The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (58 page)

2. We show great emotion when we lose our fortunes and our houses burn down; the Japanese, as far as outward appearances go, take all this very lightly
.

The same thing Frois observed has been observed over and over: to wit, the Japanese are incredibly stoical. Henry Heusken, the brilliant interpreter for the first American consul to Japan, Townsend Harris, was astonished by the Japanese reaction to a typhoon that destroyed a third of the town of Shimoda in 1856: “Not a cry was heard. Despair? What! Not even sorrow was visible on their faces.” Western media outlets recently highlighted this Japanese stoicism after the tsunami of 2011.

Although Frois implicitly seems to suggest that Japanese composure was feigned or “abnormal,” Westerners constantly remind themselves that it is pointless “crying over spilt milk” and that “people matter, not things.” It would seem the Japanese do a better job of convincing themselves of these truths.

3. We battle house fires with water and by dismantling neighboring houses; the Japanese climb up on neighboring rooftops and fan [
the flames
] with winnows
,
¹
shouting at the wind to go away
.

The growth of cities with structures made of wood or framed with wood, including buildings that were two or three stories tall and separated by narrow alleys, made for terrible fires in early modern Europe.
²
Although some cities in the sixteenth century began battling fires with primitive fire trucks (picture a carriage with a huge syringe-like device or a lever-activated pump that shot a stream of water into a building), most relied on concerned neighbors toting buckets of water. Fires that began to spread or the simple fear of a fire prompted cities to hire carpenters to remove timbers and entire wooden structures that posed a fire threat.
³

With respect to Japan, Okada
⁴
wonders if Frois was misled by paintings of large, fan-like devices that were used to block flying sparks, rather than fan flames. Frois' contrast is further misleading because the Japanese long have been world leaders in deconstruction. Removing fuel was the main method of fire-fighting in Japan from time immemorial. Morse, who first found the weak Japanese water pumps ridiculous and thought Western methods of fire-fighting better, changed his mind when he became more familiar with the realities of fire-fighting in Japan:

Mats, screen partitions, and even the board ceilings can be quickly packed up and carried away. The roof is rapidly denuded of its tiles and boards, and the skeleton framework left makes but slow fuel for the flames. The efforts of the firemen in checking the progress of the conflagration consist mainly in tearing down these adjustable structures; and in this connection it may be interesting to record the curious fact that oftentimes at a fire the streams are turned, not upon the flames, but upon the men engaged in tearing down the building!
⁵

Nevertheless, fires on dry, windy, winter days often were unstoppable. One of the worst, in 1657, destroyed half of Edo and killed over a hundred thousand
people.
⁶
Not surprisingly, the Japanese over time developed a vocabulary to match their terrible experience with fire:

So completely did this destructive agency establish itself as a national institution that a whole vocabulary grew up to express every shade of meaning in matters fiery. The Japanese language has special terms for an incendiary fire, an accidental fire, fire starting from one's own house, a fire caught from next door, a fire which one shares with others, a fire which is burning to an end … We have not given half.
⁷

4. Among us, it is a great offense to call someone a liar to his face; the Japanese laugh at this and consider it polite behavior
.

Although both Machiavelli and Castiglione championed dissimulation in the service of politics and politeness, respectively, Europeans were impatient with “bold-face” lies. During the Middle Ages Europeans stuffed suspected liars into sacks and hurled them into a moat or pond to have God affirm their guilt or innocence (if they sank they were deemed innocent and hurriedly rescued; if they floated they were guilty and promptly yanked from the sack and hanged).

Even today the Japanese lightly say “
uso-tsuki
!” or “liar!” when someone tells them something interesting (this a version of the more common “
uso
!” or “[it must be a] lie!”). We are talking about an idiom comparable to the Anglo-American expression “you don't say.” But the issue probably runs deeper than idiom. Europeans and Americans, with their tendency to take oaths on the Bible or to “swear to God,” may have a far more black and white attitude about lying than other people. The Japanese, on the other hand, seem to place a remarkable premium on being secretive. Regardless of whether this secrecy derives from the insecurity of the long warring era or the positive valuation (a sign of maturity) of hiding emotions, the Japanese prefer to remain silent about many things. In this situation it is not the liar but the person who insists upon asking questions that force one to lie who is resented. It may well be that foreigners hear more lies because they unwittingly force the Japanese to lie.

5. Among us, no one kills another except those who have jurisdiction and authority to do so; in Japan anyone can kill in his own house
.

Technically speaking, the public executioner was the only person in Europe who could take another life. However, duels,
vendettas
, and killing for reasons of honor were fairly common in Mediterranean Europe.
⁸
Honor-vengeance dramas, in which wives were routinely murdered on stage by their husbands, also were
popular in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain.
⁹
Presumably art, to some degree, mimicked life and
vice versa
.

The absolute power enjoyed by Japanese men, particularly of the samurai or
bushi
class, was one of the first things Xavier commented on when he arrived in Japan. Despite the turmoil of the warring-states era, the Japanese legal system still was based in 1585 on the samurai code of ethics (
Joei Shikimoku
) codified in 1232.
¹⁰
The code established a clear-cut chain of command that precluded a Japanese noble from exercising his fiat over everyone. This was probably good if one's master was a better man than one's master's
master
; but when the opposite was true, one had no right of appeal. One could appeal but it would likely cost your life, even if the appeal won. Moreover, because of the notion of collective responsibility, the appealer's family, and perhaps even his neighbors, might have to die for a crime against hierarchy! (See
#8
below).

6. We are terrified to kill a man, but think nothing of killing cows, chickens and dogs; the Japanese are terrified to see animals killed but killing men is commonplace
.

At the time Frois wrote Europe was beginning to experience a significant downward trend in the incidence of murder.
¹¹
Still, homicide rates in sixteenth century Europe appear to have been much higher than they are today.
¹²
So not all Europeans were, in fact, terrified to kill another human being, particularly if the human being was sufficiently different (i.e. Jews, sodomites, Native Americans, Muslims) and stood in the way of a fortune or pleasing God. But perhaps Frois' “larger point” was that the Japanese of the warring-states era had become more comfortable than Europeans with killing
each other
(as opposed to “others”). Indeed, Valignano, who was anxious to recruit young Japanese nobles into the Jesuit order, worried that the Jesuits could not find enough recruits because so many otherwise qualified Japanese were murderers.
¹³
Buddhism, with its emphasis on preserving all life, often is cited as the reason why the Japanese made it taboo to kill cows, chickens, dogs, and other animals. That Buddhism could exercise such influence seems plausible, although one has to wonder why Buddhist precepts were ignored when it came to killing people (just as one has to wonder why Christians frequently ignored their own commandment against killing).

7. Among us, no one is killed for stealing, unless they steal above a certain sum; in Japan they are killed no matter how trifling the sum
.

In 1585 Europeans were re-thinking their centuries-old attitudes and practices of capital punishment, which had been imposed on petty thieves, heretics, and everybody in between. During the Middle Ages killing and torture of “criminals” were not only justice but popular entertainment.
¹⁴
Influenced by writers such as Thomas More,
¹⁵
who remarked in his
Utopia
(1516) on the brutality and injustice of petty thieves who were hanged for stealing bread, many European legal codes were changed by Frois' time such that capital punishment was confined to a relatively small number of crimes. However, “variety rather than monotony”
¹⁶
characterized punishment in early modern Europe. On a good day a thief might be rescued by a priest and taken to confession; on a bad day he could be hanged.

All accounts of Japan from the time of Xavier (1549) well into the nineteenth century mention Japan's “draconian” laws against stealing. What is fascinating is that in Japan, at least, the draconian laws (and large rewards posted for murderers) evidently worked. Europeans who expressed surprise at the severity of Japanese laws also marveled at how safe it was to walk the streets of Japanese cities. Isabella Bird traveled throughout Japan with no more than an eighteen-year old translator. Morse, who was amazed at the lack of rowdiness in Japan, gives some interesting statistics. If you think the great disparity in our murder rates is a late twentieth-century phenomenon, think again:

Among vital statistics [for Michigan in the year 1879] I found that eighty-seven murders had been committed in that year. As the population of the State of Michigan at that time was only slightly lower than the population of Tokyo, I asked Mr. Sugi how many murders had been committed in Tokyo for the year. He said none, indeed, only eleven murders and two cases of political assassination had been committed in Tokyo in the last ten years.
¹⁷

8. Among us, if we kill another with just cause or in self-defense, we are spared; in Japan, he who kills another must die, and if he does not appear, another is killed in his place
.

The early Church deemed killing unacceptable
for any reason
. During the Middle Ages this position was “softened” by the likes of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and later theologians and jurists who argued that there were occasions
(e.g. just wars) when an individual or a society might kill without offending God.
¹⁸
As Frois indicates, taking another life was acceptable in Europe provided it was a consequence of protecting yourself and your lawful interests (i.e. family or property). Not a few murderers, particularly nobles or wealthy magnates who committed crimes of passion (“hot anger”), also were spared as a result of pardons from European royalty.
¹⁹

With respect to Japan, the apparent discrepancy between seemingly getting away with murder, per
#5
above, and the suggestion here of automatic death for killing another is explained thus: the former concerns the right to kill someone who is your charge, while the latter mainly concerns those who kill a superior, an equal (except during war) or an inferior who is the charge of another. With regard to “substitute punishment,” Okada has suggested that Frois was referring to Japanese medieval law, which allowed a corporate entity like a family to substitute one member for another sentenced to death. This was considered merciful because it allowed the family to safeguard its most important members or “bread winners.” However, during the chaotic sixteenth century this medieval practice was abandoned by many local daimyo who formulated “house codes” (
kahõ
) that embraced what amounted to “mandatory sentencing” (
#7
above).
²⁰

It is possible that Frois also meant to highlight in this distich the absence in Europe, and the presence in Japan, of a type of “collective responsibility” known as
kenka rysoeibai
, which dictated that the relatives, neighbors, or employer of a convicted criminal were punished (and sometimes executed) along with the criminal.
²¹
Here is Kaempfer's apt description of this late medieval tradition, which was still operative in Japan at the end of the seventeenth century:

If quarrels, or disputes, arise in the street, whether it be between the inhabitants or strangers, the next neighbours are oblig'd forthwith to part the fray, for if one should happen to be kill'd, tho' it be the aggressor, the other must inevitably suffer death, … All he can do, to prevent the shame of public execution, is to make away with himself, ripping open his belly. Nor is the death of such an unhappy person thought satisfactory, in their laws, to attone for the deceased's blood. Three of those families, who live next to the place where the accident happen'd, are lock'd up in their houses for three, four or more months, and rough wooden boards nail'd a-cross their doors and windows, after they have duly prepar'd themselves for this imprisonment, by getting the necessary provisions. The rest of the inhabitants of the same street, have also their share in the punishment, being sentenc'd to some days, or months, hard labour at publick works … The like penalty, and in a higher degree, is inflicted on the Kumi Gasijra [gashira], or heads of the Corporations of that street, where the crime was committed. It highly aggravates their guilt,
and the punishment is increas'd in proportion, if they knew beforehand, that the delinquents had been of a quarreling humour … The landlords also and masters of the delinquents partake in the punishment for the misdemeanors of their lodgers, or servants.
²²