The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (59 page)

As with so many Japanese customs, the principle of collective responsibility appears to have been borrowed from China, although in China the emphasis was on reporting on your neighbors rather than the responsibility of the group to work out their troubles by themselves. That said, during the Tokuagawa period the Japanese developed their own “impressive” internal spy system, which horrified Westerners (“Everybody is watched. No man knows who are the secret spies around him … This wretched system is even extended to the humblest of the citizens.”
²³
)

9. Among us, people are not crucified; this is very common in Japan
.

It is true, Europeans did not crucify. However, this probably had more to do with respecting Jesus than shunning cruelty. Sixteenth century Europe was home to some very public forms of torture and execution, everything from breaking on the wheel to burning, quartering, mutilation, and exposure on the scaffold or pillory.
²⁴

Okada gives a list of ten forms of Japanese punishment that were extant in Frois' time, including one as gruesome as “our” skinning and quartering: the “saw-pull,” where—if Japanese TV “Easterns” are to be believed—passersby were actually required to take a pull at a saw that slowly cut through a man in a stock by the side of the road!

According to Okada, before the arrival of Europeans (pre 1540s), the Japanese often crucified individuals, head down. Apparently, by Frois' time it was mostly done head up. Writing in 1610, Careletti noted that the Japanese, unlike the Romans, provided some support between the legs and under the feet. Victims were tied to the cross with ropes or “with iron straps hammered into the wood.” The cross was then lifted and the base was slid into a prepared hole. Then, at a judge's order—this is where the last minute reprieve arrives in Japanese TV “Easterns”—lances were simultaneously thrust up and through the body, from the right and left, with the intention of piercing vital organs and hastening death. It was not always as merciful, since skillful executioners could pierce the body as many as sixteen times, avoiding vital organs.
²⁵
Carletti saw people left alive on crosses, and “they similarly crucify women with babies still nursing at their breasts, so that both the one and the other die of privation.” Carletti describes hellish scenes:

along all the streets and roads …. one sees nothing …. but crosses full of men, of women, or of children ….”
²⁶

This last quote pertains to the martyrdom of twenty six Christians at Nagasaki in February of 1597. They were left up as a warning to other Japanese contemplating conversion to Christianity. Of course, Europeans engaged in similar extremes of [in]human behavior. In Aubrey's
Brief Lives
, which was written toward the end of the seventeenth century, he recounted a story about the head of Sir Thomas More, which had been placed on a pole atop London Bridge:

There goes this story in the family, viz. that one day as one of his daughters was passing under the Bridge, looking on her father's head, sayd she, That head haz layn many a time in my Lapp, would to God it would fall into my Lap as I passe under. She had her wish, and it did fall into her Lappe, and is now preserved in a vault in the Cathedral Church at Canterbury.
²⁷

10. Among us, servants are reprimanded and serfs are punished by whipping; in Japan the reprimand and punishment is beheading
.

This is an extension of
#5
above. As noted, during the politically unsettled sixteenth century some
daimyo
took the already severe samurai code and made it stricter with “amendments” or the
daimyo's
own house code. These local regulations severely limited individual rights. For instance, commoners were prohibited (often on pain of death) from travelling or farming without first securing permission from the local lord.
²⁸
However, there is a paradox here. Judging from what Valignano wrote in his
Sumario
(1583),
²⁹
samurai or
daimyo
undoubtedly thought twice before punishing or abusing their servants, for servants had high self-esteem and might avenge an insult by killing their master and committing suicide.
³⁰
Thus, stories of the famously sadistic shogun Nobunaga, who reputedly decapitated a servant girl for leaving the stem of a fruit on the
tatami
, may overstate the cruelty of Japanese elites. On the whole (see
Chapter 11
,
#27
), they probably were no better or worse than European elites.

11. Among us there are prisons, judicial authorities, civil servants in the justice system, and prison superintendents
³¹
; the Japanese have none of these, nor do they make use of whipping, cutting off ears, or hanging
.

As noted above, European justice frequently entailed some form of corporal punishment (e.g. death, mutilation, whipping) administered in public and with great theatricality (e.g. use of scaffolds, processions, masked executioners). Jail or “prison” was where you waited until your sentence was administered; they were not punishment
per se
. This all changed during Frois' lifetime, when more and more judges sentenced criminals to imprisonment (often with forced labor) or penal servitude (e.g. oarsmen on a Mediterranean galley, as per
chapter 12
,
#10
).
³²

Apparently during the unsettled, warring-states era the Japanese closed or otherwise made little use of prisons or jails.

12. Among us, when stolen goods are found they are returned by law to the owner; in Japan stolen goods that are found are confiscated by the court as lost
.

Few if any European towns or cities in the sixteenth century had a “police force” that systematically retrieved stolen property, which, ironically, was more likely to be returned to the victim not by the police or a magistrate but by the thief, for a fee.
³³
Throughout Iberia and other parts of Europe voluntary associations or brotherhoods “policed” roads, markets, and neighborhoods (these associations were not unlike the volunteer fire departments found today in many smaller American communities).

As politically turbulent Japan rapidly unified, there was evidently a lot of confiscation going on under one pretext or another (Okada cites a document showing that, by law, stolen goods were supposed to be returned to their owners in Japan).

13. Among us, men, women and children are afraid of the night; in Japan, to the contrary, neither young nor old have any fear of it
.

Europeans had good reason to fear the night, given the crime and murder rates that obtained in sixteenth-century European cities. Many Europeans also worried about witches, the devil, and even the moon. In his influential treatise “On the diseases that rob man of reason,” Paracelsus (1493–1541) wrote that the phases of the moon were responsible in part for various expressions of mania, such as frantic behavior and mischievousness.
³⁴

Most Japanese probably felt relatively safe in the light of the full moon, for it was identified with the cleansing mercy of Buddha. While “our” moon spawned werewolves and maniacs, the Japanese moon made even savage boars take a break from ravaging farms. Gazing up at the night sky, the Japanese equated the Milky Way with the home of souls; every year they celebrated a star festival for the “loving stars” (the Herder and the Weaver). Still, as far as pitch-black nights go, one has
to wonder if the Japanese were all that comfortable with the darkness. Arguably the Japanese always have had a greater variety of ghosts than Westerners, and it is hard to believe parents never used them to get children to go to sleep. During the Tokugawa era, when these ghosts evidently had their heyday, it would seem that fear got the upper hand, for here is Scidmore writing in 1897:

The outer veranda is closed at night and in bad weather by
amados
, solid wooden screens or shutters that rumble and bang their way back and forth in their grooves. These
amados
are without windows or air holes, and the servants will not willingly leave a gap for ventilation. “But thieves may get in, or the
kappa
! they cry, the kappa being a mythical animal always ready to fly away with them. In every room is placed an
andon
or night lamp.
³⁵

The Japanese today usually close these shutters, not to keep out the
kappa
, but because of a fear of catching night chills. Okada believes that Frois was referring specifically in this contrast to the children of the samurai, who were trained to be brave by making night-time excursions alone to cemeteries and so forth.

14. We, generally speaking, are afraid of snakes and are disgusted by touching them; the Japanese easily and fearlessly pick them up, and some eat them
.

Although it has been suggested that fear of snakes is “natural” and was inscribed in the DNA of our bush-loving Hominid ancestors, human beings can love snakes just as easily as they fear them. If Westerners dislike snakes it is mostly because the poor reptile has been implicated in humankinds' “fall;” snakes also are commonplace in Western literary and artistic depictions of hell.
³⁶

Vipers, in particular, were thought by the Japanese to be especially good for virility. Even today one can find airline-portion bottles of whiskey with viper extract on the counter of almost every liquor store in Japan. Many snakes were considered edible, but white ones were taboo, for Shinto held them to be sacrosanct messengers from the Earth. Still, the Japanese did not usually get as close to snakes as Indians with their cobra cults, unless one is to believe
senryu
of the eighteenth century, which mention doctors using frogs to lure snakes out of human cavities. Supposedly, in the seedy part of Edo, women who were powdered and rouged to look like
Benten
, goddess of prosperity and a synonym for beauty, trained snakes to crawl into their privies (as part of a strip-show) and sometimes had trouble getting them out. Eventually (this much seems to be fact), authorities cracked down on these shows for “cruelty to animals.”

15. Sneezing is a natural thing for us and we think nothing of it; on the islands of Goto it is thought to be an omen and anyone who sneezes cannot speak that same day to their lord
.
³⁷

Here, as elsewhere, Frois conveniently ignores European customs that smacked of magic, including imploring God to bless someone who has just sneezed. “God Bless you” apparently was a common refrain during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, when the plague repeatedly devastated European cities.

Sneezes may have gotten a bit more attention in Japan than in Europe, for there is ample literature on masking sneezes with words and
vice versa
. Even the old word for sneeze (
kusame
) may have originally meant “That I don't rot!,” or was derived from “Eat shit!” (
kuso kurae
), both charms against bad spirits. But note that Frois does not refer to Japan, but rather the Goto Islands, which are about forty kilometers closer to China than Hirado, Japan. Shortly after Frois came to Japan he spent at least several months on these islands, and he devoted three delightful pages to the islanders' “superstitions” in his
Historia
.
³⁸
The islanders closely abided by a calendar of auspicious and inauspicious days.
³⁹
According to Frois they lived in great fear of and constantly propitiated the Devil. His main example of such “superstitious customs” is far more fascinating to us than the sneezing, for it seems to exemplify what we now think of as responsible stewardship of the earth. In the last sentence of the following quote, Frois indirectly recognized the benefit of “superstition”:

Wherever they are, whatever type of place it is, when they cut the wood to fuel their salt pots [apparently salt was one of their export items], in order that their pot not be cursed by the gods, they leave untouched, for the gods, an especially verdant and pleasant place, be it an entire hill or a part of the forest that is covered with particularly tall and valuable trees. No pagans take so much as a twig from these trees though it only be for medicinal purposes. If someone were to cut even a little from those trees, it would end up costing him a lot. This is not only because of some sort of disaster or curse of the gods, but because that person must make amends in the form of ceremonies and money to fulfill his duty for the sin of cutting off tree limbs [on such a mountain] by planting a fixed number of trees. Because of that, and because when times are hard the people pledge to the gods [not to cut certain areas], the many places they have dedicated to the gods are covered with green and there is beautiful scenery for the people.
⁴⁰

Today, the Japanese are still particularly attentive to and averse to sneezing. Many Japanese men and almost all Japanese women stifle or completely kill their sneezes.

16. We use coins made of gold and silver; in Japan they circulate pieces whose value depends on their weight
.
⁴¹

In both Europe and Japan the period from around 1200–1500 CE witnessed the rise of towns and cities with ever-expanding market economies that necessitated a shift from a reliance on bartering to the use of money, particularly coins fashioned solely of one precious metal or combinations of gold and silver or silver and copper. Although Frois seems to imply that European coins were standardized or invariable, this was mostly true of higher denomination, “stable” gold and silver coins (e.g. Portugal's silver
cruzado
, France's gold
écu au soleil
or Spain's gold
escudo
or silver “piece of eight”).
⁴²
Fluctuations in supplies of precious metals (e.g. massive imports of silver from the Americas beginning around 1530) led to fluctuations in gold-silver ratios and silver-copper ratios, which in turn, led to speculation and monetary uncertainty.
⁴³
There also were occasions when rulers devalued their currency to raise capital. During the late fourteenth century, for instance, the crown of Portugal devalued the silver
real
to the point where it was almost entirely copper; the silver that otherwise would have gone into the
real
was used to fight a war with Castile and to finance the search for African gold.
⁴⁴