Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai

by Thomas Lockley

  The answer was to bring carefully selected bible stories to life through pictures and dramas. In Yasuke’s Japan, the Jesuit mission was always crying out for more devotional pictures which had to come all the way from Europe. They would never have enough until a printing press arrived in 1590 and started to mass-produce Christian artwork and texts. The “divinity play,” a drama enacted from a bible story, took on an enormous significance. The Japanese Christians learned about their new religion, its stories, its morals and its meaning, through both acting and viewing these live dramas. In the words of Goethe, who witnessed Jesuit dramas in the eighteenth century, “This public performance has again convinced me of the cleverness of the Jesuits. They despised nothing which could in any way be effective... There are some also who devote themselves with knowledge and inclination to the theatre and in the same manner in which they distinguish their churches by a pleasing magnificence, these intelligent men here have made themselves masters of the worldly senses by means of a theatre worthy of respect.”

  Adoration of the Magi, Andrea Mantegna 1495–1505. Balthazar is clearly depicted as an African.

  And so it was, at Christmas 1579, that Yasuke found himself in the grounds of the newly formed Kazusa seminary acting the part of Balthazar, the black-skinned magus who, by Catholic tradition, gave the baby Jesus his present of myrrh. The grounds of the former temple were well lit, the stone toro lanterns blushing with flickering flames in the faint sea breeze and the trees hung with red-and-white paper lanterns. Behind, the waves broke gently on the golden beach. People had walked, sailed or rowed for days to be there and Yasuke estimated the crowd, sitting and standing around the stage area, the former temple entrance, at nearly a thousand. Children adorned the trees, clamoring for a better view. These Christmas spectacles and huge gatherings had been a tradition ever since the first Christmas mass was celebrated in Japan nearly thirty years before.

  Despite the winter chill, the mass of humanity and the flames warmed the atmosphere as the spectacle of the Christ Child’s birth unfolded before them. The other actors were local boys, both seminary students and village boys who attended the catechism classes; they struggled with the Latin words, but that was unimportant. It was the spectacle the audience had come for. Well-placed Japanese-speaking Jesuits in the crowd kept the audience informed of the proceedings and the significance of what was going on.

  Yasuke had seen many such plays on his travels with the Jesuits, but the lighting and number of listeners and their clearly rapt attention, made this one special. As he took to the stage to perform his part, the crowd gave a special cry of joy to see the giant dressed as a king in gold robes and holding the golden chalice which represented the myrrh. Balthazar performed his part and withdrew to more sounds of amazement.

  * * *

  For the next year, Yasuke’s duties as Valignano’s bodyguard and valet took him throughout the west of the southern island of Kyushu, meeting the chief Christian lords and headmen there and visiting dozens of missionary outposts. Aside from Kuchinotsu and Kazusa, Valignano engaged in countless short trips—to inspect churches and mission sites, and to conduct diplomacy among half a dozen minor lords and village headmen. The Jesuits were far from a secluded monastic order. Their business was rescuing souls for Christ, and they threw themselves into it with a frenetic, often fanatic, energy.

  Accompanying Valignano, Yasuke learned a considerable amount about the country and its people, both from personal observation and from being privy to conversations between Valignano and assorted dignitaries and policy makers. The pace proved relentless. Although Yasuke had once thought they were done with sea travel for a while, it turned out almost all of these short sojourns were by boat. Roads were a largely impractical option in this mountainous, rainy and enemy-infested country; and almost everyone lived near the sea anyway.

  Beyond basic security, Yasuke had not had much need to directly defend his Jesuit employer. There had been no recognized assassination or kidnapping attempts, and no direct skirmishes with enemy troops. Valignano, instead, had skillfully avoided the conflicts raging around them—though both Lords Arima and Ōmura suffered various small defeats and humiliations at Ryūzōji Takanobu’s hands. The genuine power of prayer, perhaps? Or Yasuke’s diligence was paying off. In any case, it had been a year in Japan and no Jesuits had been killed on Yasuke’s watch; the mission seemed to be entering a period of stability. The African warrior took it as a well-earned measured victory as he’d remained thorough and on guard even in the quietest of weeks and sleepiest of villages.

  Had they arrived a year earlier, however, the conditions would have been remarkably different. The Shimazu clan (another regional anti-Catholic force), with only thirty thousand troops, had routed the fifty thousand warriors of Christian ally, Lord Ōtomo Sōrin, when they clashed over the minor province of Hyūga. The Shimazu, who’d initially been curious about the first Jesuits, had long ago decided Catholicism was not for them, especially after their principle enemy, Ōtomo, had become Christian. And, as Ōtomo, Arima and Ōmura had burned temples and shrines during their Catholic-sponsored conquests, the Shimazu troops retaliated by torching the new Jesuit church. The Jesuits who’d been within had just managed to escape and fled through the night, beginning a chase that lasted several days. In the end, they only narrowly escaped with their lives, arriving starving and traumatized back in Ōtomo’s territory.

  The specter of these attacks and the loss of Ōtomo’s army, whose shattered bodies stretched back twenty miles from the battlefield, had prompted Valignano’s need for Yasuke’s special services upon his arrival. Aside from the report of the torched church, however, the official reports that had reached Valignano in Europe, and as he traveled through India, Melaka and China to reach Japan, had all been highly, perhaps suspiciously, positive about what fertile soil Japan was for Catholicism. Those on the ground who’d written the reports, had somehow omitted details, or sometimes mention, of unfortunate setbacks and defeats. At such a distance from Roman authority, they were writing for posterity and promotion, and were unlikely to ever be found out. Now that he was here to see it for himself, the actual state of the mission in Japan, unsurprisingly, had not met Valignano’s expectations.

  In particular, there was significant discord between Japanese converts (especially the most senior ones not used to being gainsaid in their own domains), and the non-Japanese missionaries (who often behaved as if they knew everything). To meet the grievances of the Japanese community, Valignano quickly held consultations to identify ways in which the earlier mission had been mismanaged. These included overly strict discipline, racial discrimination in admittance to holy orders, an insistence on the superiority of European ways and a refusal to support the learning of the Japanese language by some senior Europeans—in particular the mission superior, Cabral.

  Another problem Valignano faced was that most Europeans did not appear very civilized to the locals who saw them as, frankly, vulgar. By comparison, the Japanese were consistently well mannered. Valignano wrote, “even the children forbear to use inelegant expressions among themselves, nor do they fight or hit each other like European lads.” Upper-class Japanese people, particularly, considered Europeans dirty, ill-mannered and ignorant of proper comportment. The Japanese were also used to daily bathing, and the ability to eat without touching food with their hands—both customs Europeans of the time customarily scorned.

  Having identified these impediments, Valignano issued decrees on how Jesuits should conduct themselves and adapt more to local norms. (Though, even the relatively broad-minded Valignano still balked at bathing regularly and forbade his charges, including the Japanese and African ones, from doing so.) By the time he left Japan for the first time in 1582, he’d already opened three more seminaries with the aim of training locally recruited brothers and priests. The mission relied upon its native Japanese followers to help celebrate masses, marriages and funerals in Japanese, and for diploma
cy in many cases. Until Valignano’s arrival, Jesuit policy had forbidden Japanese men from becoming full members; they, instead, had to remain as semipermanent acolytes. One of the most important things Valignano would do during his tenure as Visitor was facilitate the first non-Europeans becoming full Jesuit members and ordained priests in Japan.

  Then, to make Catholic priests’ status more recognizable to the Japanese, Valignano reorganized the mission structure to more closely resemble that of the social organization of the Nanzen-ji Temple in Kyoto. Japanese religion at this time had become a fusion of imported Buddhist beliefs and native animist beliefs, hence, Buddhist “saints” were worshipped in the same places as ancient animist gods called kami. Sometimes kami and Buddhist saints eventually mixed in together and became one entity. Buddhism itself, was divided, sometimes violently, by sect, some of which, like Zen, had their origins abroad, and others, like Nichiren, which started in Japan.

  Valignano copied their ranking system so locals would understand the social standing of the Jesuits and know which priests were more senior. Initially the priests had intentionally dressed poorly, marking their vows of poverty, but Valignano changed that, and they smartened up, or at least made sure their clothes were clean. This made the Japanese more open to the new religion, because it looked more like traditional ones, respectable, blurring the lines somewhat and gaining the Catholics more respect.

  Valignano also directed the missionaries and other Jesuit workers to systematically learn as much Japanese as possible. Only then, when they could speak directly to the locals in their own tongue, could they truly reach out across Japan for the Church. Perhaps influencing his plans, Valignano was particularly taken with the Japanese language, calling it “the best, the most elegant, and the most copious tongue in the known world,” adding, “It is more abundant than Latin and expresses concepts better.” What the European missionaries were particularly impressed with were the different ways ideas were expressed depending on who they were being expressed to. Language and culture were so intimately intertwined in Japan—and position and status such fundamental concepts—that their expression could be found in almost every sentence uttered. Thus, a person learned the art of rhetoric and good breeding along with the language as, in Japanese, one must know how to address the great and the lowly, the nobles and commoners, ensuring “decorum to be observed with them all.” Ideal concepts for an aristocratic Jesuit hierarchy who wished to retain their nobility while encouraging the idea of the dignity of the common man.

  Under Yohoken’s systematic tutelage, a typical foreign missionary could attain conversational proficiency in two years, a considerable improvement on the previous haphazard approach, and they reported the language relatively easy to understand. Yet, to speak correctly proved far more challenging. The problem was the sheer number of ways to express the same concept. The language was, according to Valignano, “copious in the number of synonyms” with “infinite ways” to describe objects and actions.

  Thanks largely to Yohoken’s efforts, dozens of foreign Jesuits attained a language level that allowed them to hold their own in Japanese courtly circles. The western Jesuits were soon able to compose many volumes of accurate information such as Fróis’s History of Japan and Valignano’s History of the Beginnings and Progress of the Society of Jesus in the East Indies, which were circulated to a hungry scholarly class throughout the European world.

  Information about contemporary Japan and knowledge of its language were not yet even held in any measure of regard by its closest neighbors, Korea and China. The rare high-level communications between the three countries were conducted in written classical Chinese with which any educated Japanese or Korean was also familiar. Only a handful of unofficial interpreters or pirates in Korea or China could speak any Japanese at all. (In 1590, while Europe, thanks to the Jesuits, had plenty of detailed information about Japan, the Korean government was not even sure of the name of the Japanese hegemon, Toyotomi Hideyoshi—who’d soon invade them!) At its closest point, Korea is only thirty-five miles from Japan, while the sea journey to Rome around Africa is nearer to twenty thousand miles. Valignano, with Yohoken’s help, made sure the Church wouldn’t remain ignorant of Japan and its customs.

  Valignano, however, by his own reckoning, could never quite get the language down. Although he wrote fluently in Italian, Latin, Spanish and Portuguese, the subtleties of the Japanese language remained elusive for the otherwise brilliant scholar, possibly because he was so busy. Despite his own linguistic shortcomings, in spreading the gospel—whether in India, China or Japan—Valignano continued to emphasize the need for cultural adaptation and local language study to his underlings.

  Yasuke, meanwhile, was a natural. He became quite proficient at Japanese during his years in Kyushu, likely because he was waiting on Valignano during Yohoken’s lessons. In twenty-some years, the warrior had lived in Africa, India and China, and spent countless months on Portuguese ships learning new tongues. This fluency had no doubt become a survival skill and a genuine gift. Japanese was simply the next language in a long list.

  Whether Valignano specifically encouraged his bodyguard to learn the language or not, we cannot say. But learn it he did. And, with positive outcomes for all concerned—particularly Valignano, who would soon gain great favor and grace through introducing Yasuke to Lord Nobunaga and the rest of Japan.

  Chapter Five

  The Terms of Employment

  Despite his willingness to work within foreign languages and cultures, Valignano had firmly held, and narrow, views on race.

  Formed through hitherto-learned European stereotypes, the Visitor’s perspectives were based primarily on how ready a people were to hear God’s word and convert from “base heathens” or “Moors,” to children of Jesus. His view was that Europe was “the most excellent of all the parts of the world, the part on which God with his most generous hand has conferred the most and the best good things.” Although to the modern ear, many of his views are reprehensible, Valignano was not simply a white supremacist as we would know it today, and far less so than most of his contemporaries.

  For Europeans of the time, the Chinese and Japanese people were “white folk” and at the other end of the racial spectrum from the “dark folk” like Yasuke. So while Valignano admired China for its peace, tranquility, administration and wealth, he remained forever annoyed and puzzled by the low rate of conversion among these clearly reasonable, civilized, educated and rational fellow “whites.” It challenged the very foundations of his, and Europe’s, “rational” and carefully constructed arguments on both race and religion.

  Although, over the years, some of his writings betrayed fluctuations in his long-held stereotypes, this racial ranking never really altered, and his first recorded views on Japanese people echoed those of the first Jesuit to reach Japan, Francis Xavier, who suggested the Japanese might be more civilized than Europeans; they “lacked in vice” and were ripe for the word of the Lord. Valignano wrote also that the Japanese were polite—“even the lower classes more so than Europeans”—and also capable of learning European academic subjects quicker even than Europeans. Quite capable, therefore, of accepting the one true God into their hearts. Thus, with these lighter-skinned peoples, Valignano was convinced the Jesuit mission was destined to thrive. Nothing could stop the inevitable victory of the Church; their skin color all but guaranteed it.

  Valignano’s world—one defined largely by skin color alone—proves even more troubling when the darker-skinned races are described. To understand his views, we need to know that modern skin color conceptualizations are the product of eighteenth and nineteenth century “scientific” classifications and Valignano’s European Christendom had no such “ordered” racial world. To him, darker skin simply signified non-Christian. (This, despite the fact, of which much of Europe was largely unaware, that millions of Christians with “darker skin” had lived in North East Africa, the Arab world and I
ndia, for more than a thousand years.)

  Beyond knowing that Islam (a spiritual foe and ongoing threat) was largely dark-skinned, early modern Europeans also now associated blackness (perhaps in reaction to Islam) with the long-held misinterpretations of biblical texts, particularly the so-called “curse of Ham.” Ham was Noah’s son, and, after Cain and Judas, one of the most notorious sinners in Christendom. (The Bible says Ham’s descendants were cursed by Noah because Ham gazed without shame upon Noah’s drunken, naked state after the patriarch partook of too much wine.) While no document in which Ham is recorded mentions his black skin in any way, that Ham “was black-skinned” was a widely held view in Valignano’s time. (In the way that most mistakenly think of Mary Magdalen as a “whore.”) It is uncertain where this misconception came from, but it lasted long enough that even Martin Luther King Jr. addressed it in 1956: “Oh my friends, this is blasphemy. This is against everything that the Christian religion stands for.” But for most Europeans in Valignano’s era, dark skin was often associated with sin.

  Thus, of Indians, Valignano initially wrote they were poor beyond measure and given to low and mean tasks. That they were of low intelligence and very ignorant. This was modified later—no doubt after seeing the reality of the learning and opulence found within Indian rulers’ courts—to note Indians were not without intelligence and culture but still extremely “untruthful.” He distrusted Indian Jesuits, even those of mixed-heritage Portuguese descent, and often seems to have openly hindered their promotion.