Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan (25 page)

Read Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan Online

Authors: Giles Milton

Cocks soon grew annoyed at the constant plunder of his goldfish and did his best to ignore the requests from Hirado’s fish-obsessed nobles. But all too often he was forced to relent: “The King of Hirado sent to beg my two golden fishes,” he wrote on one occasion, “ … which, much against my will, I gave him.”
The English quickly learned to adopt the best of the local customs. They had washed neither themselves nor their clothes during their long months on the
Clove
, and their fetid skin was rank and offensive when they first arrived. The Japanese were appalled by such disregard for personal cleanliness and could not understand why foreigners had no desire to bathe. They had observed the same unpleasant trait in the Portuguese, who shunned Japanese steam baths and ate their food with unwashed hands. Padre Joao Rodrigues noted their disdain in his book
Historia da Igreja do Japão
, in which he wrote with passion about Japanese cleanliness and bathing habits. “They are greatly astonished by eating with the hands,” he wrote, and said that the sight of filthy clothes and food-stained table coverings “causes both nausea and disgust.” Even in a provincial backwater like Hirado, the nobility were scrupulously clean and prided themselves on their scrubbed and scented skin. “All the houses of the nobles and gentry have bathrooms for guests,” noted Rodrigues. “These places are very clean and are provided with hot and cold water, because it is a general custom in Japan to wash the body at least once or twice a day.” The Japanese were uninhibited by nudity; they stripped naked in
their public baths “and do not worry at all if their privy parts are seen.” First they washed themselves in running water. Then they slipped into huge baths and languished in the naturally heated pool.
When Cocks and his team tried this strange custom, they were surprised to find it much to their liking. Indeed, they enjoyed it so much that they decided to construct their very own
o-furo
, or bathhouse, in which they could relax and entertain their Japanese guests. The principal chamber was the steam bath; this was constructed of scented wood, which absorbed the moisture and turned it into perfumed droplets. Before entering, the men changed into baggy loincloths. Once inside, they lounged around in the steam, which “gently softens the body … [and] brings out and loosens all the adhering dirt and sweat.” It also worked wonders in curing their hangovers. When their skin was pink and their aching joints relaxed, they entered a cooler room and refreshed themselves by splashing each other with chilled water.
Cocks’s building works had been extensive, and the factory soon enclosed a significant area of land in Hirado. Yet there was one important outhouse that receives no mention in the accounts. The Japanese were in the habit of performing their bodily functions in special privies, which were set apart along a paved path. Unlike the English, whose drains were nonexistent and whose streets often overflowed with excrement, the Japanese prided themselves on their pristine sewers and latrines. “The interior,” wrote Padre Rodrigues, “ … is kept extremely clean … [with] a perfume-pan and new paper cut for use.” He added that these privies were “without any bad smell, for when the guests depart, the man in charge cleans it out if necessary.” Every morning, a team of cleaners would visit each privy and pay good money to remove the waste matter, which was then used on their fields and vegetable plots. Cocks and his men must have been utterly bewildered by such strange habits, and it is not clear whether they adopted this particular custom.
The English factory soon began to resemble a Japanese household. It was built in the local style and kept extremely clean by its army of Japanese servants. Although the cooks did not always prepare food to the men’s liking, they knew how to keep the kitchen in order. Their attention to hygiene came naturally, for even in the meanest of Japanese households pots and pans were scrubbed with the greatest diligence before use, while any uncooked food that was touched during preparation was washed and sterilized. “[The Japanese] have special people who cut up fish, and the flesh of birds and animals of the chase,” wrote Rodrigues. “All the food is cut up on spotless thick tables with iron forks, knives and cleavers and nothing is touched with the hands.”
Photo used with kind permission from Okura Shukokan Museum, Tokyo
.
The Japanese paid great attention to hygiene and cleanliness, especially when preparing food. “[They] have special people who cut up fish, and the flesh of birds,” wrote the Jesuit João Rodrigues circa 1620. This had been standard practice since the Middle Ages, as this late-fourteenth-century manuscript illustration shows.
This attention to cleanliness, coupled with the healthy Japanese diet, ensured that the men were blessed with good health. This was in dramatic contrast to their time in Bantam, where so many of the
Clove
’s crew had succumbed to mysterious tropical fevers. Cocks was surprised that his men stayed in such rude health, especially as they had arrived in such a weakened condition, and he wrote to one of the factors in Bantam to express their good fortune. “All the Englishmen which came in the
Clove
, except myselfe, have [he means”had“] been very sick, so that I expected no life of any one of them.” Yet ever since they landed in Hirado, “they [are] recovered and in good health.”
There were a few occasions when the men fell ill, especially in the early months when their stomachs had not yet adjusted to the strange Japanese diet. Terrified that they had contracted some unknown disease and anxious to find a cure, they turned to Adams for advice. “I have been much tormented with an ague,” wrote Cocks on one occasion. “[It] turned into an extreme ache in my bones in all partes of my body, so that I had thought I should have lost the use of my limbs and was become a very crippell.” A diet of fresh fruit and seafood quickly helped him to recover his strength, and after a few days at the hot springs he made a full recovery.
Richard Wickham was unfortunate enough to fall sick while undertaking a voyage to Kyoto. “[I am] troubled with a burning ague,” he wrote to his friends in Hirado, and added that “this fever does so vex me that I cannot get no rest night nor day, want of sleep much offending me.” As he grew weaker and paler, he urged Cocks to send some alcohol, which he thought would do him good. He also took the drastic decision to resort to surgery, informing his friends that he intended to “play the surgen myselfe, for I have a very good lancet.” Cocks was alarmed when he read this and wrote an urgent reply, begging Wickham not to perform surgery on himself. “My councell,” he wrote, “is that yow give not yourself too much to physick, except upon greate extremity.”
The Japanese would have agreed wholeheartedly, for they were horrified by the barbaric medical practices of Europeans, especially the obsession with letting blood. “The Japanese would rather die than use our painful surgical remedies,” wrote the Jesuit padre Luis Frois. They preferred natural medicines made of boiled roots and herbs, sea snails and seaweed, and took candied pills that were believed to purge the body. Their widespread use of acupuncture also astonished foreign observers. “In nearly all their sicknesses they are accustomed to having their stomach, arms and back etc. pierced with silver needles,” wrote one incredulous monk, “and at the same time they cauterize with herbs.” The needles were inserted into the most sensitive points in the body and were remarkably effective in relieving pain.
Japanese physicians paid a high price for failure, since poor diagnosis and treatment was punishable by death. “During the emperor’s sickness,” wrote Wickham, “he caused his chiefe physition to be cut in pieces for telling him … that in regard he was an old man, his medicine could not worke so effectually.”
Such wanton brutality was a way of life in Japan, and the English never ceased to be amazed by the terrifying rule of law. Adams had written at length to his compatriots in Bantam to warn them that unruly behavior was punished with the utmost harshness in Japan. “In justice [they are] very severe,” he wrote, “having no respect of persoons.” He warned that thieves were rarely imprisoned, “but pressently executed,” while cities and towns were governed with the greatest rigorousness. Adams must have been aware that many newly arrived mariners were likely to be drunkards whose uncontrollable rabble-rousing often ended in violence. In order to preempt any trouble, he had warned his colleagues that “no murther[er] for the most part can escape,” because the Japanese judicial system relied upon informants and rewards. A price was placed on the head of any escaped criminal—up to
£
300—which was paid out to whoever provided incriminating information.
Adams, who had grown up in the violent back streets of Lime-house, quickly became a keen advocate of strict Japanese justice. He said that the shogun’s policy of “eye for eye, touth for touth” meant that “in their citties, you may go all over in the night without anny trobell or perill.”
King Foyne was as inexorable as any other Japanese lord. He governed his fiefdom with a razor-sharp sword, crushing disobedience and refusing mercy. Cocks’s men were no strangers to the spectacle of public beheadings and grisly disembowelments—for they were a common occurrence in London—yet they were surprised to discover that Adams was not exaggerating the inflexibility of Japanese justice: even minor transgressions were capital offenses. Worse still, the sentence was inviolable, and King Foyne would not “revoke or mittigate the severitie of it.” Once judgment was passed, the punishment was immediate. The victim was instructed to kneel and the executioner cut off his head. Then the head and body were chopped into tiny pieces.
from Arnoldus Montanus’s Atlas Japannensis, 1670
.
Like all Japanese lords, Foyne maintained a troop of well-armed retainers who could be called upon in times of crisis. They were well equipped (above) and liked to test their swords on the corpses of criminals.
Cocks and his men were horrified by such violence and watched in dismay as young children were executed for minor crimes. In their first months, they had been too nervous to intervene. But when they were more familiar with their new home, they began to lodge complaints with King Foyne. On a December afternoon in 1615, Cocks learned that “a boy of sixteen yeares old was [to be] cut in peeces for stealing a littell boat and carrying it to another island.” Cocks felt that the death sentence was unduly harsh and “sent [an appeal] to the king to beg his life.” He also dispatched a message to the executioner, asking him to refrain from killing the boy until he had learned of King Foyne’s reaction. The executioner, infuriated by the English petition, was further angered when he learned that Foyne intended to pardon the lad. Without further ado, he unsheathed his sword and “put him to death before the [official] pardon came, cutting him in many mammocks.”
Life was cheap in Hirado, and death was so commonplace that the local populace was untroubled by the sight of corpses lying in gutters or fields. Cocks was rather more sensitive, and such horrific spectacles would remain forever etched on his mind. One day, he was enjoying a walk on the edge of the town when he “fownd a young girl of some eleven or twelve years of age, dead on the backside under the walle [of a little lodge].” He was disgusted to see “doggs feeding on her, having eaten both her legges and her lower parts.” He was unable to discover her identity or the cause of death, but noted that “it is thought some villen had ravished her and after killed her, or else, being a slave, her master had killed her upon some displeasure and cast her out to be eaten of dogges, an ordenary matter in these partes.” He added that the lives of slaves were in the hands of their masters “to kill them
when he will, without controle of any justice.” Even the corpses of the Clove’s mariners who had died in Hirado were not allowed to rest in peace. On one occasion, Cocks was passing the little graveyard where a crew member had been buried when he noticed that “some villanouse people had digged up the coffin and stolen the winding sheete and his shert, and left the karkasse naked upon the ground.”

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