João Rodrigues's Account of Sixteenth-Century Japan

by Michael Cooper (Editor), João Rodrigues

João Rodrigues sailed from Portugal to Japan in 1577, and there entered the Jesuit novitiate and was ordained priest. He met Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the virtual ruler of Japan, in 1591, and from that time became the missionaries' spokesman in dealings with Japanese authorities. He was also involved in negotiations concerning the bulk sale of Chinese silk in Japan, and commercial and political rivalries led to his eventual expulsion from the country in 1610. Rodrigues spent the rest of his life in Macao and the interior of China, dying in 1633. Renowned for his fluency in spoken Japanese, Rodrigues earned a place in the history of Japanese-European cultural relations by publishing a Portuguese grammar of the Japanese language (Nagasaki, 1604-1608), followed by a revised edition (Macao, 1620). Both works provide valuable information about Japanese spoken in the early 17th century. Rodrigues also provided the draft used as a basis for the official history of the Christian mission in Japan. To set this work in context he composed two books on various aspects of Japanese life - geography, customs, clothing, science, architecture, art, and, above all, the tea ceremony. The present volume provides annotated translations of these two books, together with an introduction assessing Rodrigues's contribution to the understanding of Japanese life and culture in the early 17th century.

Genres: Japan

428 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: Michael Cooper


Michael John Cooper (1930 – 31 March 2018) was an American historian. Briefly a Jesuit himself, Cooper wrote extensively on 15th- and 16th-century encounters between Jesuit missionaries and Japan. He was editor of the journal Monumenta Nipponica in Tokyo for 26 years (1971–1996) and was also formerly a president of the Asiatic Society of Japan.

source: Wikipedia

Reviews

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is typically a book you can't stop reading, while all the time asking yourself why you're still doing it. Excellently edited, it remains a hefty read, not only on account of its size but also of its rather - at times - tedious, endlessly detailed descriptions.
And yet: you can't quite stop reading it because of the world it shows you, a world truly gone of course, but at the time a world that was changing. And to arrest this change, Japan was to close its borders to all for two centuries.
These are the glimpses that make this book fascinating: Rodrigues was writing for the audience of his time (roughly 1640), an audience who had, obviously, very little knowledge of Japan and its inhabitants. So the author, who clearly loved that country, endeavours to describe, explain and exemplify the minutia of daily life, and especially of rituals: how people salute each other, how they communicate, how they visit one another, how they drink tea etc. What they eat also, and what they drink, and how.
Everything is described in its minutest details: drinking vessels (shape, material, colour etc), hand and head movements, buildings, clothes. This repetition does get tedious but through it, we come closer to the everyday atmosphere, the life as it was.
Obviously, the study of character was not yet a mainstay of the world of publishing, much less psychological analysis, so that side of things the reader has to do: Rodrigues does repeatedly speak of the Japanese as a 'melancholy race', attracted to death, but that's about it. The social relations have to be inferred from the descriptions of the life they took place in.
As for the historical side of things, it's a treasure of course, especially as Rodrigues keeps talking about China and Korea, tracing Japanese ancestry there as well as placing Japanese customs in an all-Asian perspective (for his time).
All in all another great addition to that collection, very well edited and annotated.