Turns Out Japan Wasn't Isolationist After All: Faxecura Rocuyemon

Okay okay, someone is going to point out that Japan wasn't even claiming to be isolationist during this period, and I willingly acknowledge that ahead of time. Regardless, do you really already know about Spanish-Japanese relations in the early 1600s? If you did, then I'm really impressed. If you didn't, there's really no harm there, since I'm about to tell you about it.

Today I'll be writing about Faxecura Rocuyemon, also known as Hasekura Tsunenaga, who was a samurai and retainer for the daimyo Date Masamune. He was also the leader of the Japanese Embassy to Europe that happened over 200 years before the First Official Embassy to Europe in 1862. Not only did Hasekura travel to Spain and Europe, but he also managed to sail all the way to the New World (New Spain in particular). Here's a pretty handy map of his travels:

Unfortunately for Hasekura, he didn't pick the best time to represent Japanese interests abroad. First off, at this point, official Japanese policy (via the Shogun) was beginning to get rather anti-Catholic (a religion which is fairly popular in 17th century Spain, especially among the rulers). This ticked off the Spanish crown and they refused to sign any treaties with Japan. Thinking he could smooth things over with the Spanish and other Europeans, Hasekura converted to Catholicism, which is when he got the snazzy name of Francisco Felipe Faxicura (you'll note the various spellings- back then spelling was a free-for-all and no one really minded if the same word was spelled 80 different ways). He made a big impression on people with his frequent prayers are devotion to faith, but unfortunately did not manage to convince anyone to sign a treaty with Japan. When he finally returned back home to Japan from his perilous cross-planet journey, he immediately fell ill and died.

As I mentioned before, Japan was becoming increasingly anti-Catholic. After Hasekura's death in 1621, his son and a bunch of households servants were accused of being Christians and subsequently hanged. The Hasekura family had all its privileges revoked (ahhh, feudalism) and all their heretical Christian objects were taken away by the government (crosses, bibles, that sort of thing).

There's a ton of other interesting facts about him (including the fact that there are a lot of people running around in the Americas today with some version of the last name Japon (as in Hasekura de Japon). If you are still interested, I suggest you check out his Wikipedia site.