The Southern Barbarians

Let’s start looking at this object from Japan by looking at a detail of its decoration: what we see is a depiction of a man as he looks away to his side. He is dressed in bright red clothing and is holding in his hand the leashes of two dogs.

This person is a Portuguese man: he has caucasian features, is dressed in bright colors, and is wearing wide-legged trousers. This representation of Portuguese men can be seen on other Japanese artworks from the same period, such as this folding screen from the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art, which depicts the arrival of a Portuguese ship in the harbor of Nagasaki.

At the time this object was made, people from Portugal were not present on the Japanese archipelago, but they had been present on Japanese islands between 1542 and 1640. The first Portuguese men to arrive in the Japanese archipelago did so by chance, as they were stranded on the island of Tanegashima during a storm, but soon after Portuguese traders arrived, they became known as Nanban (南蛮), the Southern Barbarians.

The Portuguese merchants in Japan traded Chinese goods in exchange for silver, as direct commerce between Japan and China had been banned by the Ming government. The Portuguese imported much-desired Chinese silk and porcelain, as well as furniture and weapons from Europe, and took part in slave trading.

Portuguese traders were not the only Southern Europeans who were coming into Japan at this time: they were in fact accompanied by Portuguese (and at times Spanish and Italian) missionaries, mostly Jesuits, who introduced Christianity to the archipelago. For this reason, the century in which the Portuguese were present in Japan is sometimes referred to as “the Christian century”. Portuguese missionaries preached Christianity, but also contributed to the spread of European knowledge on subjects such as medicine and cartography.Sources: Boxer, C.R., Papers on Portuguese, Dutch, and Jesuit influences in 16th- and 17th-century Japan: writings of Charles Ralph Boxer, Washington, D.C. : University Publications of America, 1979 Lucio de Sousa, The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan, Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2019