The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (20 page)

Japanese men hold the small
sake
cup with both hands when someone is filling it for them and formally drink that way as well (see
Chapter 6
,
#28
). Japanese women use only one hand. Frois' contrast is not between one hand or two hands but between drinking with the same hand the drink is received in and drinking with the opposite hand. It may well be due to the fact that women conventionally waited to the right of men and, facing the tables, received
sake
with the left hand and drank with the right.

65. Women in Europe braid their hair with silk ribbons; the Japanese tie theirs in the back in a single place, sometimes with a very dirty cloth
.

This contrast is nearly identical to
#7
above, but one wishes that Frois was more specific about the class of women he is contrasting. After all, in
#28
we are told of Japanese women who appear like European soldiers in dress attire. Working women in Japan often tied their hair back with a
tenugui
, a simple piece of cloth that often boasted interesting designs. Frois may have considered favorite well-worn
tenugui
“very dirty” or he may have observed “lucky” hair-ties worn by samurai women whose husbands were off on campaigns. These ties were not washed until a loved one returned to untie it.

66. In Europe one case of face powder would be sufficient for an entire kingdom; in Japan, despite importing many boatloads from China, there is still a shortage
.

This is a more poetic restatement of the contrast offered in
#15
above. Japan at this time (and later, when it began to industrialize) still had sufficient reserves of most minerals. The idea of Japan as a nation which is exceptionally poor in natural resources that “has to be diligent” is a modern invention and, in Japan today, a useful tool of government. Still, Japan did import mercury and lead from China. Okada
⁷⁴
notes that the two were ground and combined to make a popular powder that was called “Chinese dirt.”

67. European women do their sewing with copper thimbles on their fingertips; Japanese women do theirs with a strip of leather in the palm of their hand or with a little bit of paper wrapped around the middle of the finger
.

Europeans and Americans sew by pushing the needle and thread through the fabric. In Japan, a long needle is held steady with its butt against a piece of leather or paper, and one uses one's finger tips to push the cloth onto the needle. (This is called “grab-needling” or
tsukami-bari
).
⁷⁵
Today, like most everyone else, the Japanese rely on sewing machines. However, when replacing buttons or mending torn cloth, they still use broad-banded rings called
yubi-nuki
or “finger-pass [through]” rather than the closed, cap-like Western thimble.

68. Among us, when we want to take apart a garment, we do so by cutting the seams with a knife; Japanese women pull out the whole line of stitching
.

If you have ever taken apart an old kimono, you know that it is simply far easier and faster to pull out the thread than to cut it and risk damaging the material.

1
  Keith Thomas,
The Ends of Life Roads to Fulfillment
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 20–21, 104–107.

2
  Issues of gender and our changing understanding of the role of women in Japanese society over time are the subject of two excellent collections of essays: Gail Lee Bernstein,
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Anne E. Imamaura, ed.,
Re-Imagining Japanese Women
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

3
  See, for example, Jerome's letter (22) to Eustochium,
The Letters of Saint Jerome
. Trans. Charles C. Mierow (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1963), 134–180.

4
  Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Introduction.” In
Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain
, ix–xxiv (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xvii–xviii; Isabel M.R. Mendes Drummond Braga, “Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Portugal: The Case of Misericôrdias.” In
Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe
, eds. Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham, and Jon Arrizabalaga, 210–215 (London: Routledge), 207–208.

5
  Anne Walthall, “The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan.” In
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945
, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein, 42–70 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 51, 63.

6
  Richard Corson,
Fashions in Hair: The First Five Thousand Years
(London: Peter Owen, 2001).

7
  Victoria Sherrow,
Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 115.

8
  A.H. De Oleveira Marques,
Daily life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 84.

9
  Akio Okada, trans. and ed.,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
[European Culture and Japanese Culture] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965), 39–40.

10
  Richard Corson,
Fashions in Hair: The First Five Thousand Years
(London: Peter Owen, 2001).

11
  Ibid.

12
  
Kubo
, literally, is a “public-direction = person = way,” but it has been used to refer to anything from the Emperor to public officials. In Frois' time, it usually referred to the shogun and could modify his household and those of his close relations, or, at least, that is how Frois used it.

13
  Three
couvades
.

14
  Ronald Rainey, “Dressing Down the Dressed Up: Reproving Feminine Attire in Renaissance Florence.” In
Renaissance Society and Culture
, eds. John Monfasani and R.G. Musto, pp. 217–239 (New York: Ithaca Press, 1991).

15
  Tweezers, called
ke-nuki
or hair-removers, were a popular item among Japanese street vendors during the Tokugawa era.

16
  Note here Frois' reference to
nobres
, apparently court level, which was a higher level than, say,
fidalgas
.

17
  Sherrow,
Encyclopedia of Hair
, 115.

18
  Fray Luis De Leon,
The Perfect Wife
(Denton, Texas: The College Press, Texas State College for Women, 1943[1583]), 60.

19
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 89.

20
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 46.

21
  In Michael Cooper,
They Came to Japan
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 208.

22
  
Daily Life in Portugal
, 89–91.

23
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 47.

24
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 72, 87.

25
  See for example Malveena McKendrick,
Women and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Study of the ‘Muger varonil
' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 16–17.

26
  Varley would seemingly take issue with Frois, arguing that the many rights and responsibilities that Japanese women enjoyed during the Kamakura period (1185–1333), including equal inheritance of property, had been ceded to men even before the Jesuits arrived. Paul Varley, “Law and Precepts for the Warrior Houses,” In
Sources of Japanese Tradition, Second Edition, Volume One: From Earliest Times to 1600
, eds. Wm. Theodore de Bary, D. Keene, G. Tanabe, and P. Varley, 413–433. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 415.

27
  According to samurai teachings, divorcées were not supposed to remarry; better the wife should commit suicide. Anne Walthall, “The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan.” In
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945
, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein, 42–70. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 60.

28
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 49.

29
  Since the 1960s, the divorce rate has slowly increased and now over 30 percent of marriages end in divorce. See Allison Alexy, “The door my wife closed; houses, families, and divorce in contemporary Japan.” In
Home and Family in Japan
, eds. R. Ronald and A. Alexy, 236–254 (London: Routledge, 2011), 238.

30
  Ibid., 49.

31
  
Queer Things About Japan
(Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1968[1913]). See also Walthall, “The Life Cycle of Farm Women,” 60–62.

32
  Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks,
Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 75–81.

33
  Walthall, “The Life Cycle of Farm Women,” 48.

34
  Catharina Blomberg,
The Heart of the Warrior
(Sandgate, UK: Japan Library, 1994), 123.

35
  Thomas,
The Ends of Life
, 187–225.

36
  Jordan Sand,
House and Home in Modern Japan
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

37
  Londa Schiebinger,
Plants and Empire, Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 116–128.

38
  Ekaterina Hertog, “I did not know how to tell my parents, so I thought I would have to have an abortion.”
In Home and Family in Japan
, eds. R. Ronald and A. Alexy, 91–112 (London: Routledge, 2011).

39
  Bardwell Smith, “Buddhism and Abortion in Contemporary Japan: Mizuko Kuyõ and the Confrontation with Death.” In
Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender
, ed. José I. Cabezón, pp. 65–90 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).

40
  John Henderson, “Charity and Welfare in Early Modern Tuscany.” In
Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe
, eds. Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham, and Jon Arrizabalaga, 56–87 (London: Routledge).

41
  Maria W. Piers,
Infanticide
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 122–123; Linda A. Pollock, “Parent-Child Relations.” In
The History of the European Family, Volume I, Family Life in Early Modern Times
, 1500–1789, eds. David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli, 191–220 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 217–218.

42
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 1.

43
  “The lean cows of Pharaoh” refers to a time of famine and poverty as per the Book of Genesis (41:3).

44
  
Cartas que os Padres e Irmãos da Companhia de Iesus Escreuerão dos Reynos de Iapão & China aos da Mesma Companhia da India & Europa, des do Anno de 1549 Até o de 1580
. 2 Vols. Facsimile edition by José Manuel Garcia (Maia: Castoliva Editora, 1997), I, 60.

45
  Laurel L. Cornell, “Infanticide in Early Modern Japan? Demography, Culture, Population Growth,”
Journal of Asian Studies
55 (1996): 22–50.

46
  Jurgis Elisonas, “Christianity and the Daimyo.” In
The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 4, Early Modern Japan
, ed. J.W. Hall, 30–373 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 317.

47
  Okada quotes a document that mentions no less than twelve bundles of straw covered with a futon.

48
  Jacques Gélis,
History of Childbirth, Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1991), 173–183. Lacking a germ theory, Europeans nevertheless perceived correctly at times that disease was transmitted through the air. Thus, diseases like malaria, which is actually transmitted by anopheles mosquitoes, were attributed to bad air (
malaria
).

49
  
Rua de meretrices
.

50
  For the complex lives of cloistered women see Alison Weber,
Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Asuncion Lavrin,
Bodies of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Stephanie Kirk,
Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Mónica Díaz,
Indigenous Writings from the Convent
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010).

51
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 54.

52
  Wiesner-Hanks,
Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe
.

53
  Thomas,
The Ends of Life
, 20–21, 104–107.

54
  Joan E. Ericson, “The Origins of the Concept of “Women's Literature.” In
The Woman's Hand, Gender and Theory in Japanese Women's Writing
, eds. Paul G Schalow and Janet A. Walker, pp. 74–116 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 77–82.

55
  The Portuguese is imprecise here as to whether it is both men and women who do not date their correspondence.

56
  Jeroen Pieter Lamers, ed. and trans.,
Treatise on Epistolary Style, João Rodriguez on the Noble Art of Writing Japanese Letters
(Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 2002), 72–73.

57
  
They Came to Japan
, 246.

58
  Lafcadio Hearn,
Shadowings
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1900) left us forty-eight charming pages with hundreds of fine examples of Japanese women's names.

59
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 66–67.

60
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 55–56.

61
  Brian Cowan, “New Worlds, New Tastes, Food Fashions after the Renaissance.” In
Food: The History of Taste
, ed. Paul Freedman, pp. 197–232 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 212.