They Came to Japan

This is an impressive collection of first-person accounts of experiences in Japan by various Europeans including Jesuit missionaries, adventurers, and others. Each account is short, and all are organized by themes. Here we learn of audiences with Nobunaga,  Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, along with reports of some of their atrocities. Other entries pertain to the daily life of Japanese people and still others describe great temples and shrines that are still there today. The immediacy of these commentaries sends me back in time to this pivotal epoch in Japanese history when civil wars were ending and two centuries of closure were… show more.

Japan’s first encounter with the West came with the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese merchants and missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century and dramatically ended less than a century later when the Tokugawa Shogunate closed the country to most foreign visitors. Luckily, the Westerners who visited Japan during this brief (by historical terms) window left many fascinating accounts of what they saw and experienced. This book is a kind of Reader’s Digest of the juiciest of those records. It’s old but has never been superseded and never will be. The book is super easy to read because each entry is just… show more.

This is a hidden gem for Japanese studies. Michael Cooper (now deceased) compiled, translated, or compiled translations of the best accounts of Japan between the years 1543 and 1640. Each one of them represents the words of a traveler who reached Japan at the height of its period of war or just when the Tokugawa family took over. It is neatly organised, a chunky book and to me, it is the best work on understanding Japan, the Japanese, and the samurai from a time period that was one of the most important times for the samurai. I love this book.