The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (15 page)

27
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 59–61.

28
  Ibid., 37.

29
  …
nas ylhargas e hum tanga[nho] ou arsáo de sela de
[?]. A knot of some kind is suggested by Frois' mention of a “saddle pommel.”

30
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 206.

31
  The terms used by Frois for these materials are
canga
(apparently from the Chinese word
yang
, meaning coarse fabric of cotton) and
nuno
. Josef Franz Schütte, S.J.,
Kulturgensate Europa-Japan (1585)
(Tokyo: Sophia University, 1955), 102, f.2.

32
  Okamoto,
The Namban Art of Japan
, 25, 38; Oliveira e Costa,
Da Cruz de Cristo
, 20, 34, 56.

33
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 39–41.

34
  James Murdoch,
A History of Japan
. 3 Vols. (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1964), II, P. I, 80, f.5.

35
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 206.

36
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 52–53.

37
  
Dores
.

38
  We have translated
camisas
as shirts to reflect current English usage, although shirts during the sixteenth century often were belted and could extend well below the waist, even to the knee.

39
  
Liteiro
.

40
  
Daily Life in Portugal
, 91.

41
  
Traçado

42
  Tobias Capwell,
The Noble Art of the Sword
(London: The Wallace Collection, 2012), 28–82; Thomas,
The Ends of Life
, 44–78; Dobrée,
Japanese Sword Blades
.

43
  
Veludo
. Note that Frois speaks of felt (
feltro
) in distich 26a.

44
  Actually it is the cutting edge that is made of tempered steel; behind the edge is soft steel that is wrapped in hard steel, making the sword incredibly sharp and resilient. Coats, “Arms & Armor,” 263.

45
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 167.

46
  See for instance, Capwell,
The Noble Art of the Sword
, 77.

47
  
Beden
. Not only is “
bedém
” a Moorish tunic; it can also be a rain-cape or a tunic made of rushes. Frois' use of the term, which is Arabic in origin, makes it clear that in Europe such capes were not made of rushes. This raises the interesting question of whether the Portuguese experience in Japan eventually led to a broadening in the semantics associated with this term. No similar term is used in Spanish.

48
  In yet another twist to the raincoat story, it has been suggested that a group of Japanese who visited Mexico in 1610 introduced the raincoat of grass to the Indians of West Mexico! Zelia Nuttall, “The Earliest Historical Relations Between Mexico and Japan.”
University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology
4:1–47 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1906–07), 47.

49
  Englebert Kaempher,
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]), I, 400.

50
  See Maria Rodriguez del Alisal, Peter Ackerman, and Dolores P. Martinez, eds.,
Pilgrimages and spiritual quests in Japan
(London: Routledge, 2007).

51
  Dobrée,
Japanese Sword Blades
, 11.

52
  According to Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka to Nihon-Bunka
, 27, the Japanese did, in fact, embellish with gold and silver certain swords that were used for ritual purposes.

53
  Catharina Blomberg,
The Heart of the Warrior
(Sandgate, UK: Japan Library, 1994), 55; Coats, “Arms & Armor,” 263.

54
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 92.

55
  
Todo o norte desquberto
. Far be it for Frois to make a direct reference to the
derriere
.

56
  Erika Rummel ed.,
The Erasmus Reader
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 105.

57
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 45, 50, 67.

58
  Mary Dobson,
Tudor Odours
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

59
  Sir Rutherford Alcock,
The Capital of the Tycoon, A Narrative of a Three Years' Residence in Japan
(London: Longman, Green, and Roberts, 1863), I, 394.

60
  See Money L. Hickman, ed.,
Japan's Golden Age, Momoyama
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 70, 85

61
  See the book cover to the Penguin edition (1966) of Basho's
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
, which features a reproduction of a portrait of Basho in the Itsuo Museum in Ikeda City, Osaka.

62
  Phillip Franz Von Siebold,
Manners and Customs of the Japanese in the Nineteenth Century
(Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1973[1841]), 25–26.

63
  Woods-Marsden,
Renaissance Self-Portraiture
, 31.

64
  See 1-1a, 1-4a, 1-8a, 1-12a, and 1-13a above.

65
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka to Nihon-Bunka
, 33.

66
  
Primor
. Elsewhere (see footnote 17 above) we have translated this term as stylish. Here we elected to go with “dandier” as it seems more consistent with Frois' thoroughly male-gendered perspective.

67
  
Aljibeiras
.

68
  Paris in 1292 (with a population of seventy thousand) had twenty-six public bathhouses. François De Bonneville,
The Book of the Bath
(New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1998[1997]), 34. Today perhaps only the Finns can be said to enjoy public bathing. Garrett G. Fagan,
Bathing in Public in the Roman World
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 1–2.

69
  
Chapis
.

70
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 45.

71
  
Primor
.

72
  João Rodrigues,
This Island of Japon
, trans. and ed. Michael Cooper (Tokyo: Kodansha International Limited, 1973[ca. 1620]).

73
  Part of the text is missing here, but what is missing begins with the letter ‘r,' most likely (given the context)
remendar
, or repair.

74
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka to Nihon-Bunka
, 38.

2   Women, their persons and customs

1. In Europe a young woman's supreme honor and treasure is her chastity and the inviolate cloister of her purity; women in Japan pay no mind to virginal purity nor does a loss of virginity deprive them of honor or matrimony
.

During the sixteenth century European women continued to struggle as they had for centuries with societal norms that cast them in a subordinate role relative to men. Although women did “men's work” (e.g. butcher, fisher, merchant, renter, moneylender, sovereign), and did it well
¹
this reality was systematically obscured and women by and large were denied access to education, opportunity, and power. The situation
might
have been better for Japanese women; it is hard to say, given that literature and the historical record are ambiguous. While Shinto's most beloved
kami
was a woman–(the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu–) and the Pure Land schools of Buddhism proclaimed women capable of salvation, Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism more frequently spoke of women as “imperfect” (respectively: sources of pollution; spiritually “obstructed;” a potential threat to familial harmony) and best suited to supporting roles.

As this first distich and the twenty-seven that follow suggest, Europeans treated women's bodies as a fetish. This fetishization is often reflected in Frois' surprise that Japanese women's clothing revealed as much as it did. Beginning with distich twenty-nine, Frois' focus is more on behavior and rights and responsibilities. Again, the tone of the distichs is one of surprise that Japanese women enjoyed inheritance of property, relative freedom of movement, etc.

While Frois' distichs in this chapter necessarily provide a partial picture of the lives of women in Japan as well as Europe, they tend to support recent scholarship that has emphasized the significant changes in gender roles in Japan, particularly since the Meiji Period (1868–1912). The Japan that Frois experienced was a nation of mostly farm households and small businesses (i.e., artisans and merchants) where men and women worked together at home, sharing many rights and responsibilities, including nurturing and child-rearing. Complicating matters, however, was the rise to power of the samurai during the late medieval and warring states period (1467–1568), which created a privileged male culture centered on warfare. The empowerment of the samurai class and the subsequent emulation of their norms by lesser classes undermined the relative gender equality that Frois mentions or alludes to. Gender inequality was further exacerbated during the second half of the nineteenth century when the Japanese state whole-heartedly pursued
industrialization, relegating women to a cult of domesticity while promoting male education and employment away from home.
²

As regards this first distich, the Christian church has a long history going back to late antiquity and the “Church fathers” of glorifying female chastity.
³
In Portugal and the rest of Mediterranean Europe, the post-Tridentine Church was obsessed with female chastity.
⁴
In Japan, by contrast, premarital sex was an accepted part of courting; “night-crawling” (
yobai
) was an ancient practice that continued well into the twentieth century in rural parts of Japan.
⁵
Some young women also prostituted themselves to support their poor families and gain dowries for their subsequent marriages. They were not criticized for doing so because: 1) coitus had no stigma in a Shinto culture, where, for instance, people sang explicitly bawdy songs while planting rice; 2) the women acted to help others and did not act from selfish desire, something that would be considered bad from a Buddhist point of view; and 3) they were behaving in an exemplary manner from the point of view of Confucian ethics, where assisting one's parents and superiors was the cardinal virtue. Among the upper class, marriages generally were arranged and women were discouraged from intercourse with other men lest their affection be alienated, but virginity
per se
was not at issue.

During the post-World War II occupation of Japan by the United States, many Japanese took on more conservative American values, including a virgin-until-marriage mindset. Indeed, during the 1960s the Japanese press criticized the West for being “sexually promiscuous.” However, by the end of the twentieth century Japanese attitudes were similar to Europeans', both of whom, for instance, thought Americans made too big a deal of President Clinton's sexual promiscuity.

2. Women in Europe greatly prize and do everything possible to have blond hair; women in Japan abhor it and do all they can to make their hair black
.

Europeans as far back as the Romans apparently believed that “blondes have more fun,”
⁶
presumably because the hair color is reminiscent of men's other preoccupation: gold. Women in sixteenth-century Iberia were chastised by moralists
such as Fray Luis de Leon for dying their hair blond (“God save us from such ruination”). In Japan, on the other hand, raven black (
nubatama
) hair was
the
classic mark of a beauty.

3. Women in Europe part their hair at the forehead; in Japan they shave their foreheads and conceal the part
.

European women not only parted their hair, but some noblewomen also shaved their scalps or used a caustic paste (ceruse) to accentuate their foreheads and lighten their eyebrows.
⁷
This attention to the forehead was an aesthetic complement to the tall hats with veils (
crespina
) that were fashionable in Portugal and other parts of Europe (e.g.,
hennin
).
⁸

Japanese women shaved their hairline to create what Westerners might call a widow's peak and what the Japanese call
fujibitai
(literally Mount Fuji-brow). Okada wonders, however, if Frois is referring in this distich to a
naka-zori
, a spot in the scalp shaved for the purpose of inserting a small pillow to construct a hairdo. It is unclear whether this Tokugawa era-style yet existed in 1585.
⁹

4. Women in Europe perfume their hair with fragrant aromas; Japanese women always walk about reeking of the oil they use to anoint their hair
.

Japanese women in ancient times placed cloves in their hair oil (
mizu-abura
, literally water-oil), which was made from sesame and camellia oil. Okada cites a work of literature where a woman is advised to trade in her sesame oil for less smelly but more expensive walnut oil. How ironic that European women, who bathed infrequently, apparently smelled good thanks to perfume, while Japanese women, who bathed every day, apparently reeked.

5. Women in Europe rarely add hair from other sources to their own; women in Japan buy many wigs brought through trade with China
.

It might be more accurate to say that wealthy European women
infrequently
used wigs or hairpieces; some did so for a fuller effect or because their own hair was too thin.
¹⁰

Some Japanese noblewomen did wear several lengths of hair in serial. Okada notes that the Japanese had professionals whose job was to purchase hair lost through brushing, which was recycled as wigs. It is likely that the Chinese “wigs” spoken of by Frois were, properly speaking,
kamoji
, which were large hair buns stuffed with yak hair. Europeans were behind in the wig game, but even as Frois wrote the male wig had begun to take root among English professional men and would soon spread throughout much of Europe.