Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan (32 page)

Read Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan Online

Authors: Giles Milton

His sickness had begun after one of his customary hawking tours. He had celebrated his return with a lavish banquet, dining on freshly caught sea bream cooked in sesame oil. But the meal had disagreed with him and he found himself seized with violent cramps. The pain was temporarily allayed by medicine, but it was not long before the cramps returned and he grew weak from the pain. His friends were extremely concerned and—fearing the worst—decided to honor him with the title of
dajo-daijan
, or Minister-President, “which,” wrote Cocks, “is as the names of Caesar or Augustus amongst the emperors of Rome.”
Ieyasu was by now desperately ill, suffering from what was probably stomach cancer, but he struggled from his sickbed in order to accept the congratulations of his fawning retainers. It was clear to all that the end was near. In the middle of July, Ieyasu handed his sword to a friend, asking him to test it on a convicted criminal and report back on the quality of the blade. The friend
performed this grisly task with relish and informed Ieyasu that it was as sharp as it had ever been. “With this sword,” said Ieyasu, “I will guard and protect my descendants for many ages.”
He could no longer eat solid food and managed only a few sips of hot water. On July 17, 1616, he pulled himself upright, wrote two short verses, then breathed his last. He had, in the words of the official chronicle, “passed to another world.” Cocks and his men had lost their most powerful ally.
So, too, had William Adams. For more than sixteen years he had been totally dependent upon Ieyasu, who had granted him his title, his estate, and his unrivaled position at court. The shogun had also saved Adams from almost certain death back in 1600, by refusing to allow the Jesuits to crucify him. He had even come to treat him as an oracle—a window on the outside world—and had frequently sought his advice on how to deal with the Catholic proselytizers. Adams was only too aware that he owed everything to Ieyasu and must have been deeply concerned when—on his return from Siam—he learned of his death. His letters written in the immediate aftermath have been lost, but other surviving accounts reveal the deep sense of anxiety that followed the death of any great lord in Japan. It often prompted the most faithful followers to commit suicide, in order to accompany him on his journey to the land of the dead. It had long been the practice for loyal relatives to offer themselves for
junshin
—the barbaric and excruciatingly painful practice of being buried alive. But in recent years ritual disembowelment had become more commonplace. The Dutch adventurer François Caron was witness to both kinds of suicide and was so bewildered that he wrote about it at some length. “When one of the lords die,” he wrote, “ … they celebrate the parting feast upon mats and carpets … [and] having well eat and drank, they cut up their bellies, so that the guts and entrails burst out.” Caron noted that “he that cuts himself the highest, as some do, even to the throat, is counted the bravest fellow and most esteemed.”
Those who chose to be buried alive went to their deaths with steely determination. “They go with joy unto the designed place and, lying down there, suffer the foundation stones to be laid upon them which, with their weight, immediately bruise and shiver them to pieces.”
There were many who expected a mass suicidal display after Ieyasu’s death, but a peculiar calm fell over the city of Shizuoka. Cocks noted in his diary that just two noblemen elected to die: “they killed themselves to accompany Ieyasu in another world,” he wrote. Their loyalty did not pass unrewarded, for their corpses were buried near Ieyasu’s and a splendid monument was erected in their honor.
The English had not been altogether surprised to learn of Ieyasu’s demise. Rumors of his sickness had been circulating for many months, and Cocks and his men had first been told of his death more than seven months before it actually occurred. They had been skeptical on that occasion, and Cocks had recorded in his diary: “I beleeve rather [it] is a fable, and given out on purpose to see how the people would take the matter.” In March he had received two more warnings of Ieyasu’s death, and in April he had been told that Ieyasu had fallen from his horse and been knocked unconscious “so that no man might speak with him.” When he received confirmation that, on this occasion, the news was indeed true, Cocks knew that a visit to the new court was imperative. The English needed to pay their respects to Ieyasu’s son, Shogun Hidetada, and—more important—they required confirmation of their trading rights.
It was fortunate that Adams returned from his voyage to Siam less than a week after Ieyasu’s death. He immediately offered to escort Cocks and Eaton to court—accompanied by a small band of mariners—in order to take presents and good wishes to Hidetada. As they sailed through the Inland Sea toward Fushimi, they saw evidence of civil unrest. “We saw a dead man cast upon the shore,” wrote Cocks, “whom had been murthered by some villains,
yet the cuntry people let him lie, and not giveing him buriall.” The men turned their heads to avoid this unpleasant sight, only to be met with one that was even more gruesome: “on the other side was a man crusefied upon a crosse for murthering a merchant’s servaunt.” Close by, there was a row of poles adorned with decomposing human heads. “I saw some eight or ten malefactors’ heades set upon timbers by the highway,” wrote Cocks.
The party rested for a few days at Osaka, before setting out on the last leg of their journey to Edo, where they intended to lodge in Adams’s town house. They were given a friendly welcome by courtiers and retainers, and received gifts of sake and pigs, grapes, and bread. But scarcely had they settled into their accommodation than they found themselves in real danger. “About three a-clock in the afternowne, there happened an exceading earthquake in this city.” So wrote Cocks, who was stunned by the severity of the quake. “It was so extreame that I thought the howse would have fallen downe on our heads.” His men were terrified that they would be crushed and ran out into the street “without hat or shoes, the timbers of the howse making such a noise and cracking that it was fearefull to heare.”
When the earthquake subsided, a careful check of the gifts for the shogun revealed that some of them had been irreparably damaged on the journey, while others had disappeared completely. To the superstitious English, these two disasters presaged ill for their visit and they began to wonder whether their privileges would be confirmed after all.
The big day came on the first of September, when Adams and the others were asked to present themselves at the shogun’s palace. Work had begun on this vast labyrinth some ten years earlier, when Ieyasu had made the city his official courtly capital. He had hired more than 600,000 laborers to help build the chambers and fortified walls, which stretched more than ten miles in circumference. It made for a most impressive spectacle. When the Spanish
governor of the Philippines had visited a few years earlier, he had been stunned by the scale of the defenses. There were three tiers of walls, a fast-flowing moat, and “more than 20,000 persons between the first gate and the prince’s chamber.” The chambers were of exquisite beauty and were decked with painted hunting scenes chased with gold. “Although the first compartment left nothing to be desired,” he wrote, “the second chamber was finer, while the third was even more splendid.”
The bodyguards at the entrance to each section of the palace wore golden cuirasses that sparkled in the sun and were armed with pikes, lances, and razor-sharp scimitars. Cocks was amazed by the size and luxury of the place, for it was built on a scale that far surpassed anything he had seen in England. There was room enough within its walls to house more than 150 Towers of London. Cocks described it as “a huge thing” that appeared, at first sight, to be “far bigger than the cittie of York.” But unlike York, Hidetada’s castle was surrounded by “three greate and deepe ditches full of water, with strong walls about each of them … being all of free stone of an exceading height with faire building upon it and towers.” Cocks was astonished to discover that even the roof tiles glittered with gold leaf.
The interior of the palace was no less splendid, “being gilded with gould, both overhead and upon the walls.” The rooms were also richly adorned with paintings and murals—depictions of “lions, tigers, onces [lynx], panthers, eagles and other beastes and fowles, very lively drawne and more esteemed [than] their gilding.” The largest chambers could be divided into smaller rooms by means of folding screens, “which go up and downe, or rather to and fro … [like] the shutting of our windows in England.”
No less impressive were the furnishings, and Cocks was particularly taken with the exotic floor rugs. “All the roomes in his palace under foote are covered with mattes edged with damask or cloth of gold, and lie so close joined on[e] to another that you cannot put the point of a knife betwixt them.”
The men were escorted into the inner chambers by two of Hidetada’s chief counselors, who carried away the English gifts of broadcloth, coral, animal skins, and pots before leading them to the presence chamber. Here they stopped, for even the senior-ranking Honda Masanobu did not dare to enter the room without prior permission from the shogun.
from C. R. Boxer, A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam, 1953
.
Protocol was all-important at the Japanese court. Courtly servants entered on hands and knees, while lords repeatedly prostrated themselves. When Richard Cocks visited the court, he found the shogun seated “cross-leged like a tailor” and flanked by shaven-headed monks.
Adams had stressed to Cocks the overriding importance of abiding by the complex rules of Japanese etiquette. He told him that he would earn great respect by following the correct protocol and that this would be of great assistance in forging good relations with Hidetada. He had offered similar advice to Saris, but the captain had ignored it, creating much bad feeling at court. Cocks was more willing to listen to advice and impressed the shogun with his deferential humility. “He [Hidetada] called me once or twice to have com in, which I refused; which, as I understood afterward, was well esteemed of.” After being summoned for a third time, Cocks entered the chamber and found himself face to face with the shogun. Hidetada was seated on the floor, “cross-leged like a tailor” and flanked by four shaven-headed monks. The shogun was swarthy and well built, but cut a somewhat comical figure on account of the colorful ribbons that he was accustomed to wear in his hair. On this particular occasion, he looked quite splendid in his light summer robe made from bright blue silk.
Cocks was fortunate to be granted a private audience. Hidetada had a fondness for pomp and ceremony and liked to be surrounded by the lords of his realm, all decked in their traditional costumes and hats. When the Spaniard Sebastian Vizciano visited Hidetada a few years earlier, he had been bemused by the extraordinary headgear of their lordships. “Some had mitres on, others wore three-cornered hats like
birettas
, others had hats like clogs, others wore coloured turbans, and so on.” Hidetada himself was no less flamboyant, but his colorful exterior concealed a wily and crafty nature: he was said to have inherited many traits from his father. As history would show, Cocks was absolutely correct to describe him as “the politikest prince that ever reigned in Japan.”
There was no mention of trade or privileges at this first meeting. Instead, the men stuck to pleasantries and the audience passed “with many favourable words.” Two days later, Adams returned to
the castle “to procure … the renewall of the old emperor’s privileges, with a
gowshin
[shogunal pass] for his junk.” Hidetada listened politely to Adams’s request—made on Cocks’s behalf—but declined to give an immediate answer. Obliged to leave the court empty-handed, Adams returned to Cocks with the grim news that their privileges might not be renewed after all.
The next few days were spent in a hectic round of lobbying and meetings, as Adams attempted to persuade the shogun’s most senior courtiers that they had nothing to fear from the presence of Cocks and his men on Japanese soil. But he quickly discovered that this was no easy matter. Hidetada, who had inherited from his father a deep mistrust of Christians, was even more determined than Ieyasu to enforce the anti-Christian edict. While he was perfectly content to allow Adams to remain in Japan, he was rather less convinced about giving his blessing to the small community of Englishmen in Hirado. Adams warned Cocks that Hidetada was naturally suspicious and far stricter “against the Romish relligion than his father was, for he hath forbidden thorough all his dominions, under pain of death, non of his subjectes to be Romish Christians.”

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