Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in 17th-Century Japanese Diplomacy

Introduction. The Prisoners from Nambu

Introduction The Prisoners from Nambu On 29 July 1643, ten crew members of the Dutch yacht Breskens were lured ashore in Nambu, a domain in northern Japan, by an equal number of attractive Japanese women. The day before, during a voyage of discovery to Northeast Asia, their ship had anchored in an idyllic bay where the crew had also made a landfall a month and a half earlier. This time, however, as soon as the Dutchmen had been led out of sight of their ship, they were surrounded by a crowd of men from the neighborhood. Trussed up, they were then brought to Morioka, the castle town of the domain. There they waited until police officers came from Edo to take them to the shogun’s capital, where they were interrogated for four months before finally being released on 8 December 1643. Prisoners from Nambu is the story of what these men experienced and saw in Japan. Narrative history has many advantages that, because of neglect of the genre in recent times, have remained unexplored so far in Japanese history. Through its narrow focus, it can evoke in the reader a feeling for the reality of the past such as analytical history rarely achieves. This account aims to give the reader an idea of what it felt like to be an ordinary Westerner suddenly forced to participate in the world of the samurai. It is a story of cross-cultural contact, in which, for a change, Westerners were not in control, but at the mercy of Japanese warriors. During their detention, the prisoners were in a position to make firsthand observations of the internal structure of the Japanese government and its decision-making process concerning such matters as 2 Introduction the eradication of Christianity. In particular, the Dutchmen were confronted on several occasions with four Jesuit priests who had tried to come ashore by stealth in Kyushu, only one month before the men from the Breskens had been arrested. Their observations document the brainwashing process, recently perfected in Japan, by which the Jesuits were forced to apostatize and become allies of the Japanese government in its battle against Christianity. In the end, the Dutchmen were able to convince the Japanese authorities that they had nothing to do with such matters as bringing Roman Catholic priests ashore. However, the clearer it became that the Dutchmen had been arrested by mistake, the more imperative it became for the Japanese government to find a suitable excuse for having detained its own allies. When the representative of the Dutch East India Company residing in Nagasaki came to Edo to obtain the release of the Dutch prisoners he was forced to accept a description of them as shipwrecked sailors saved by the Japanese. This version of events created tension and difficulties for the Dutch trade with Japan in the subsequent years. For if the shogun had “saved” the lives of ten Dutchmen, he should be thanked for such magnanimity in an appropriate manner. In the eyes of the shogun himself, no manner would be more appropriate than having an official embassy from Holland prostrating themselves in gratitude at his feet. In Dutch eyes, however, this would be turning the world upside down. As the years went by, however, shogunal officials in both Nagasaki and Edo made it clear that the Dutch trade in Japan would come to a halt if such an embassy did not materialize. The solution was found in the time-honored East Asian manner of sending a bogus ambassador. In 1649, to appease the Japanese shogun by thanking him for the release of the prisoners from Nambu, a splendid Dutch embassy was prepared, ostensibly coming from Amsterdam, but in reality put together on Java. A Dutch schoolmaster, recently arrived in Batavia from Holland, was made ambassador to Japan, although he was sick to the point of dying. This was, of course, exactly why he was the appropriate man. For if he died at sea before arriving in Japan, it would be impossible for the Japanese to investigate who had sent him. Everything happened as foreseen. The ambassador died and was duly mummified at sea, so the fact of his existence could be verified by the Japanese officials on the arrival of the ship carrying the embassy . Of course, nobody in Japan was fooled, least of all the Japa- Introduction 3 nese officials in Nagasaki and Edo. However, without clear evidence...