policies implemented by Ieyasu concerning foreign trade. These include ordering the Shimazu to make peace overtures to Ming China, accepting embassies from the Ryukyu Islands and Korea, establishing a concrete shuinsen system, exchanging letters with several monarchs in Southeast Asia, and, of course, granting relatively free trade to four European countries. See in particular pages 24–29.

9. Tokutomi Ichiro, Yutaku Kinsei Nihon Kokumin Shi, vol. 3, Tokugawa-shi Jidai (Tokyo: Jiji Press, 1967), 146. When Ieyasu asked the governor of Nova España to send him shipbuilders and mining specialists, the Spanish refused, fearing the Japanese might use their own technology to overtake Spanish trade in Asia.

10. Marco Polo included in his writings an account of gold in Japan that would have made even New World conquistadors envious. Similarly, there were rumors throughout the early modern period of islands somewhere in the Pacific that abounded in silver. Clearly, because of the amounts of silver that Japan produced, these were the rumored islands, but it is interesting that even after Japan was well known to Europeans, rumors of silver islands to the east of Japan persisted. See Iwao Seiichi, Nihon no Rekishi 14: Sakoku (Tokyo: Cho Koronsha, 1966), 6–7.

11. For a readable account of early contact between Macao and Japan, see Charles Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).

12. For a good discussion of the techniques of refining silver in early modern Japan, see Okumura Shji, Hinawaj kara Kurofune made: Edo Jidai Gijitsu-shi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), 134–137.

13. Kobata stated that by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japan was probably exporting at least 200,000 kilograms of silver per year. He traces the advent of the “ash blowing method” of silver refining to merchant families in Hakata who had regular contact with both the Portuguese and China. By 1633 this method was being used in the famous Iwami silver mine. See Kobata Atsushi, Kzan no Rekishi (Tokyo: Nihon Rekishi Shinsho, 1959), 59–60.

14. The Jesuit Cosme de Torres stated, “These Japanese are better disposed to embrace our Holy Faith than any other people in the world. No men in the wide world like to hear sermons on how to serve their creator and save their souls.” Early Jesuit accounts of Japan are full of accounts such as these, extolling the potential of the Japanese as Christians. Michael Cooper, They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 40.