The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (30 page)

Today in Japan, it is more common to hear people speak of “Shinto for birth and Buddhism for death” (or Shinto for happy occasions and Buddhism for sad ones). However, this division is dynamic rather than absolute. Thus, every year there is a political debate in Japan about the propriety of politicians visiting one of Japan's main Shinto shrines (the
Yasukuni-jinja
) to honor those who fought and died for their country.

This is the only distich in these two faith-related chapters that even mentions Shinto. It is not clear why the Jesuits paid so little attention to this somewhat regionally-specific folk religion (although there are prominent national Shinto shrines such as Ise). Perhaps it was because Shinto at the time had an informal priesthood (i.e. prominent families led rituals) and lacked a doctrinal system. Shinto's profound yet simple belief in powerful yet mysterious forces that manifest themselves in life (
kami
) gave rise to innumerable local shrines where people engaged the divine, purifying their souls and seeking renewal.
³⁵

28. Our images are painted on wood; theirs are painted on paper scrolls
.

As noted earlier, in 1585 most European religious art or painting still was being done on wood panels (
retablos
) rather than on canvas. Wonderful examples of this religious art from Frois' lifetime are on display in Lisbon's National Museum of Antique Art (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga), including Nuno Gonçalves' “Adoration of Saint Vincent,” six-panels of oak done in oil or tempera celebrating Saint Vincent of Saragossa, who is Lisbon's patron saint.

Although painting on paper might not seem very permanent, Japanese pictures were commonly rolled up and stored when not hung up for viewing, which minimized their exposure to the elements. The scrolls usually have a cloth backing and margins, and wooden ends, which not only help hold the scroll open but improved the image in the same way that a frame improves an oil painting.

29. Among us, a good retablo done in oils is at times worth quite a lot; in Japan, oil paints are not used, but a figure done in black ink can be worth many thousands of cruzados
.

One can find wonderful black and white sketches in European art (e.g. Michelangelo's notebooks or Rembrandt's Portrait of Saskia), although these generally were not considered finished works of art, but rather studies in preparation for a painting in oils, hence Frois' unstated wonder at the fact that Japanese ink drawings were worth so much. Had the Japanese drawings conveyed a Christian theme, Frois presumably would have acknowledged their aesthetic beauty. Some seven years after the
Tratado
was written, Frois noted in a later volume of his
Historia
that Japanese students being trained by the Jesuits were reproducing paintings from Rome so perfectly that it was impossible to tell the original from the copy. “So, with God's help,” Frois concludes, “Japan won't lack men who can keep all her churches full of fine images and satisfy the [aesthetic needs of the] gentry.”

30
. Our prelates travel on mules; Japanese prelates travel in sedan chairs.

Frois' word choice here (
amdão em mulas
) evokes an image of a parish priest astride a mule. While perhaps accurate, some Catholic prelates such as bishops often travelled in litters—picture a comfortable closet of sorts suspended from poles that was carried by humans or mules.
³⁶

In Japan, Xavier made a point of walking so as not to be perceived as being yet another Buddhist high priest, who, like other well-off Japanese, were carried in sedan chairs. These chairs hung from two poles and were generally carried by two men.

1
  In Romance languages and English the word “church” refers to a Christian place of worship, while temple is a more generic term. The Japanese use completely different terms for native and foreign “houses of worship.” A Shinto shrine (often a simple wooden building with roof-beams crossing in the fashion of a two-dimensional tepee) is a
yashiro
or
jinja
; a Buddhist temple is a
tera
or
otera
; a church is a
kyokai
.

2
  Despite being a sacred space, particularly during mass or when the Blessed Sacrament is exposed, churches also were multi-purpose centers for a variety of secular activities. See A.H. De Oliveira Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 224.

3
  In 1585, the Monto, an informal congregation of the Pure Land school, was perhaps the most influential Buddhist sect in all of Japan, owing in part to its main doctrine articulated by Shinran (1173–1263): salvation did not require abandoning “delusional” attachments and mastering difficult meditative practices; it was as “simple” as whole-heartedly embracing Amida. Dennis Hirota,
Asura's Harp, Engagement with Language as Buddhist Path
(Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2006), 5–13.

4
  Isabella L. Bird,
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1987[1880]), 25.

5
  Jacqueline I. Stone and Mariko Namba Walker, eds.,
Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008).

6
  The
honzon
of a particular temple could also be an image of a bodhisattva, or especially in the Shingon or Tendai schools, an esoteric deity (usually of Indic origins).

7
  Hirochika Nakamachi,
Japanese Religions At Home and Abroad
(London Routledge, 2003), 14–16.

8
  Japanese Buddhism did not have choirs during Frois' time, but Soka Gakkai (an offshoot of Nichiren Buddhism) does today.

9
  For a discussion of scrolls and books, see Andrew Pettegree,
The Book in the Renaissance
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 4–9.

10
  
Varelas
. As noted in
Chapter 3
, the term
varela
is probably derived from the Malay
berhala
or the Javanese
brahala
, meaning “idol”;
berhala
alone may have been used elliptically by the Malay or misunderstood by the Portuguese.

11
  Pedro Dias,”O Manuelino.” In
História da Arte em Portugal
, Vol. 5. (Lisbon: Alfa, 1986); “Manueline Art.” In
Museum With No Frontiers Exhibition The Manueline
:
Portuguese Art During the Great Discoveries
, pp. 22–38 (Lisbon: Programa de Incremento do Turismo Cultural, 2002), 30–31. See also Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting Under the Jesuits and Its Legacy Throughout Catholic Europe, 1565–1773.” In
The Jesuits and the Arts
, eds. John W. O'Malley, S.J., Gauvin A. Bailey, and Giovanni Sale, S.J.(Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press, 2005), 125–201.

12
  The Council of Trent (1545–1563) encouraged church art that moved the masses by appealing to the senses.

13
  The great Christian theologian and Jesuit favorite, Thomas Aquinas, argued that natural reason and contemplation of nature (which is the emphasis in Zen Buddhism) revealed the existence of God but not his nature; the latter was knowable only from the study of scripture and, ultimately, an infusion of God's grace.

14
  A
bodhisattva
is a follower of the Buddha who devotes his or her life to freeing others from suffering. Bodhisattvas are a lot like Catholic saints in that they are not supposed to be worshipped, but rather embraced as models to emulate, thereby quickening the enlightened qualities inherent in everyone.

15
  Patricia J. Graham,
Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art 1600–2005
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), 19.

16
  Although European artists during the Middle Ages often exaggerated the size of the most important characters appearing in a painting, a stained-glass window, etc., the exaggeration is usually a matter of degree rather than kind (i.e.
diabutsu
are not just big, they are colossal).

17
  Kohei Sugiura,
“Futo—” no geijutsu kōgaku (Tokyo:
Kōsakusha, 1999), 162–163.

18
  Michael Cooper,
They Came to Japan
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 340.

19
  William E. Deal,
Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 213.

20
  A. R. Disney,
A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, From Beginnings to 1807 Volume I
:
Portugal
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 63.

21
  Giorgio Agamben,
The Highest Poverty, Monastic Rules and Forms-of-Life
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 18–27.

22
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 230–231.

23
  The Japanese are not completely averse to using greenery for adornment. They stand two cut pine boughs in artistically cut green bamboo vases in front of their houses on New Year's Eve (one red pine, one black pine,
yin
and
yang
respectively).

24
  Edward S. Morse,
Japan Day By Day, 1877, 1878–1879, 1882–1883
. 2 Vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917).

25
  Kinahan Cornwallis,
Two Journeys to Japan., 1856–57
(Bristol, U.K.: Genesha Publishing Ltd., 2002[1856–57]).

26
  Peter Brown,
The Cult of the Saints
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

27
  Deal,
Handbook
, 359.

28
  See Hikaru Suzuki,
Death and Dying in Contemporary Japan
(London: Routledge, 2013).

29
  Engelbert Kaempfer,
The History of Japan, Together With a Description of the Kingdom of Siam, 1690–92
. 3 Vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906[1690–92]), II: 313.

30
  Antoni Riera-Melis, “Society, Food, and Feudalism.” In
Food, A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present
, eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, pp. 251–268 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 265.

31
  
Elche
. Traditionally this Portuguese term referred to an individual who had converted from Christianity to Islam. Antônio Houaiss, Mauro de Salles Villar, and Francisco Manoel de Mello Franco
Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa
(Rio de Janiero: Objetiva, 2001), 107.

32
  
Kami
= Shinto god/s.

33
  
Fotoque
or
hotoke
= Buddha/s.

34
  See Valerie Flint,
The Rise of Magic in the Early Middle Ages
, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Daniel T. Reff,
Plagues, Priests, and Demons
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

35
  Ichiro Hori,
Folk Religion in Japan, Continuity and Change
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); For contemporary Shinto see Nakamachi,
Japanese Religions At Home and Abroad
, 55–75.

36
  Marcelin Defourneaux,
Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 15.

6   The Japanese way of eating and drinking

1. We eat everything with our hands; the Japanese—both men and women, from the time they are children—eat with two sticks
.
¹

Europeans at the time ate mostly with their hands; a knife might be used to cut meat and spoons were used to eat gruel, soups, stews, and pudding. It was customary to wash your hands before and after eating, and books of manners advised against petting the dog or cat during dinner. During the sixteenth century napkins started showing up on European tables and the table cloth became more decorative than functional, meaning you no longer used it to wipe your hands. It was the wealthy and aristocrats who were likely to own silver forks and spoons, although they too mostly used their hands.

The Jesuits and most other Europeans were dumbfounded by the skill with which the Japanese ate with chopsticks. To quote Valignano: “… there are no tablecloths, napkins, knives, forks or spoons. All they have are two small sticks, called
hashi
, which they manipulate with such cleanliness and skill that they do not touch any of the food with their hands nor let even a crumb fall from their plate on to the table.”
²

2. The staple of our diet is bread made from wheat; the Japanese ordinarily eat rice cooked with no salt
.

Bread was indeed a staple for many Europeans,
³
although it was not always an inexpensive food item. The price of wheat-flour often skyrocketed in early modern Europe, in part as a function of poor harvests and steady growth in Europe's population.
⁴
When Frois was a child in Portugal, the grain harvest fell below expectations one year in three
⁵
; after 1530 the demand for wheat increasingly outstripped supply.
⁶

Perhaps the most fundamental principle underlying Chinese and Japanese cuisine is the
fan-cai
principle, which dictates that a good meal should include a proper balance of carbohydrates (i.e. rice, bread, or noodles) and protein and
fiber (meat/fish and vegetables).
⁷
As Frois suggests, rice satisfied the
fan
half of the principle. In Japan during the 1970s one frequently encountered a different distich: “We Japanese eat rice, you Westerners eat meat.”
⁸
This was also true in the sixteenth century, as Europeans, apparently of all classes, ate a good deal of meat,
⁹
and the Portuguese perhaps more so, owing to their extensive game preserves and uncultivated lands.
¹⁰
Eggs, butter and cheese also were an important source of protein for Europeans, and thus the olfactory adjective that the Japanese used with reference to Europeans was “butter-stinking” (
bata-kusai
).
¹¹