Medieval Japan and foreigners

[Takhisis]

What language did the Japanes use to communicate with outsiders? In the Tokugawa era, it was Dutch, but before?
Also, did they call them gai-jin to the face?
Last, did other Europeans apart from Portuguese and Dutchmen contact Nippon?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Japan banned all foreigners in like 16 something.

 

[Takhisis]

Around 1630, seemingly, but Dutch traders were allowed to stay in the man-made island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour, only for trading.

 

[Verbose]

Japan banned foreign trade, bar the Dutch, in 1637. This also included banning the contruction of all Japanese sailing vesells above a certain size (i.e. designed for long-distance sea travel), and all ties were cut with the already pretty sizeable expatriot Japanese communities in the Philippines and Indochina.

This is consistent with how Japan had dealt with foreign contacts previously. It was to be done on Japanese terms, and in 1637 they were pretty harsh. The reason the Dutch were offered the deal was that they were considered less potentially dangerous to Japan than either the Portugese or the Spanish.

Contact with Europeans was established in 1542 IIRC. A Spanish ship out of Manilla was wrecked of the Japanese coast. But it was the Portugese who as per Papal specification were allowed a free hand there, and not the Spanish.

Prior to that Japan did have considerable contact with the Asian mainland, China and Korea. As for the language used, everyone with an education knew Chinese. Official texts in Japan were often written in Chinese anyway. And a whole lot of less-than-exciting literary composition was done in Chinese.
At a pinch I suppose buddhism might have made the religiously inclined Chinese, Japanese and Koreans capable of communicating in Sanskrit, should they have liked to. (Since it's an indo-european language the latter might have been useful for the Japanese specialists on things western when learning Latin and Dutch.)

 

[Dann]

At a pinch I suppose buddhism might have made the religiously inclined Chinese, Japanese and Koreans capable of communicating in Sanskrit, should they have liked to. (Since it's an indo-european language the latter might have been useful for the Japanese specialists on things western when learning Latin and Dutch.)

No need to. The Japanese and Koreans were both using Kanji (literally "Han words" = Chinese text) for formal written communication then. The words would have been read differently in sound by all 3 parties but the meaning they were meant to convey would have been perfectly clear to all 3.

(Thus to nitpick, the ancient Japanese were not writing in Chinese. They were writing in their own language using Kanji, which are identical to Chinese characters.)

 

[Takhisis]

So you can use Kanji for writing in either Chinese or Japanese?

 

[Plotinus]

Only to a certain extent. Written Japanese is a combination of Kanji and Kana (Katakana, used mostly for words taken from foreign languages, and Hiragana, used for everything else), so to write Japanese you can't use just Kanji.

The Japanese writing system is ridiculously complex, consisting as it does of a combination of logograms and two different systems of syllable-based characters. Kanji isn't really needed at all, since you can write everything in Katakana (children learn Katakana first, and then have to have Katakana "translations" written over the top of Kanji so they can learn those symbols too). And of course it's a bit odd to write Japanese in Chinese characters given that the two languages are totally different. But the Japanese still use Kanji because of the prestige that Chinese culture has always had in Japan.

In the period immediately before the Tokugawa shogunate, there were lots of Italian missionaries in Japan.

 

[Kafka2]

Last, did other Europeans apart from Portuguese and Dutchmen contact Nippon?

Very famously so, yes. William Adams, the English pilot, was made an honourary samurai by Tokugawa Ieyasu himself- and became the Shogun's chief advisor on the outside world (much to the horror of the Jesuits).

Adams was the model for Blackthorne in James Clavell's "Shogun".

 

[Verbose]

No need to. The Japanese and Koreans were both using Kanji (literally "Han words" = Chinese text) for formal written communication then. The words would have been read differently in sound by all 3 parties but the meaning they were meant to convey would have been perfectly clear to all 3.

As Plotinus said, structurally Chinese is very different from Japanese and Korean. Chinese will recognise the basic nouns, adjectives and verbs making up a sentance in written Japanese or Korean as the kanji for them are being used, but that's it, it seems. They'll get no real idea about verb tense, negations, who's adressing whom, etc. unless they pick up some of the grammar of these languages.
(If you're wondering I once spent a year as a student of Japanese, in an East Asian Studies program alongside people studying Chinese and Korean, and the general verdict was that none of these languages is actually intelligible to the others. I just did that year, before the Army got hold of me, and when they were done with my sorry arse, I had aquired new interests and never got back to the Japanese.)

What the Korean and Japanese did early on was write Chinese with supplementary diacritial marks as clues to non-Chinese readers how it should be understood. And later they developed their own writing systems that could hand in particular inflection.

But there certainly was no need to muck about with Sanskrit, as the Koreans and Japanse would have learnt Chinese anyway. Not just the kanji, but the entire grammatical structure of it. I just mentioned it as an outside possibility.

(Thus to nitpick, the ancient Japanese were not writing in Chinese. They were writing in their own language using Kanji, which are identical to Chinese characters.)

Actually they were writing in Chinese. Bad Chinese. The classical Japanese literature of around 1000 AD written in the Japanese was written by women, and men writing under female pseudonyms ("Tosa Nikki").

Why? Because the females lacked the formal education necessary to write in Chinese proper. The men of the court were expected to write Real Literature in The Only Real Literary Language, i.e. Chinese. The females were supposedly just mucking about with the "crude" native Japanese. But it was the females ended up writing the literary masterpieces (and the odd bloke who realised what the only real ball-game in town was).

And IIRC Chinese continued to be the language of choice for Japanese imperial edicts for centuries afterwards (not that the emperor would wield much power admitedly), so things did get written down officially in Chinese in Japan as well for a very long time it seems.

 

[Dann]

...The men of the court were expected to write Real Literature in The Only Real Literary Language, i.e. Chinese..

Pretentious bastards.... serves them right they got overshadowed.

You never cast aside your roots in favor of a foreign culture. No matter how behind you perceive yourselves to be. Learn from it. Borrow from it. Steal from it if need be. All to improve your own culture. Not what these men did.

Those ancient Japanese women were smarter than their male counterparts.

 

[Plotinus]

You never cast aside your roots in favor of a foreign culture.

Why not? I say, follow the culture that you prefer. There's no such thing as "roots" beyond what you choose. If those guys preferred Chinese to Japanese culture, I don't see what's wrong with that.

 

[Takhisis]

In the period immediately before the Tokugawa shogunate, there were lots of Italian missionaries in Japan.

I thought they were Portugues and Spanish Jesuits...

You never cast aside your roots in favor of a foreign culture.

that´s right, look at what happened here in argentina when they started exterminating the gaucho because they were a link with the past! Or at what happened when Japan was westernized and their own traditons were thrown outboard?

 

[Plotinus]

Jesuits came from all over. For example, one of the most important missionaries in Asia in the generation after Francis Xavier was Alessandro Valignano, who worked in Japan before travelling to Macau and instructing Matteo Ricci on how best to evangelise the Chinese. Both were Italian Jesuits.

 

[Takhisis]

As Oda Nobunaga´s muskets were italians too, I´d say that Italians gave them everything: religion, guns, what else do you need?

 

[Evie]

Italian muskets? Pah! I'll have you know I had no italian musk...

Oh, wait. You meant that OTHER Oda Nobunaga. The jerk

(More seriously, while the japanesse did import european muskets, they picked up how to make them fairly quickly, and were among the bests at making them by the end of the XVIIth century...as usual when Japan steals someone else idea and start making it for their own).

 

[Verbose]

Italian muskets? Pah! I'll have you know I had no italian musk...

Oh, wait. You meant that OTHER Oda Nobunaga. The jerk

(More seriously, while the japanesse did import european muskets, they picked up how to make them fairly quickly, and were among the bests at making them by the end of the XVIIth century...as usual when Japan steals someone else idea and start making it for their own).

Yeah, the muskets were introduced immediately upon making contact with Europeans in 1642. The Spanish captain who had the misfortune of ending up wrecked on the little island of Tanegashima south of Kyushu presented one to the local lord. (Muskets in Japan were from then on known as "Tanegashima teppo"/"Tanegashima tubes".)

The Japanese knew a good thing when they saw it, took took that musket apart, put it back together and then improved on the design. I.e. already in the late XVIth c. Japanese fire-arms doctrine and design had started to doverge from Europe.
The Japanse simplified the firing mechanism, making it more reliable. The also made the muskets considerably lighter, meaning no need for that supporting fork European used. And finally Japanese doctrine was based upon accuracy rather than rate of fire, which was the case in Europe.

Otoh this didn't prevent Oda Nobunaga from independantly, and ahead of Europe, invent volley-fire as a battle-field tactic, which won him the battle of Nagashino in 1576. (Check it out, or a reasonable reproduction, at the end of Akira Kurosawa's "Kagemusha".)

 

[Evie]

Yeah, saw that in one of my history of Japan class in Uni .

What can be said? Japan has a reputation for being the fastest at stealing other people's ideas and improving them for a reason.

 

[Plotinus]

Another example from the same period: the Tokugawa shoguns decided, for reasons known only to themselves, that Christianity was undesirable and they mostly stamped it out in the early seventeenth century, forcing the church to go underground. The one idea that they did take from Christianity was crucifixion, which evidently impressed the Japanese; they therefore added this to their methods of capital punishment and used it just as effectively as the Romans ever did.

 

[Fox Mccloud]

Quick tip for Oda Nobunaga: If you leave out the "-" you will create a real smilie.

Or at what happened when Japan was westernized and their own traditons were thrown outboard?

When was Japan westernized?

 

[Verbose]

Another example from the same period: the Tokugawa shoguns decided, for reasons known only to themselves, that Christianity was undesirable and they mostly stamped it out in the early seventeenth century, forcing the church to go underground. The one idea that they did take from Christianity was crucifixion, which evidently impressed the Japanese; they therefore added this to their methods of capital punishment and used it just as effectively as the Romans ever did.

The "crucifixion" seems to have been there before contact with Christianity (minus the symbolism). At least that's what I've always understood?

And neither the Chinese or the Japanese were unaware of the carrying on of the Spanish and Portugese, meaning they felt they had a real reason to take care of the how conquest might follow the cross.
Certainly having a hundred thousand or so of their own social elite converted to Catholicism, with at least one formal Japanese embassy sent to Rome, would have made the Japanese leadership aware of how things had often worked when nations adopted Christianity elsewhere.

So, it would seem to have been a fairly rational political decision to not risk anything here.