The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (21 page)

62
  During the Tokugawa period Japanese girls from age fourteen to marriage attended compulsory “needle shops” and “girl's rooms” where they learned sewing from other women. Walthall, “The Life Cycle of Farm Women,” 46.

63
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 253–254.

64
  Joy Hendry, “Drinking and Gender in Japan.” In
Gender, Drink and Drugs
, ed. Maryon McDonald, 175–191 (Oxford: Berg, 1994).

65
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 40.

66
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 58.

67
  
Biobus. Byõbu
, which are standing screens of paper.

68
  
Levarem as molheres couza à pinga
.

69
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 137–138.

70
  Xavier de Castro and Robert Scrhimpf, trans.,
Traite de Luis Frois, S.J.(1585) sur les contradictions de moeurs entre Europeens & Japonais
(Paris: Chandeigne, 1993).

71
  Natalie Zemon Davis,
Women on the Margins, Three Seventeenth-Century Lives
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 63–139; Kathleeen Myers and Amanda Powell, eds.,
A Wild Country Out in the Garden
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

72
  Alice M. Bacon,
Japanese Girls and Women
(London: Kegan Paul, 2001[1892]), 8. For all her cultural relativism, Bacon noted in a footnote that the Japanese way of sitting was “unnatural and unhygienic.” This notion is still current today, even in Japan, and yet it is Americans, not the Japanese, who seem to suffer from bad knees.

73
  
Sakazuki
.

74
  Okada,
Yoroppa-Bunka To Nihon-Bunka
, 60.

75
  During the Edo era a small round metal dish was used instead of a piece of leather or paper.

3   Concerning children and their customs

1. Boys in Europe wear their hair short; in Japan, they all let it grow freely up to the age of fifteen
.

This chapter reflects the fact that the education of children was absolutely central to the Jesuit program for directed culture change, be it in Asia, the Americas, or Europe itself.
¹
If the Jesuits were to transform Japanese society it was imperative that European Jesuits understand how Japanese children were reared.

In paintings such as “Saint Francis Xavier Preaching,” Portuguese artist André Reinoso clearly depicted boys with hair that was off the ears.
²
Recall that Europeans equated long hair with virility and thus it was more appropriate for adult men.

In Japan a baby boy's head was shaven four to five times a month until age three, when there was a ceremony called “hair placing” (
kami-oki
). Henceforth the boy's hair was allowed to grow until age five, when it was trimmed neatly around the edges in the manner of a bowl-cut. The child's hair was not cut again until the boy's coming of age, roughly between the age of eleven and sixteen. The hair was not, however, allowed to hang freely, for a shock of loose hair was considered to be the mark of an outlaw or a vengeful ghost. It was generally bound in a ponytail until adulthood, at which point the front of the pate was shaven and the remaining hair bound and set as described previously in
Chapter 1
,
#6
.

2. European babies spend a long time in swaddling clothes with their hands tucked inside; in Japan they wear kimonos from the time they are born and their hands are always free
.

It was common in Europe to swaddle infants, that is, to keep them tightly wrapped in cloth or linen for upwards of nine months (if not too restrictive, the swaddling seems to comfort babies).
³
With respect to Japan, Frois is correct that the robe worn by infants was similar to adult robes. However, the Japanese would say the infant is put into
ubugi
or
ubuginu
, which literally translates as “birth-robe.” These robes often were decorated with auspicious motifs appropriate to the infant's sex and are fastened from behind by two ribbons. At age three, the child changes to a
kimono
with a girdle-like
obi
.

3. In Europe, children sleep in cradles and they use little carts to teach them to walk; in Japan, they have none of these things and use only the aids that nature provides
.

Manuscripts from the Middle Ages describe a three-wheeled walker that was used in Europe to teach infants to walk. One of these “baby walkers” is depicted on a tapestry dating to 1390.
⁴
The Japanese did not have “walkers“and used cocoon-like wicker baskets instead of cradles. Today, Euro-American style cribs are common in Japan and are called by the descriptive term
beibi-sahkuru
, or “baby circles.” Note, however, that at night Japanese infants ordinarily sleep with their parents, not in a crib.
⁵
Japanese parents do not feel obliged to teach their children to sleep alone, nor do they worry about infants being suffocated or otherwise hurt in a family bed. (The American belief that infants and young children should sleep by themselves is unusual, as cultures go).

4. Among us, it is ordinarily grown women who carry the babies, on their bosom; in Japan, it is nearly always very young girls who carry the babies, on their backs
.

Here Frois contrasts commoners; the nobility in both Japan and Europe generally had grown nursemaids who looked after infants. According to Bacon, there was even a particular village in Japan of large, extremely fit, red-cheeked women who performed this service as a hereditary calling for the Emperors' children. Be that as it may, Frois makes two generally valid contrasts in one: 1) the different manner of carrying the baby, and 2) the different age of the carrier. Although today in Japan one rarely sees siblings carrying tiny tots on their backs, one does occasionally see infants being carried on their mother's or, more commonly, grandmother's back.

5. Among us, infants wear only a single cloth belt, cinched and tied in front; infants in Japan wear kimonos with a ton of ribbons, all tied in back
.

One might think the knot uncomfortable, but the Japanese did not have chairs to lean back against, and back-ties made sense for those who carried infants (the knots did not come between the child and its mother or older sister). Although Frois' usage—“a ton”—prosaically conveys the number and size of the knots, they came undone in an instant because they were tied in a bow.

6. Among us, a four-year old child still does not know how to eat with his own hands; in Japan a three-year old already eats by himself using chopsticks.
⁶

Frois' contemporary, the Spanish merchant Bernardino de Avila Giron, noted with amazement that a Japanese child of four could remove the bones of a sardine with chopsticks. In the economic “bubble” days, when Ezra Vogel's (1980)
Japan as Number One: Lessons for America
was still selling like hotcakes, Morita Akio,
the head of Sony, suggested that because chopsticks were more difficult to use than Western silverware, Asian minds were better developed, hence the success of the Far East.

7. With us, it is normal to whip and punish a child; in Japan this is very rare and they only reprimand them
.

Daily life in sixteenth-century Europe was filled with danger. Many parents viewed corporal punishment as a Biblically-sanctioned means of insuring that children did not repeat behavior that might get them killed by a horse, burned by a fire, or run over by a cart. The Jesuits were amazed that Japanese parents disciplined their children solely with words, spoken to a child of six as if he or she was a seventy year-old. Even today visitors and researchers alike remark on how Japanese mothers squat down and explain things at length to children,
⁷
rather than simply demand obedience.

8. Among us, one learns to read and write from secular teachers; in Japan, they all learn at the temple-schools
⁸
of the Buddhist monks
.

Cities and towns in Europe, particularly in northern or Protestant Europe,
⁹
often established neighborhood schools (
gymnasia, ludi litterarii
) where the children (particularly boys
¹⁰
) of commoners and the petty bourgeoisie received a basic education. Frois may overstate the extent to which schools were staffed by secular teachers, as elementary education in sixteenth-century Europe often fell to priests or religious. Indeed, during the sixteenth century (albeit after Frois left Portugal in 1548
¹¹
) the Jesuits became largely a teaching order, establishing schools throughout Catholic Europe as well as Asia and Latin America

With respect to Japan, Frois' fellow Jesuit, Rodrigues, observed that the sons of nobles were tutored at home while the rest of the gentry studied in temple schools. According to Rodrigues:

Some stay at the monasteries for their studies, but others return home daily if the monastery is near their homes. These monasteries of the bonzes also serve
as universities for those who study philosophy and the sciences and want to follow an ecclesiastical career. In the district of Bando, in the kingdom of Shiomonotsuke, there is a university called Ashikaga, whither students flock from all over Japan in order to study all the sciences which are taught there
gratis
.
¹²

9. Our children learn first to read and then to write; in Japan they commence with writing and then learn to read
.

Japanese children did indeed write Chinese characters before they could read them. Because most Chinese characters have multiple pronunciations in Japanese, mastering the various possibilities, that is, reading, does indeed take much more time than writing (excepting a significant number of very complex characters, which most Japanese learn to read but never learn to write). Today the Japanese still are big on memorizing by writing. The thick, brushed line seemingly impresses the visual memory, and it is important to learn the order of the strokes. Moreover, such writing can be art. The calligraphy of elementary school children (usually just one or two large brushed characters) frequently is on exhibit in Japanese rail and subway stations.

10. Our instructors teach our children the catechism, [the lives of] the saints, and virtuous habits; the bonzes teach the children to play music, sing, play games,
¹³
fence and carry out their abominations with them
.

The catechism and lives of the saints were a major component of primary education in Europe, which, as noted, often was in the hands of clergy and religious orders such as the Jesuits. Frois' allusion to pederasty (“their abominations”) hints at his less-than-objective attitude toward Buddhist temple-schools. The mastery of hundreds of Chinese characters clearly occupied most student's time. And yet Frois is correct in suggesting that pederasty was a part of temple-school life (see
Chapter 4
). Indeed, judging from the literature, which goes back a thousand years, there was rather intense competition among temple-schools to recruit attractive boys. Although pederasty was not uncommon in Europe, particularly in school settings, Europeans ignored it or made a great show of horror when it was discovered.
¹⁴

11. Young men in Europe do not know how to deliver a message; a Japanese child of ten can do so with the wisdom and prudence of a fifty year-old
.

This contrast, like others in this chapter (e.g.
#6
,
#13
,
#14
) show that Frois is not just following an agenda to idealize Europe. Nowadays, the “messenger boy” is
an anachronism; so, too, is his skill at recalling details of a message or supplying contextual information that would clarify or amplify a hastily penned dispatch. Not long ago in both Japan and the West messenger boys were crucial to the functioning of any town or city. The English verb “to page” testifies to this fact, as does the Japanese term for message,
kojo
, which literally means “mouth-above.”

12. Among us, a man can reach the age of twenty and still not carry a sword; in Japan, twelve- and thirteen-year old boys carry a sword and dagger.
¹⁵

As noted in
Chapter 1
, Europeans during the sixteenth century increasingly equated privilege with education, rather than martial prowess. Soldiering, in fact, became a profession and many a European army was made up of mercenaries. Correspondingly, young boys of the middle and upper class were raised to appreciate rather than pursue military service.
¹⁶

Frois was certainly not exaggerating the situation in Japan.
¹⁷
Others (e.g., Alvarez and Gago) claimed that boys of eight or ten carried arms. In a letter from 1565, Frois noted that Japanese boys slept with their swords and daggers next to their pillow. What neither Frois nor his European contemporaries pointed out was that it was primarily Japanese boys of the
buke
or samurai class who donned swords and daggers at an early age, although even little commoners as well as their parents could wear a single sword if they so wished. Until the modernization of Japan in the late nineteenth century, tykes far younger than twelve or thirteen wore the standard “big and little” sword set.

This contrast reflects both the utterly martial orientation of the Japanese gentry and the same precocious self-control suggested by other contrasts. The young Japanese who could be entrusted with a message could also be entrusted with a lethal weapon. Why? For one thing, Japanese children quarreled infrequently, and this is largely true even up to the present day. There was a downside, however, to armed precocity. Frois' Jesuit superior, Valignano, noted that it sometimes happened that small children would have a temper tantrum and commit
hara-kiri
by slitting open their stomachs.