by Michael Booth.
Four centuries ago, the East India Company began trading in Japan. Michael Booth retraces the footsteps of the first English samurai.
Ravaged by scurvy, dysentery and hungry cannibals encountered during their traumatic two-year journey, the surviving crew of the East India Company’s galleon, the Clove, staggered ashore at Hirado, Japan’s westernmost port, in June 1613. They had been despatched to the part of the globe marked “Here be dragons” with a letter from King James I (pictured below) requesting permission to trade. They received their answer 400 years ago, on September 8, but not before a heroic, eyeopening journey half the length of this mysterious, often brutal, yet highly sophisticated land.
It’s always good to have a connection in a foreign city: a cousin to show you the bars in Adelaide; an ex-neighbour to guide you to the best tapas in Madrid. Imagine how relieved those mariners must have been to learn that the rumours of a fellow Englishman in Japan were true. Not only that, but William Adams, now “Anjin Miura” (the Pilot from Miura), who had arrived 13 years earlier as the pilot of a Dutch ship, understood the language and had risen to honorary samurai status.
As my local train arrives at Hirado station, I too am welcomed by a friendly face, the Dutchman Remco Vrolijk. “You feel like you’ve come to the end of the world, don’t you?” Remco laughs as we clamber aboard his titchy Daihatsu. “But if you want to experience a more authentic side of Japan, this is the place.”
He came to this quiet fishing town to teach English and now works for the town hall. Hirado has stronger Dutch connections than English, he explains: the “Hollanders” were much more successful here. Every fourth Sunday, the local ladies dress up in Dutch costume and parade up the high street, but this year, in honour of the 400th anniversary of Anglo-Japanese trade, Union flags adorn the main drag. Though they learnt to enjoy onsen baths and green tea, and fathered children with the locals, several of the men left behind to run Hirado’s English trading station went mad on a diet of drink and prostitutes. As the only Westerner in what is still a relatively remote town, I wonder if Remco ever feels a little … isolated? “I do miss the street life in Europe,” he says, but judging by the number of people who greet him as we walk through town, I think he’ll be fine.
Remco takes me to see the site of the English warehouse, now a noodle shop; Adams’s house, now a sweet shop; and the place where he was buried in 1620, on a hill overlooking the town. “You see that house,” he says, pointing behind some trees close to the grave. “The family name is Miura, the name Adams took.” Relatives? Remco shrugs. “Maybe. Christianity was later banned in Japan and anyone with foreign blood hid their traces.” This being Japan, other continuities have survived. Adams’s house still belongs to his landlord’s family, and the descendants of the ruling Matsura clan remain influential.
To gain permission to trade, the Clove’s captain, John Saris, needed an audience with Japan’s ruler.
This was not the Emperor, by this stage a powerless puppet confined to Kyoto, but the worldly shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, father of a newly unified Japan and one of the greatest – and fattest –rulers of the 17th century.
From Hirado I cross Kyushu, the smallest of Japan’s three main islands, following in Saris and Adams’s footsteps to Ieyasu’s former base in Shizuoka, up the coast of the largest island, Honshu. I am aided along the way by helpful strangers.
Japan restores your faith in human nature. Aside from the Yakuza mafia men who deliberately shoulder-barged me once in Tokyo’s seedy Kabukicho district, I have only ever met with kindness and generosity here. The social trust is remarkable too: a man leaves his suitcase unattended outside a station lavatory; others walk with wallets protruding from their back pockets; Sasebo station’s waiting room has books for passengers to borrow; and those surgical masks the Japanese sometimes wear – I had put that down to a fear of germs, but it turns out they are to protect others
from their colds or flu.
Saris and Adams took a month to reach Shizuoka, entering the city along a road lined with severed heads on pikes. The journey gave Saris time to observe the Japanese: he liked their “cheese” (in fact, tofu) and the women were “well faced, handed and footed”, although he was somewhat put off by their practice of dyeing their teeth black. The journey also gave the two men time to get to know each other. The crew of the Clove had expected an effusive welcome from a compatriot marooned for 13 years, but were offended by Adams’s coolness towards them. Saris distrusted him as “a
naturalised Japaner”. The historian James Murdoch likely echoes Adams’s view of Saris as “a mere
dollar-grinding philistine with a taste for pornographic pictures”.
The captain exasperated Adams by ignoring his advice about courtly etiquette, insisting on delivering the king’s letter to Ieyasu himself and refusing to prostrate himself before the Japanese ruler.
They travelled by horse and palanquin, but by Shinkansen (bullet train) Japan’s forested mountains whizz by like a sped-up silent movie. Between tunnels I get tantalising glimpses of coastline and malls, golfing ranges and convenience stores (one of Japan’s great glories); I spy traditional houses with their multi-tiered, heavily tiled roofs, like samurai squatting in their armour.
Nothing remains of Ieyasu’s castle, Sumpu, where Saris presented his letter, although a re-created gatehouse hints at its vast scale. But Ieyasu’s burial place, the Toshogu Shrine (below) on nearby Mount Kuno, has survived the fires and earthquakes of the centuries. He picked a nice spot: the cable car you take there affords majestic views of the coast with its endless strawberry-growing greenhouses. Outside the shrine I notice a wall of what appear to be catering cans of cooking oil. I ask my monk guide, Yoshihiro, about them. “Tempura oil,” he tells me. “Tokugawa Ieyasu died
from eating too much tempura, so people leave it here as an offering. Tempura? That’s like fish and
chips in England, right?”
This time it was Saris’s turn to be exasperated as he learnt that they would have to travel to Edo –
modern-day Tokyo, more than 600 miles from Hirado – to beg final permission to trade from Ieyasu’s son, Hidetada. On the way they stopped in Kamakura to visit the Daibutsu, a 40ft bronze Buddha. The yobbish English mariners hollered and left graffiti – now erased – inside this astonishing statue, built in 1252. I am surprised such behaviour was tolerated: the same mariners witnessed summary samurai justice meted out for the flimsiest of crimes on several occasions: petty thieves sliced in two before their eyes, their corpses hacked into mincemeat. The Japanese
are big on respect.
You can enter the Buddha from a door in his back, as I do when I visit with my friend Emi, who lives in this popular, artsy seaside town. Talking of respect, she frowns when I refer to her country’s former shogun as “Ieyasu”. “You mean
‘Tokugawa Ieyasu’,” she corrects.
Tokyo, where I end my journey, is never less than fascinating. I spend an afternoon exploring Nihonbashi, its financial district, in the company of Chie Hiyakawa, a guide from my hotel, the Mandarin Oriental. This was the heart of old Edo, a place Adams knew well.
There is a street, Anjin-cho, named after him, but more fascinating are the 17th-century shops still thriving here, selling fans, paper products, fishcakes and sweets.
There is one other living link to Nihonbashi’s samurai past: up a flight of stairs in a nondescript office block, Hiyakawa-san opens the door to a dojo, a small gym where a 70-year-old samurai sword master, Shoun Uetsubara, demonstrates his smooth, purposeful moves. He passes me a blade.
Everyone takes a couple of steps back and I do my best to imitate his most fearful stroke from the top of the head to the naval. Useful, should you wish to turn your opponent into a human clothes peg.
That was very nearly the fate of the Englishmen in Hirado towards the end of their 10-year stay as displeasure among the Japanese elite towards their European guests grew. In charge of trade efforts was Richard Cocks, a man for whom the word “hapless” might have been coined. Thanks largely to his naivety and indolence, the East India Company’s Japanese adventure was a disaster – they never did figure out what goods the Japanese wanted to buy. He died on the journey home after the warehouses closed in 1623.
Back in Hirado, Remco and I had stopped by a fine bronze statue of Cocks, although its plaque read
“Richard Cocs”. Even in death, ignominy stalks him.
The same cannot be said of Adams, the inspiration for James Clavell’s Shogun, among other books, and still highly regarded both in his adopted homeland and his home town. At Gillingham’s annual William Adams Festival this year (September 14), the direct descendant of Hirado’s ruling family, Akira Matsura, will perform a tea ceremony in his honour. I’ll be there, sipping a cup of matcha in his memory.
Getting there
ViaJapan Holidays offers an “In the Footsteps of the First British Samurai” package. The 11-day
tour costs from £1,545 per person (not including flights) and takes in Tokyo, Shizuoka, Kyoto,
Fukuoka and Nagasaki. Included in the price are city tours, sake tasting and green tea experience,
transfers and a Japan Railways JR Pass. This is a self-guided tour, so the itinerary is flexible. A
visit to Hirado, or other destinations, can be added. For further details, or to book, contact
ViaJapan Holidays on viajapan.co.uk, english.uk@his-world.com or 020 7484 3328.
KLM flies to Tokyo Narita via Amsterdam with a choice of 15 departure points in Britain, as well
as direct flights from Amsterdam to Fukuoka, the closest international airport to Hirado. Fares
start from £583 (return). See klm.com.
For more information about travel in Japan, visit seejapan.co.uk.
400th anniversary events
Numerous events will commemorate the arrival of the British in Japan.
The British Museum’s erotica exhibition Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, runs from
October 3 to January 5 2014.
The British Library’s Japan 400: Hirado and the British in Japan runs until September 25.
For information on other events, visit japan400.com.
East India company
The East India Company was dissolved in 1873 but an Indian businessman, Sanjiv Mehta, acquired
the rights to the name in 2005 and set about recommencing trade between the East and Britain.
Among its many ventures, the new EIC is exploring the Japanese speciality foods market for
products to import. While in Japan, I visited one of Japan’s greatest tea masters, Yoshio Moriuchi,
supplier to the imperial family, at his 200 year old plantation just outside of Shizuoka. Here he
hand rolls an exceptional sencha green tea – said to be Tokugawa Ieyasu’s favourite brew – and,
unusually for Japan, also a black tea. They can be purchased via www.eicfinefoods.com or at the
EIC’s store at 7-8 Conduit St, London.
Japanese teas
Sencha – most common: from quickly steamed and dried new leaf shoots.
Fukamushi sencha – leaves steamed for loger: more bitter.
Gyokuro – grown under cover for deeper flavour.
Matcha – dried tea powder used in tea ceremony. Bitter taste.
See the original Telegraph article here
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