The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (45 page)

Caron would seem to be talking about the telegraphic Chinese style of writing. Women in Japan often used what Rodrigues described as a “soft and fluent style” with a particular vocabulary, which was every bit as long as “ours.”
¹⁵

15. Among us, writing between the lines would be uncouth; in Japan they always intentionally
¹⁶
write between the lines
.

Writing letters in which one shared experiences with fellow Jesuits, particularly one's superior, was an integral aspect of being a Jesuit missionary.
¹⁷
The Jesuits were part of a long tradition going back to the apostles and Greek and Roman forebears (e.g. Cicero) who understood “letter-writing” as a distinct genre. This European tradition, which conceived of the letter as an intimate conversation between friends,
¹⁸
dictated that a letter received was answered with a “fresh” response.

With respect to Japan, Okada
¹⁹
mentions a number of types of recognized
gyoukan-gaki
or “line-between-writing.” There is
otte-gaki
or “chasing-writing,” something like our postscript;
kaeshi-gaki
or “return writing,” where one person's letter is returned with the reply between the lines; and
nao-nao-gaki
or “this-too-this-too-writing,” which simply adds more detail.

If you did not read Okada's notes, you might conclude that this writing between the lines was phonetic syllabary written small, next to Chinese characters, thus supplying the pronunciation in the case of hard-to-read names, unique usage, or for the sake of poor readers. Such wonderful little training wheels (called
furigana
) permit one to play with Chinese characters. They have nevertheless reaped scorn from the West: “One hesitates for an epithet to describe a system of writing which is so complex that it needs the aid of another system to explain it.”
²⁰
Even the Japanese novelist turned pedagogue, Yamamoto Yuzo, has expressed exasperation at the procession of “disgusting black bugs” that crawl around our sentences.

16. Our letters are sent folded; Japanese letters are rolled up
.

While the Japanese are fond of
origami
or “fold-paper” art, and at times folded their letters,
²¹
Frois may be correct that letters ordinarily were rolled. It is hard to say why rolls might have been preferred. One reason may have been the availability of cheap tubes in the form of bamboo. Japanese literature does offer examples of letters that were folded and stuffed into the bosom for carrying, so the difference was not absolute. When during the nineteenth century Japan began “modernizing/Westernizing” and sending mail by the packet, Morse wrote that the old style letterboxes big enough to fit a number of rolls (see
#19
below) were abandoned as too bulky. Letters written on paper attached to a roll “… were torn off, … flattened by smoothing with the hand, and slid into a long, narrow envelope.”
²²

16A. Among us, we indicate the year in which we are writing; the Japanese give only the day of the lunar [
month
] in which it is sent
.

(This contrast was not numbered in the original manuscript.) The European/Christian worldview is predicated on a linear, progressive notion of the passage of time, which it is believed will culminate in Christ's return and life without end (for the saved). Therefore, marking the passage of years since Christ's birth (i.e. AD,
Anno Domini
, The Year of Our Lord) has figured in European timekeeping since the early sixth century, when a Scythian Monk, Dionysius Exiguus, introduced the qualifier
Anno Domini
.

Many of the letters of Hideyoshi, translated by Adriana Boscaro,
²³
follow the pattern suggested by Frois (e.g. “6
^th
month, 20
^th
day,” “12
^th
month, 2
^nd
day”).

17. The Christian era never changes from the birth of Christ to the end of the world; eras in Japan change six or seven times during the lifetime of a king
.

As suggested above, Shinto and Buddhism, the religious foundations of Japanese culture, make no claims to the unfolding of time in a linear, progressive fashion. The Japanese did not live out their lives reflecting on their temporal place in “God's unfolding plan.” What mattered was who was emperor; the latter could change the course of a million lives. Thus, the year in Japan was reset to “Year One” whenever an emperor died and a new reign began, or when a regent made a major policy change or there was a major disaster (the change was made for the sake of better luck). In the six decades before the
Tratado
was written there were new eras beginning in 1521, ‘28, ‘32, ‘55, ‘58, ‘70 and ‘73. And just before the Meiji Reformation (1868), we find eras beginning in 1844, ‘48, ‘54, ‘60, ‘61, ‘64 and ‘65.

In 1869 the
gengo
system was modified so that the era would only change with the inauguration of a new emperor. The system continues today alongside the Western/Christian system of reckoning time. Thus Japanese newspapers generally put both year dates on the top of each page (for example, 2005 appears alongside Heisei 17).

18. Our letters are sent sealed with beeswax or sealing wax; in Japan they place a small ink seal over the signature
.

The Japanese actually had more ways of sealing letters than Europeans. Okada
²⁴
mentions “glue-sealing, twist-sealing, knot-sealing, and fold-sealing and so forth.” But they did not stamp warm wax, be it bee's wax or wax made from a mixture of shellac, rosin, and turpentine. The symbolic closure Frois referred to was achieved by making an ink mark, either an initial, a diagonal line, or a diagonal line with a small line crossing it to make a sign resembling the syllable
me
, which stood for
shime
or “closed=tight=done.” Today it is common to initial documents in the same way, with the mark crossing the divide to make what is, to use a printing term, a registration.

19. Our letters are sent in bundled stacks; theirs are sent in small, elongated lacquered boxes made for that purpose
.

Every year, usually in March, a fleet bound for Asia sailed from Lisbon, arriving six months later in Goa, India. Another year might go by before the ships, loaded with spices, trade goods, passengers, and correspondence (collected from as far away as Japan), made the return trip to Europe. It was normal during this lengthy period between voyages for Jesuit correspondence to accumulate before it was eventually bundled and dispatched from Japan to India and then on to Europe.

As Frois indicates, the Japanese transported letters in special waterproof containers called
fubako
or
fuminohako
(letter-boxes).

20. In Europe paper is beaten flat with an iron mallet on a smooth stone; in Japan they roll it up on a round pole and beat it with two other poles
.

One of the first stages of rag-paper production entailed soaking discarded linen cloth, including underwear, in water and sometimes lime to break down the fibers. The resulting mass was subsequently placed in a trough and beaten before being subjected to further processing in vats, drying on felt, and final pressing to remove excess water. Although Frois may have observed rag-pulp being beaten by hand during his youth, by the time he left Portugal (1548) water mills were being employed in Europe for large-scale paper production.
²⁵

In Kochi Prefecture, which is famous for its handmade paper (
Toshi Washi
), Japanese artisans still make some of the highest-quality paper in the world, employing methods that go back to the sixteenth century, including beating the still unfinished paper with poles.

21. We clean the ink off our quills by wiping them on our black clothing; the Japanese suck them clean with their mouths
.

Although the Jesuit order did not require members to wear particular garb, the Jesuits early on distinguished themselves by a preference for the simple black cassock worn by priests (thus the appellation “the black robes”). With respect to the Japanese, any sucking that is done is done after the ink has been essentially removed from the brush by brushing it dry. Arguably the sucking is to smooth out the hairs and leave the brush with a sharp point. This has more to do with arranging the point of the brush before it fully dries than with cleaning.

22. We write our letters at a table or desk; the Japanese write theirs upon the fingers of the left hand
.

When the Japanese teenagers sent by the Jesuits as ambassadors to Europe met with Phillip II at the recently completed Escorial, in 1585, they gave him a gift of a writing desk made of bamboo.
²⁶
In point of fact, the Japanese had very nice portable desks and generally used them to write. Still, prints from the seventeenth century often show letter writers holding the paper in their left hand and the brush in their right. This delicate style of writing, with its touching body language, was possible because a brush does not need to push down on paper like a pen to release ink. Writing on paper held by the hand releases a different, connected sensibility physically (and perhaps mentally) that is not there when writing on a desk or the floor, where Japanese calligraphy is usually done.

23. We seal our letters with scissors; they seal theirs with a knife
.

Frois wrote “seal” in both halves of this distich; he presumably meant to write “open.” The knife used by the Japanese as a letter-opener was called a
sasuga
(“stab sword”) and was kept in a writing box with the inkstand, ink stick, water vessel, etc.

24. We sprinkle sand on our letters [
to absorb excess ink
]; theirs is absorbed quickly by their paper
.

Sand has a wonderful capacity to absorb water or oil, and of course, ink, which, as noted above, often consisted in large part of one or both mediums.

25. Our handwriting is very small; theirs is larger than our uppercase letters
.

Small, indeed! The British Library has one of two extant copies of Alessandro Valignano's 1601 manuscript account of the Jesuit mission to Japan (
Libro Primero del Principio
…), and the lettering is so fine and small that a modern reader requires (or certainly benefits from) a magnifying glass. The majority of classical texts discovered and celebrated by Humanists during the Renaissance were in Carolingian miniscule,
²⁷
which does not use all upper-case letters. Well-educated Europeans such as Frois and Valignano grew up imitating the Carolingians. For this and other reasons (e.g. paper and ink were expensive
²⁸
), European handwriting tended to be on the small side.

Now that brushes are used only for signing art gallery registers and writing old-style New Year greetings, Japanese letters are written by ballpoint or are printed about the same size as ours, despite, in the case of characters, holding ten times the visual information.

26. The stanzas in our ballads are made up of four, six or eight lines; all Japanese songs contain only two verses, with no rhyme
.

During Frois' lifetime the Italian Renaissance exerted a significant influence on Portuguese literature and many of Frois' contemporaries followed Petrarch's example of ballads that followed the octave and sextet rhyming scheme (i.e. abba, abba, aba, aba).
²⁹
Even before the Italian Renaissance, Portugal had its own medieval tradition of poetic parallelism that resulted in ballads with even-numbered stanzas.
³⁰

The name for Japanese classical verse,
waka
, literally breaks down into “peace=Japanese + song.” Poets were said to “sing” poetry rather than to “make” or “write” it. (The Chinese character for the verb was different than that used for singing a truly melodic song, however.) Frois' use of
cantigas
(‘canticles' or poetry set to music) for Japanese poems suggests he understood the sung aspect of the verse. While Japanese poetry, unlike Chinese poetry, did not use obvious end-rhyme, it is not right to say that there was no consonance. There is considerable Dickinsonian rhyme, which is usually considered to be assonance or “vowel rhyme,” which can be brought out through parsing.

27. Our reading is done very quickly; when they read, they do so inserting pauses and taking little leaps [
forward in the text
]
.

Most Japanese can read as quickly as Westerners, despite the fact that the pronunciation of many characters depends upon a context that is sometimes not grasped until the word has passed before the eyes. Here Frois must be describing how the Japanese read Chinese or pseudo-Chinese, called
kanbun
. This is one of the cleverest ways to read that has ever been invented, for the Japanese mark the edges of the lines with a number of signs that indicate how to change the word order and parse the grammar of the original as one reads. They are translating, then, or rather, doing simultaneous interpretation. One method of doing this does not vocalize; the other, which does, also gives native Japanese word equivalents for many of the characters.

This writing is of intellectual interest because it shows how Chinese characters (or any large vocabulary common to more than one language) allowed for communication between different languages.

28. We write on tall tables, seated on chairs; they write while seated on small stools placed on the ground or on mats
.

This distich appears to be related to
#22
above, where the focus is on one style of Japanese writing that does not entail use of a desk. Ironically, the traditional Japanese desk (going back to at least the sixteenth century) is one of the few examples of “furniture” in Japan. The small desk has folding legs and sometimes a writing surface on which the angle can be adjusted. Arguably, during the latter half of the twentieth century Japan could boast more desks
per capita
than any nation in the world. A Japanese child may not have their own bedroom but they invariably have their own desk.