The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony By Micha ...

converted for reasons that were less than godly, the sheer scale of the persecution and the number of deaths attest to many Christians of great conviction in Japan at the time.

The other reason for Portuguese success in Japan was the enormous amounts of silver taken away in Portuguese ships. Although there were a number of Japanese ships trading all over Southeast Asia at the time, there was no direct trade with China because the Ming dynasty had forbidden Chinese to trade with Japanese after a resurgence of wak activity in the sixteenth century (wak were Japanese pirates who raided the coasts of China, causing a great deal of havoc).¹⁹ Therefore, Chinese luxury goods such as porcelain and silk had to find their way to Japan circuitously, either on Japanese ships calling at ports in Southeast Asia or on ships arriving in Japan laden with Chinese goods. This is the situation the Portuguese stepped into, and given that they had access to the Chinese silk market from their base in Macao, they were able to supply a great demand for Chinese goods on the Japanese market. Therefore, the Portuguese acted as middlemen in the extremely lucrative Chinese silk and Japanese silver markets. The Portuguese in Macao came to depend on the Japanese silver trade to such an extent that when the trade was cut off in 1639, the prosperity of Macao took an enormous plunge, never to recover.²⁰ It is true that Macao did not disappear as a Portuguese colony, as some overenthusiastic Dutch observers had hoped, but the colony would never again reach the heights of prosperity it had attained at the apex of its trade with Japan.²¹

Hearing of the silver that made the Portuguese endeavors so profitable, the Dutch sent out a voyage consisting of several ships to try to open trading relations with Japan in the last years of the sixteenth century.²² One of the Dutch ships, De Liefde, was piloted by an Englishman named William Adams. It was common at the time for men of other nationalities to hire out their services on foreign countries’ ships. After all, neither Columbus nor Magellan was Spanish, and Henry Hudson was not Dutch but English. The Dutch themselves learned of Iberian success in the East Indies primarily from Dutchmen in the employ of the Portuguese who returned home to write accounts of their time in