Following the huge success of the FX series “Shogun,” which centers on an Englishman who becomes embroiled in power struggles during the samurai era, there has been a flurry of interest in the colorful history of foreigners in Japan. It’s with a satisfying symmetry, therefore, that there should be a new book about a Japanese man heading in the other direction.
“A Gentleman from Japan” by Thomas Lockley, an associate professor at Nihon University College of Law in Tokyo, technically concerns two Japanese men who were enslaved and renamed Christopher and Cosmus by the Europeans (their birth names have been lost to history). After a dramatic and circuitous route across the oceans, they found themselves in London during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, landing in 1588 and leaving in 1592.
A Gentleman from Japan: The Untold Story of an Incredible Journey from Asia to Queen Elizabeth’s Court, by Thomas Lockley. 432 pages, HANOVER SQUARE PRESS, Nonfiction.
Lockley is not new to this time period. Alongside Geoffrey Girard, he was the author of “African Samurai,” the fascinating story of Yasuke, an African man who ended up in Oda Nobunaga’s court in the late 1500s. Like that book, “A Gentleman from Japan” uses the thread of one man’s experience to guide his readers into a complex world of suspicion and danger.
Christopher — the first recorded Japanese person to set foot in the United Kingdom, the United States and South America — rather than Cosmus is the focus of “A Gentleman from Japan” by dint of greater extant historical records. However, given how few records there are concerning the details of his life, a large bulk of the book is devoted to world building, geopolitical context and the nitty-gritty of life at sea in the 16th century.
Written in fast, novelistic prose, Lockley lays out the history of English exploration around the globe, pulling no punches in his depiction of the brutality used in building their empire. As in “Shogun,” the war with the Spanish and the Portuguese takes center stage, but it’s much less about religion and much more about loot. Christopher and Cosmus find themselves a part of Thomas Cavendish’s crew, transferred from the Spanish ship Santa Ana, which was making its way home from Manila when Cavendish attacked and defeated her in the eastern Pacific. A privateer taking part in “state-legitimized piracy,” Cavendish is essentially sailing around the Atlantic and Pacific oceans looking for Spanish ships laden with treasure to hijack. He is also a wily operator with an eye ever open for any kind of opportunity.
At this point, while Japan is known to the Europeans, only Spain and Portugal have had any direct contact with it, and the English don’t even have accurate maps showing its location. It’s for this reason that Christopher is of such interest to Cavendish. From the Santa Ana, he claims a map of Japan labeled in Chinese characters, which Christopher is able to decipher and translate for him. In many ways, these are greater prizes to Elizabethan England than any chest of gold. Cavendish invents a backstory for the two young men, raising their social status to that of “gentlemen from Kyoto” to more readily impress his class-conscious compatriots back home. The ruse clearly works as they end up meeting Queen Elizabeth I herself.
Current marketing trends necessitate a dramatic personal story at the heart of every historical narrative, but in truth, so little is known for sure about Christopher’s experiences that there is necessarily a certain amount of conjecture in piecing his life together. Lockley does immense work with the records but, as he states in the conclusion, his book is less about a gentleman from Japan and is “fundamentally about a world that orientated toward what we now think of as ‘The East.’”
Through characters like Christopher, Cavendish and others, Lockley paints a compelling picture of colonialism in action and draws a clear, hard line between Christopher’s “encounter with Tudor England” and “the contemporary world’s most powerful and rich societies” who are “still in effect the beneficiaries of those historical wrongs.”
Stories of people like Christopher and William Adams, the real-life inspiration behind “Shogun,” may be gripping yarns. They are also representatives of an aspect of history many like to pretend is long gone but which, in reality, still underpins the geopolitical dynamics of today.
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