Христианское столетие Японии // Redroom

In January 1615, a foreign embassy arrived at El Escorial to the court of the Spanish King Philip III. The impeccably dressed envoy was accompanied by a whole detachment of soldiers consisting of thirty swordsmen and twelve archers in elaborate armor. And on the envoy’s personal coat of arms was a black swastika on a white

background. In Spain, the envoy was called Don Francisco Felipe Faxicura. His real name was Hasekura Tsunenaga. And he had arrived in Madrid from Japan . Formally, Hasekura was sent to Europe by his suzerain, the Daimyo of the Sendai domain, who was referred to as a "king" in European diplomatic protocol. But the true initiator of the embassy

was the Shogun himself, Tokugawa Ieyasu . The journey took a year and a half. The Japanese sailed on a ship built by English shipwrights from the Japanese port of Tsukinoura, crossed the Pacific , traveled overland through Mexico, and then boarded a Spanish vessel to sail to Europe. After meeting with Philip, Hasekura traveled on to France, and

then to Rome, where he was received by the Pope. And then, in exactly the same way, across the Americas and two oceans , the Japanese headed home. They only returned to the islands in 1620. This somewhat disrupts how we usually imagine 17 th-century Japan. There is a prevailing image in the public consciousness of a closed country

living by feudal laws and isolation, which only Matthew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy forced to open to the world. But in reality, that was not always the case. Three hundred years before the American steamships in Nagasaki, the Japanese islands were already experiencing an era of close contact with Europeans. So close, in fact, that Hasekura’s embassy was not even