The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (52 page)

The body of the ship is not built roundish, as our European ones, but that part which stands below the surface of the water, runs almost in a straight line towards the keel.
¹⁵

5. Our small vessels are high in the stern and low in the bow; those of the Japanese are high in the bow and low in the stern
.

The high stern (or poop) on European boats of all sizes from the sixteenth century is striking (consider the traditional Venetian gondola or Columbus' ship the Santa Maria). Large Japanese vessels also had high sterns, although their poop deck was more of an extension out over the stern (in the traditional Chinese manner) than the top of a multi-deck aft cabin, as was the case with European sailing ships.

A high bow on a small ship or boat (e.g. a “Boston whaler”) is ideal for navigating choppy, coastal waters as it allows the boat to slice through waves without taking on excessive water. And, lacking true decks and bilges, the Japanese would want to keep water completely out, rather than taking it on and having it run out the scruppers (deck-level drains on the side or rear of a boat).

6. Ours ships have cloth sails; all theirs have straw sails
.

Frois apparently is still referring to small vessels, which, in the case of the Japanese, probably still relied in 1585 on straw-mat sails. According to Okada, at this time many or most Japanese ships (i.e.
bezaisen
) were using sails of cotton cloth.

7. Our ship's rigging is made from hemp, palm fiber, or coconut fiber; theirs is made from straw
.

Frois is comparing the most common type of rope used for rigging. The Japanese may have relied heavily on straw, but they also used rope made from
ichibii
(Indian mallow, for which one of the Chinese characters is ‘hemp'), bark from the hinoki tree (a type of cypress), and an unknown plant that was denoted with the Chinese characters for silk grass and hemp.

8. Our anchors are made of iron; theirs of wood
.

Wooden anchors may sound strange, but they sank because they had stones tied to them and a cross-bar that helped keep the single barb pointing down. There were probably some four-fluke (Chinese-style) iron anchors, too. A hundred years after Frois, Kaempfer wrote that “the anchors are of iron, and the cables twisted of straw, and stronger than one would imagine.” So wood turned to metal but straw remained king.

9. Our ships' prows have either a ram or a bowsprit; the Japanese funes
¹⁶
have open bows and are not very well suited for battle
.

Going to sea and going to war went hand in hand for Europeans.
¹⁷
And if real naval battles were not enough, Europeans enjoyed making believe. As part of his wedding festivities in 1589, Grand Duke Ferdinando I de' Medici flooded the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence to stage a spectacular mock sea battle.

European ships were built with a bowsprit (a pole-like projection that served as a bridge for boarding other ships) and sometimes—particularly in the case of the galley—a ram for puncturing and then sinking enemy vessels (the ram was at the waterline or slightly lower). Prior to the loss of the Spanish armada in 1588—a loss
attributed in significant part to British use of long-range culverins—conventional naval warfare was a matter of ramming, boarding, and hand-to-hand combat.
¹⁸

The unsuitability of Japanese ships for any kind of warfare is legend. Japan had one famous ancient naval battle (
Da no-ura
) in 1185 that sent the whole Heikei clan to the bottom of the sea, where legend has it the warriors left their faces on the shell of the crab called
heikei-gani
. Otherwise, the Sea of Japan generally was for fishing and trade, not fighting.

Frois in his
Historia
recounts an occasion in 1586 when the mighty Hideyoshi asked the Jesuit Vice Provincial Gaspar Coelho for help securing two Portuguese warships to lead Hideyoshi's own Japanese fleet in an invasion of Korea. Although nothing came of the request, it is doubtful that two ships would have made a difference. In 1592 Korean Admiral Yi Sun, in one of the greatest feats of naval warfare, sank the Japanese fleet with a squadron of his newly invented, heavily-armored “turtle-boats”—a whole fleet of ships that anticipated the Monitors and Merrimacs of the American Civil War.

10. Our sailors, as they row, remain seated and quiet; Japanese sailors row standing and almost always singing
.

Frois obviously was
not
thinking of the
gondolieri
of Venice who still today row while standing (and some sing as well). Frois presumably had in mind the “ordinary” European galley (
gallia sotil
), which was propelled by upwards of 100 or more seated oarsmen who were divided into groups of four men per oar; usually only one of the four was a free man and the other three were slaves.
¹⁹
It is no wonder these galleys were without song.

With respect to Japan, it already has been noted that Japanese boats generally were smaller than European watercraft. Captain Sarris, in 1613, observed something that perhaps only a captain might observe, namely that by performing “their worke standing as ours doe sitting … they take lesse roome.”
²⁰
Kaempfer seconded Frois on the singing aspect of Japanese rowing: “They row according to the air of a song, or the tune of some words, or other noise, which serves at the same time to direct and regulate their work and to encourage one another.” Japanese seamen were not the only ones who “sang,” as both Elizabeth Bird and Eliza Scidmore were struck by the singing of the men who pulled carts. Eliza Scidmore wrote, rather unsympathetically:

Those coolies who pull and push heavily loaded carts or drays keep up a hoarse chant, which corresponds to the chorus of sailors when hauling ropes. “Hilda! Hoida!” they seem to be crying, as they brace their feet for a hard pull, and the very sound of it exhausts the listener. In the old days, people
were nearly deafened with these street choruses, but their use is another of the hereditary customs that is fast dying out.
²¹

11. Our oars are made as a single piece of wood; Japanese oars are made as two pieces
.

The long oars used on European galleys and
galleasses
(galleys with sails) were mostly made from ash, beech, and pine; these are all relatively strong, lightweight woods. According to Kaempfer, the long oars used on Japanese ships were “… not at all streight, like our European oars, but somewhat bent, with a moveable joint in the middle, which yielding to the violent pression of the water, facilitates the taking of them up. The timber pieces and boards are fasten'd together in their joints and extremities, with hooks and bands of copper.”
²²
Eliza Scidmore gave us a picture in words of these oars in action:

… voluble boatmen keep up a steady bzz, bzz, whizz, whizz, to the strokes of their crooked, wobbling oars as they scull in and out.
²³

12. Our oars have a wide, detachable blade; Japanese oars are made of a single piece of wood and the blade is narrow
.

The shape of an oar's blade, including its width, affects an oar's performance (i.e. a sea-going oar blade is narrower than an oar blade used on a river). Detachable blades also were an answer to the problem of frequently damaged or broken oar blades. If you chose to use one oar and most of your rowing is in the coastal waters of Japan, a narrow oar makes sense (an oar with a wide blade would be tiring in choppy water).

13. When our sailors row, they lift their oars out of the water; the Japanese row with their oars continually under the water
.

Chamberlain
²⁴
devoted almost two pages to debating the pros and cons of the different ways of rowing. He noted that the constant use of the entire body, and the fact that the oars were always submerged, meant that the Japanese oarsman never got to rest. However, rowing with such a large stroke—like using a low gear on a bicycle—can be more efficient and easier than sculling very fast (in the “Western way”).
²⁵
Morse wrote: “Our man … began sculling at ten o'clock at night and kept it up with one or two intermissions until four o'clock the next afternoon, with no sleep and apparently no fatigue.”
²⁶

14. On our boats, we are very cautious about fire; even though Japanese boats are all straw, there is no precaution taken for fire
.

Sailors who were with Columbus apparently introduced snuff (ground tobacco that was snorted) to Europe during the closing decade of the sixteenth century. We might now understand why snuff became so popular, so quickly: Sailors obviously were discouraged from smoking aboard ship. (Apparently the “smoking lamp” came into being during the early sixteenth century to essentially restrict smoking to the area near the galley.)
²⁷

The Japanese were less concerned with fire and even had a boat (
yu-bune
) that was a floating public bath, which was supplied with warm water from a wood-burning fire aboard ship.
²⁸
Perhaps because the Japanese tended to stay near shore, they felt comparatively safe with fire.

15. Among us, respected individuals always ride astern; in Japan the nobility ride on the bow, where at times they get soaked
.

One reason for the high poop in Western vessels is for the steersman (or watch) to better see over the bow. Here we learn of another good reason: The smoothest and driest ride generally is at the back of a ship, up high. Unlike Japanese nobles, however, European nobles were not the first to arrive where they were going.

16. Our boats have rounded masts; the masts on the funes are squared
.

A square mast is perhaps yet another reflection that the Japanese rowed more than they sailed, as suggested by other distiches in this chapter.

17. We never lower the sails on our boats; they do so the minute they start rowing
.

“Never” is a bit of an exaggeration, because in bad storms Europeans not only lowered their sails but sometimes cut down the mast, as the violent swaying of a heavy mast can cause a ship to capsize.

18. Our boats have topsails, mizzen-sails, and foresails; Japanese fune have none of these
.

As noted, European ocean-going vessels (e.g. the
nao
, the galleon and the caravel) generally had three masts. The mizzen mast was at the rear or aft of the ship and usually had a lateen-shaped sail, which not only helped propel the ship forward but acted as a giant wind rudder. At the front of the ship was a square foresail, which, in combination with the main sail (also square), generated more propulsion than the sum of each sail on its own. Often above the main sail was yet another, smaller topsail, which also was square.

Japanese ships, including the largest vessels (
bezaisen
or
kitamae-bune
), had one mast with a square sail.

19. Our boats can travel by day or night; Japanese ships put into port at night and travel only by day
.

At the time Frois wrote Japanese ships were trading as far away as the Philippines. This shipping, as well as illegal trade with China, clearly required nights spent at sea. One wonders if most of this long-distance sea travel by the
Japanese actually was done in Chinese ships or ships modeled after the very seaworthy Chinese junk. Kwan-wai So cites a sixteenth-century document to the effect that most of the alleged Wako pirates were using ships with a “sharp bottom” that was introduced by “traitorous people of the Fukien seaboard.”
²⁹
The same document notes that the seagoing vessels of Japan had flat bottoms and sails that required favorable winds; it purportedly took Japanese ships a month to cross seas that Chinese boats crossed in days.

Whatever the reality with respect to Japanese long-distance trade, the vast majority of Japanese ships were seemingly built for fishing or coastal shipping, which apparently was conducted strictly by day. (At night, ships put into the nearest harbor.) The irony here is that a half-century after Frois wrote this (beginning in 1633 with the
sakoku
or isolation policy of the Togukawa shogunate), it became illegal for the Japanese to construct any seaworthy ships
³⁰

20. Our ships often sail regardless of rain; Japanese ships are not to sail unless the weather is clear
.

According to Kaempfer, the deck on a Japanese ship “… is built so loose that it will let the [rain] water run through before the mast hath been taken down and the ship cover'd, partly with mats, partly with sails.” Knowing this, Kaempfer writes, “We can't accuse the Japanese captains of ‘fear and cowardice' for the manner in which they repair to the nearest harbour—available on every inhabited island, and there were many—at the slightest pretext.”
³¹
So, if Frois exaggerates the contrast, he doesn't exaggerate much.

21. Among us, when you hire a small boat, the cost of the crew is included; in Japan, you must pay the same for the fune as you do for a sailor
.

This contrast would seem to reflect nothing more than the Japanese having made explicit what is true to both contractual arrangements: When you rent a boat you are also renting its crew (in neither culture did you simply rent a boat and supply your own crew).

22. Among us, a ship's capacity is determined by the size of its hull; in Japan, it is determined by the number of sections in the sail
.

Frois is evidently talking about classes of ship rather than capacity per se, which was measured in tonnage in the West and in “stones” of rice in Japan (thought of as a numerical quantity, rather than a weight). Estates were also ranked for prestige and taxes according to this same unit, representing the output of the harvest. Japanese sails were not measured in their equivalent to our square feet or yards, but in units of a given area, namely woven mats, so you have the ten-mat sail class, the twenty-mat sail class, and so on.