote to ban all Jesuit slave permits. He renewed the excommunication that had lapsed with Martins’s death. And he took on the theological arguments directly, dismantling the “lesser of two evils” and “tolerable slavery” defences with the Pauline principle that would echo through centuries of abolitionist thought: non sunt facienda mala, ut veniant bona, evil must not be done so that good may come of it.

Cerqueira then did something that no churchman in Japan had previously attempted: he lobbied the secular authorities. He wrote to King Philip III of Spain, who, through the Iberian Union, was simultaneously King of Portugal, and secured a sweeping royal prohibition on the Japanese slave trade across all Habsburg territories. Church law and secular law now aligned. The trade, at least in its officially sanctioned form, was over.

From Chino to Indian: The Legal Afterlife

Over the decades, the physical and cultural distinctions between enslaved chinos from overseas, free Filipino immigrants, and Mexico’s indigenous population blurred to the point of administrative incoherence. Spanish officials, already struggling with the legal fiction that indigenous Americans were free vassals of the crown who could not be enslaved, a fiction violated constantly in practice, found themselves unable to distinguish between a Japanese slave who had arrived on a galleon and a Filipino freeman who had immigrated voluntarily. The categories were collapsing.

In the 1670s, the Spanish crown resolved this problem with characteristic bureaucratic audacity: it simply reclassified all chinos as “Indians”. Every person who had been designated chino, regardless of whether they had been born in Sakai, Surat, or Cebu, was now legally an indigenous vassal of the Spanish king. As members of the “Republic of Indians”, they could no longer be held as slaves. Masters were ordered to release their Asian captives. Former chinos were permitted to integrate into the free indigenous communities of Mexico.

It was liberation by administrative reclassification, a profoundly strange and profoundly colonial form of emancipation. The people who had been kidnapped from Japan, trafficked across the Pacific, and forced to work in textile mills were freed not because slavery was recognised as wrong, but because the bureaucratic category under which they had been enslaved was deemed to overlap inconveniently with a category of people who were, on paper, already free. The paperwork, which had enslaved them, now set them loose.

The Silence After

The Portuguese trade in Japanese slaves lasted roughly half a century in its most active form, from the 1550s to the early 1600s, and touched every continent that the Iberian maritime empires reached. It was never on the scale of the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans, and historians have rightly cautioned against false equivalences. But scale is not the only measure of historical significance, and the fact that this trade has been so thoroughly overshadowed by larger atrocities does not diminish the experience of the individuals caught in it.