Ahhhh, Romantic Japan
copyright
© 2011 Jeff
Broderick, all
rights reserved
I'm reading an excellent book called "Samurai William" about
William Adams, the first Englishman to come to Japan. He was a pilot
aboard a Dutch trading vessel that came to Japan in 1600. Eventually,
he came to be a very trusted advisor to the Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu,
and his story was fictionalized in the novel, "Shogun". He was,
however, a very real person and he lived part of his life in Hirado, a
small town in Nagasaki where I also lived for 2 years on the JET
Program. He and the other Englishmen who eventually established a
trading house on the island left behind some very interesting accounts
of life during this period, that should give us second thoughts about
how great it would be if we could only go back in time to the glorious
Age of the Samurai! (That Trans-Dimensional Portal Kim is always
mentioning...) For example:
"[Captain] Saris might have had more success had he employed Japanese
punishment which, he soon discovered, was as brutal as it was severe.
When three local men started a street brawl, King Foyne [local daimyo
Mastuura] ordered their summary execution. When this had been carried
out, all the able-bodied men of the town 'came to try the sharpenesse
of their
katanas upon the corps[es] so that before they left
off they had hewn them all three into pieces as small as a man's hand.'
The casual violence of the Japanese never ceased to amaze newcomers. It
was common practice for samurai to test their swords on criminals,
hacking at their corpses 'until the wretched body is chopped into
mincemeat'. They were also in the habit of stitching the bodies
together so that the same exercise could be repeated again and again.
'They often sew up bodies which have been cut up by swords,' observed
the Jesuit, Joao Rodrigues, who said that 'the delight and pleasure
which they feel in cutting up bodies is astonishing.'
King Foyne was as inexorable as any other Japanese lord. He governed
his fiefdom with a razor-sharp sword, crushing disobedience and
refusing mercy. [Captain] Cocks's men were no strangers to the
spectacle of public beheadings and grisly disembowelments - for they
were a common occurrence in London - yet they were surprised to
discover that Adams was not exaggerating the inflexibility of Japanese
justice: even minor transgressions were capital offences. Worse still,
the sentence was inviolable, and King Foyne would not 'revoke or
mittigate the severitie of it'. Once judgement was passed, the
punishment was immediate. The victim was instructed to kneel and the
executioner cut off his head. Then, the head and body were chopped into
tiny pieces.
Cocks and his men were horrified by such violence and watched in dismay
as young children were executed for minor crimes. In their first
months, they had been too nervous to intervene. But, when they were
more familiar with their new home, they began to lodge complaints with
King Foyne. On a December afternoon in 1615, Cocks learned that 'a boy
of sixteen yeares old was [to be] cut in peeces for stealing a littell
boat and carrying it to another island'. Cocks felt that the death
sentence was unduly harsh and 'sent [an appeal] to the king to beg his
life'. He also despatched a message to the executioner, asking him to
refrain from killing the boy until he had learned of King Foyne's
reaction. The executioner, infuriated by the English petition, was
further angered when he learned that Foyne was intending to pardon the
lad. Without further ado, he unsheathed his sword and 'put him to death
before the pardon came, cutting him in many mammocks'.
Life was cheap in Hirado, and death was so commonplace that the local
populace were untroubled by the sight of corpses lying in gutters or
fields. Cocks was rather more sensitive, and such horrific spectacles
would remain for ever etched on his mind. One day, he was enjoying a
walk on the edge of the town when he 'fownd a young girl of some eleven
or twelve years of age, dead on the backside under the walle [of a
little lodge]'. He was disgusted to see 'dogges feeding on her, having
eaten both her legges and her lower parts'. He was unable to discover
her identity or the cause of death, but noted that 'it is thought some
villen had ravished her and after killed her, or else, being a slave,
her master had killed her upon some displeasure and cast her out to be
eaten of dogges, an ordenary matter in these partes.'"