Japan's First Contact with Europeans
Three Portuguese traders were shipwrecked on Tanegashima, an island south of Kyushu, in 1543, and were the first Europeans to reach Japan. They were aboard a Chinese junk blown off course, and what they carried mattered more than who they were: matchlock arquebuses, which the island's lord Tanegashima Tokitaka bought at an enormous price and had his swordsmiths copy. Japanese production began within a year. The country was in the middle of the Sengoku period, a century of warfare among competing daimyo, and demand was effectively unlimited — within three decades Japan was probably manufacturing more firearms than any country in Europe. Oda Nobunaga used them decisively at Nagashino in 1575, with ranks of matchlock men behind palisades destroying the Takeda cavalry, and the wars were largely settled within a generation. Castle architecture changed to meet artillery, and stone bases and low broad keeps replaced hilltop forts. Trade followed the guns. Portuguese carracks from Macau brought Chinese silk, which Japan wanted and could not buy directly because Ming law forbade it, and took away silver from mines that were among the world's most productive. Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima in 1549, and Christianity spread rapidly in Kyushu, reaching perhaps 300,000 converts. The Tokugawa reversed all of it. Christianity was banned, the Shimabara rising crushed in 1638, missionaries and Portuguese expelled, and foreign contact confined to a Dutch factory on an artificial island at Nagasaki for two centuries. Firearm production declined sharply under the peace that followed, which is sometimes cited as the only case of a society giving up a weapon it had mastered. Commodore Perry reopened the country in 1853.
- Year: 1543 CE
- Category: Political
