The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (23 page)

4
  Irina Metzler,
Disability in Medieval Europe
(London: Routledge, 2006), 174. See also Beekman,
The Mechanical Baby
, 4–5, 24.

5
  Joy Hendry,
Becoming Japanese, The World of the Pre-School Child
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 19–22.

6
  
Faxis
, from the Japanese
hashi
.

7
  Hendry,
Becoming Japanese
, 51–57; Shing-Jen Chen, “Positive Childishness: Images of Childhood in Japan.”
In Images of Childhood
, eds. C.P. Hwange, M.E. Lamb, and I.E. Siegel, pp.113–128 (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996); Anne Allison, “Producing Mothers,” In
Re-Imagining Japanese Women
, ed. Ann E. Inamura, pp. 135–155 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

8
  
Varelas
, a Portuguese term for Buddhist temples, derived from Malaysian or Javanese. The Japanese called the schools
terakoya
, “temple-small-room” or “temple-child-room.”

9
  Luther and other reformers argued that Christians should read the bible rather than have it read to them. This imperative, rather than a desire to promote social mobility, seems to have prompted the establishment of schools for commoners. Keith Thomas,
The Ends of Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 18–19.

10
  As previously noted, girls generally were taught to read but not write. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks,
Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 147. See also Paul F. Grendler,
Schooling in Renaissance Italy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 87–109.

11
  That very year the Jesuits opened their first school in Messina, Italy.

12
  Michael Cooper,
They Came to Japan, An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 242.

13
  
Jugar
. Frois is probably referring here to board games such as
shogi
and
go
, which are similar to chess.

14
  Isabel M.R. Drummond Braga, “Foreigners, Sodomy, and the Portuguese Inquisition.” In
Pelo Vaso Traseiro
, eds. Harold Johnson and Francis Dutra, pp. 145–165 (Tucson: Fenestra Books, 2008), 156–158; Thomas,
The Ends of Life
, 205–206.

15
  
Catana. … vakizaxi
.

16
  Thomas,
The Ends of Life
, 62–77.

17
  In their Japanese-language edition of the
Tratado
, Matsuda and Jorissen write that Frois exaggerated, inasmuch as the teenage Japanese ambassadors who left Japan in 1584 to travel to Europe recounted meeting three teenage sons of a Portuguese count who all wore swords.
Touché
? Not quite. A formal occasion is not the same as wearing a sword or swords all the time, as was the case for little samurai.

18
  
….os de Japáo sáo nisto estranhamente inteiros, em tanto que poem admirasáo
.

19
  See Hendry,
Becoming Japanese
, 85–96.

20
  Akio Okada, trans. and ed.,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
[European Culture and Japanese Culture] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965), 66.

21
  Ibid., 67.

22
  There is some evidence from the seventeenth century that suggests that the lives of most Japanese children under five were made as pleasant as possible and afterwards the children were treated more strictly and given age and gender specific tasks. Anne Walthall, “The Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan,” in
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945
, ed. Gail L. Bernstein, pp. 42–70 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 45. See also Kathleen S. Uno, “Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor.” In
Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945
, ed. Gail L. Bernstein, pp. 17–42. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 22.

23
  In Frois' time these festivals were called Doll-festival (
Hinamatsuri
) and Carp-banner (
Koinobori
) and were celebrated on March 3 and May 5, respectively.

24
  Edo (Tokyo) during the seventeenth century is said to have had innumerable vendors of services and toys catering to children, with everything from soap bubbles (
shabon
) to tiny kinetic toys like those for which Japan became famous during the immediately post-World War II era.

25
  
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 67.

26
  Takie Sugiyama Lebra, “Migawari: The Cultural Idiom of Self-Other Exchange.” In
Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice
,” eds. Roger T. Ames, Wimal Dissanayake, and Thomas P. Kasulis, pp. 107–125 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994).

27
  
Crisma
.

28
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 206.

29
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 67.

30
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 237. The Sino-Japanese system of address (country-state-city-street-number-name) and dating (era-year-month-day) follows the same logic.

31
  And perhaps most parts of Europe. See Thomas,
The Ends of Life
, 190.

32
  
Os filhos
.

33
  
Japanese Girls and Women
(London: Kegan Paul, 2001[1892]).

34
  Neither Europeans nor Japanese living in the sixteenth century were “workaholics;” most people worked because they had to and preferred to be idle. Thomas,
The Ends of Life
, 81–82.

35
  
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 68–69.

36
  
Arrebige e alvayade
. Although arrebique generally meant “makeup,” in this case it may refer to rouge, inasmuch as the term appears along alvaiade, a powder made from white lead.

37
  
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 69.

4   Concerning the
bonzes
1
and their customs

1. Among us, men enter religious life in order to do penance and to save their souls; the bonzes enter religious life to live in pleasure and ease and to escape hardships
.

Frois' own life choices and identity as a Jesuit, not to mention the fact that superiors saw everything he wrote,
²
made it seemingly impossible for him to acknowledge the worth of another religion, never mind the shortcomings that accrued to his own Catholicism.
³
Of course, by 1585 Protestant reformers had compiled a long list of Church shortcomings. Frois was not about to repeat such complaints.

Frois was well aware that some men in Europe became clerics or joined religious orders to enjoy a life of relative leisure and to, in effect, escape hardship.
⁴
What was true of Christianity was true of Buddhism. For instance, various Zen sects (not unlike the Jesuit order) attracted large numbers of novices from wealthy and powerful families. Like Jesuit novices, many or most of these would-be monks were animated by a desire for enlightenment or “salvation.” Still, others became bonzes to escape (at least in part) difficult family situations or to enjoy a life free from manual labor.

2. Among us, one subsequently professes vows to be pure of soul and chaste of body; the bonzes profess vows to all manner of inner filth and all the nefarious sins of the flesh
.

In his eleventh century treatise on sodomy,
The Book of Gomorrah
, St. Peter Damian acknowledged that sodomy was commonly seen as “the vice of
the clergy.”
⁵
At the time Frois wrote,
pecado nefando
(unspeakable sin) remained widespread among Catholic clerics, monks and religious, even if the Church and inquisition railed against it.
⁶
Sodomy certainly seems to have been less controversial among Buddhist monks and the Japanese as a whole,
⁷
but it is hardly true that Buddhist monks took vows to “all inner filth.”

3. Among us, a vow of poverty is made to God and worldly riches are shunned; the bonzes fleece their followers and seek countless ways to increase their wealth
.

Frois' contemporary, the Florentine voyager and merchant, Francesco Carletti (1573–1636), offered a perfect foil to this unfair contrast of the best Christians and the worst Buddhists. In an aside he commented on an austere sect of Buddhism that rivaled the asceticism of an Antony and other Christian ascetics:

They all lead a sterile life, in imitation of the founder, who introduced it [to Japan]. They say of him that he never ate anything but cooked rice, and sometimes raw rice, and that to do greater penitence he always wore an iron chain tight against his flesh, where it had made such a sore that it became putrid, generating and nourishing a quantity of worms. And if one of these worms happened to fall to the ground, he would pick it up lovingly and with charity and put it back in the sore, saying: ‘Why are you fleeing? Are you perhaps lacking something to eat?'
⁸

4. Among us, one professes and vows obedience to his superior; the bonzes each do as they please and obey their prelate only by happenstance, as they see fit
.

Most Buddhism in Japan was hardly that anarchistic. Some Zen sects, however, made a point of free thinking and independence, even going so far as to abuse the Buddha and the Patriarchs. The way they flaunted disobedience must have horrified the Jesuits. Frois' generalized contrast between Western religion, with its strict order, and a more individualistic Eastern religion, is a welcome counterpoint to the orientalist depiction of the obedient oriental, even if Frois did not intend it as a compliment.

5. Among us, the temporal possessions of religious are held in common; the bonzes all have their own property and earn [
money
] in order to acquire [
property
]
.

It is perhaps true as a generalization that Japanese religious enjoyed more personal effects than their Western counterparts. For instance, most Japanese had their own bowls, chopsticks, tea cups, writing equipment, bedding, clothing, and, within limits, spending money.

By now the reader should suspect that Frois is not about to say anything nice about Buddhist priests or monks. The Jesuits believed they were on a mission from God, and as noted in the critical introduction, they were delighted when Japanese converts, particularly
daimyo
, seized or destroyed Buddhist temples, causing the
bonzes
to flee or apostatize.

6. Among us, the faithful belong to a parish and not to a particular clergyman; the bonzes divide the people amongst themselves so that each is fed by those under his charge
.

You would never know from Frois that being a parish priest or cathedral canon in Europe was a desirable position, often because parishioners gave generously or paid handsomely for a funeral mass or a special petition to the Virgin Mary.
⁹
The territoriality of the
bonzes
(at least young
bonzes
and begging bonzes, who went door to door) was recorded as late as the Meiji period (1868–1912). A haiku by Shiki, known as the father of modern haiku, jokes of an alms-gathering monk walking into a dead end: another alms-gathering monk.

7. Among us, religious condemn their congregations' sins without regard for social niceties; the bonzes court their followers and praise their sins so that they will not strip them of their income
.

Frois again speaks of the ideal situation with respect to Europe and the sordid reality of Japan. During his lifetime many of his fellow Jesuits became advisors and confessors to Europe's rich and powerful. Jesuits as a whole were advised to seek out the powerful, since one devout Catholic noble could provide enormous help funding Jesuit schools, residences, or missionary activities. It is hard to believe that Jesuit confessors did not, on occasion, refrain from condemning the sins of the kings, dukes, and other elites whom they served as spiritual advisors.

8. Among us, religious do not wear silk clothing out of contempt for the world; all the bonzes who can, wear silk to better display their pride and vanity before the world
.

This contrast beautifully reverses the Orientalist idea of Far Eastern religion as other-worldly nihilism. Japanese Buddhists were one of the most proselytizing groups in Asia. Buddhist or Christian, attractive clothing (and for that matter, good looks) never hurt a preacher man. Writing toward the end of the tenth century, Sei Shonagon commented:

A preacher ought to be good-looking. For, if we are properly to understand his worthy sentiments, we must keep our eyes on him while he speaks; should we look away, we may forget to listen. Accordingly an ugly preacher may well be the source of sin …
¹⁰

9. Among us, good religious abhor and have great fear of honors and being promoted to positions as dignitaries; the bonzes in Japan spend great sums of money on these things and all of them avidly pursue these promotions
.

Frois, to his credit, finally qualifies the European side of this distich, implicitly acknowledging that some Catholic religious were not observant of their vows. As usual, however, he makes no such distinction for the bonzes, saying they were
all
bankrupt. Qualifications aside, the Jesuits in particular made it a rule not to accept titles and honors. However, not all Christian religious were so humble; many Franciscans and Dominicans, and even the Jesuits, on rare occasions, accepted privileges that went with titles and ranks.
¹¹
The question then becomes whether the
bonzes
differed greatly from Christian religious; arguably the difference was one of degree not kind.