Fantastic Voyager

This article appeared in the Book World, the book review section of The Washington Post (February 2, 2003) where Kunio Francis Tanabe is a senior editor and art director. (reprinted with kind permission)

The Englishman Who Opened Japan
By Giles Milton
Farrar Straus Giroux. 352 pp. $24

A decade ago, I was among hundreds of attendees at the annual Japanese memorial service honoring William Adams, the English navigator who arrived in Japan in the year 1600. It took place atop a steep, narrow hill covered with cherry blossoms, where two ancient tombstones of similar shape stand side by side, one for Miura Anjin (Adams's Japanese name), the other for his Japanese wife, Yuki. The Dutch ambassador was there, along with the mayor of Yokosuka, the commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, several British naval attache{acute}s and a representative of Japan's foreign ministry. Three flags -- the Japanese, the British and the Dutch -- were raised to the accompaniment of the national anthems of each of the three countries that claim Adams as one of their own. A flock of white doves was released, and a chorus of children sang about the Englishman who loved the sea and who lived in Hemi village a long, long time ago.

This celebration occurs every year at Adams's ancient domain (now a park near Yokosuka), which was given to him by Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu for the Englishman's service as adviser, interpreter and shipbuilder. The shogun also gave Adams 70 retainers, the high samurai rank of hatamoto and an annual income of 250 koku (enough rice to feed 250 people for a year). There are two other annual festivals in Adams's honor: in Ito, where he built ships for the shogun, and in Usuki City, where he first landed.

The story Giles Milton tells in Samurai William should be familiar to the millions who have read James Clavell's Shogun or have seen the television series and movie based on the novel. And what an amazing story it is -- almost as fantastic as Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, except that Adams's adventures really happened. Milton, who has previously written about this period in Nathaniel's Nutmeg, a history of the spice trade, takes a storyteller's approach, culling material from archives in several libraries and shaping it into popular history. In brief, here is what happened:

A Dutch fleet of five ships sailed out of Rotterdam for the Moluccas on June 24, 1598, following Magellan's and Drake's challenging route down to Africa, over to South America and across the vast Pacific. William Adams, born in Gillingham, Kent, was hired as a pilot aboard one of the ships, the Liefde. There were harrowing adventures along the way, and only two ships from the fleet managed to attempt the Pacific crossing. After reaching Mocha Island (off Chile), they sailed northwest toward Marco Polo's fabled land of Zipangu instead of the Spanish-held Philippine Islands and by sheer luck reached a group of islands in the mid-Pacific. "The place of their landfall has long remained a mystery," writes Milton, "for neither Adams nor his captain had any idea of their position, but it is possible that the Liefde had unknowingly reached (and discovered) Hawaii, more than 179 years before Captain Cook."

Soon after, the ships encountered a storm (one of many) in which the sister ship, Hoop, went down. But Capt. Jacob Quackernaek, navigator Adams and the Liefde crew sailed on through leagues of uncharted waters, finally reaching, on April 12, 1600, what turned out to be the shores of Bungo. Twenty-four seamen survived the ordeal, but within days six of these perished.

Fortunately, the crew was captured by a clan friendly to Ieyasu just a few months before the Battle of Sekigahara determined which alliance of warlords would rule Japan. Adams was sent to Osaka Castle, where he met Ieyasu himself, the shogun-to-be whose dynasty was to rule for the next two-and-a-half centuries. Ieyasu learned that the Liefde had come by way of the Straits of Magellan, that Adams was an Englishman piloting a Dutch ship and that he "desired friendship with all kings and potentates in way of merchandize."

Through Adams, Ieyasu discovered what the European empire builders were really up to, a version of world affairs radically different from what the Spanish and Portuguese padres had been telling him. Adams's special relationship with Ieyasu developed over the years, and through him the Dutch and the English obtained special trade privileges at the expense of the Spanish and the Portuguese.

Too much of Milton's story takes place at Hirado, on the southern island of Kyushu, where the English and Dutch set up their trading post. This is the least interesting period of Adams's colorful life, but Milton seems to have become engrossed in the records of the English East India Company, with their scandalous details. For example, he quotes Richard Cocks, a merchant: "It is thought some villen had ravished [a young girl] 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 doggs, an ordenary matter in these partes."

Such hearsay will be viewed skeptically by serious historians. So will the use of inaccurate illustrations by Arnoldus Montanus from his Atlas Japannensis (1670). Except for Montanus's depictions of Hirado and Osaka Castle, the engravings of people and places (more than 20 are reprinted in the book) only vaguely resemble those drawn by more reliable artists of the period. (Montanus's book, by the way, was a big seller in Europe and was translated into several languages.)

The reader should also question Samurai William's audacious subtitle -- The Englishman Who Opened Japan. The credit for "opening" Japan belongs to Prince Shotoku (574-622 A.D.), who initiated diplomatic relations and trade with China. Japan's written language and a vast wealth of culture and knowledge came from China (and Korea to a lesser extent) long before the Englishman's arrival. As to the other Europeans, the Portuguese first landed in 1543, and the Spanish followed soon after. The Dutch may also find Milton's account far too Anglocentric, with not enough material on Adams's shipmates. One begins to wonder if the author knows, for example, that the shogun gave Adams's friend Jan Joosten van Lodenstijn the same samurai rank of hatamoto. One of Japan's major thoroughfares, Tokyo Station's Yaesu exit, is named after Joosten -- and is located not far from Anjin-cho, a street named after the English pilot.

Two questions concerning William Adams remain unanswered. First, where is he buried? The excavation of his tombs in Hirado, where he died in 1620, and Hemi, where he lived, did not reveal his remains. And second, what happened to his son by his Japanese wife, who became a licensed navigator under the flag of Tokugawa? After Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu issued a decree to expel almost all foreigners -- missionaries, traders who had married Japanese spouses, and their children -- did Joseph Adams sail off with his family to the Philippines, to Cochin China or to Java? (Even Japanese subjects who were out of the country after the edict had taken effect were not allowed to return.)

Four centuries after his death, the story of samurai William still evokes a web of speculations.