The Japanese Slave Trade: captives, merchants and the Church

In sixteenth-century Japan, war and poverty fed a trade in people long before Portuguese buyers arrived.¹²The old ritsuryō codes allowed only people of the nuhi class to be traded, but service for a fixed term was unregulated and became an important part of the economy, especially in Kyūshū (九州).¹By the end of the century this term servitude (nenki hōkō) had become the usual form of bondage.¹⁵Jesuit letters describe capture as routine: in 1561 Brother Luís de Almeida warned that travellers on the road from Hakata (博多) to Funai (府内) could be seized by thieves and sold to work with the hoe, and in 1571 Brother Miguel Vaz wrote that the wives and children of men killed in war were customarily captured and sold.²Most soldiers in the armies of the time were low-ranking foot soldiers (zōhyō), who lived off plunder and captives.¹⁶Church inquiries later listed other ways people fell into bondage: the families of executed men, wives and servants who fled to a lord's house, children seized by creditors as pledges, and children sold by parents when lords demanded more than the fields produced.¹⁷¹⁸In some places, one report said, the poor were "living a good part of the year on roots and wild herbs" (translated).¹⁸From the 1570s a network of canvassers (hitokadoi) and brokers (hitoakibito) grew up in Kyūshū to supply foreign buyers.¹⁹¹⁰

Churchmen criticised Portuguese slave buying from the start: in 1555 the Jesuit Nunes Barreto complained that the Portuguese at Lampacao forgot the truth through greed in trade and through their slave women.³In the 1580s, during the wars in Kyūshū, a Japanese man or woman could cost less than a cow.²⁰Fr Luís Fróis (フロイス) wrote that at Mie and Shimabara (島原) forty people might be found together for sale, women and children of Bungo (豊後) going for two or three tostões.²¹Wealthy captains bought whole households: the will of Head Captain Domingos Monteiro (1592) freed a large group of Japanese slaves, and in the same year Head Captain Roque de Melo bought at least eight in Nagasaki (長崎) and later took seven of them to Portugal.²²²³²⁴The voyage itself was cruel.²⁵²⁶Captives were packed one on top of another in the hold, many died on the passage to Macao, and even the lascars and servants of the Portuguese bought and carried slaves.²⁵²⁶There, servants bound for a fixed term were often resold as perpetual slaves and branded.²⁵²⁷Jacinta de Sá, the first known Japanese woman in Europe, married a former slave in Lisbon on February 5, 1573.²⁸In Argentina, Francisco Xapón sued for his freedom at Córdoba in 1597 and won it the following year.²⁸Japanese slaves are recorded in Lisbon, Porto, Goa, Macao, Malacca, Seville, Mexico City, Lima, Italian cities and even Algiers.²⁹When the young Japanese envoys of the Tenshō embassy toured the Portuguese settlements of Asia and Africa, they were distressed: "Everywhere we went, we saw Japanese, who had been sold as slaves."³⁰

Fr Cosme de Torres (トーレス), the superior in Japan, asked King Sebastian of Portugal to stop the trade, and a royal provision of September 20, 1570 forbade any Portuguese to ransom or capture any Japanese.⁴⁵⁶Any Japanese so taken were to be freed, and the offender lost all his property, half to the crown and half to his accuser.⁶The verb used, resgatar, meaning "to rescue", was then the usual Portuguese word for buying a slave.³¹The law was to be proclaimed in every fortress and sent to the captains in Japan, so that the Japanese especially would know of it, and Philip II renewed it in 1581 and again for Macao in 1597.⁶⁵In practice, Jesuit paperwork became part of the trade.³²³³Certificates issued by Jesuits in Japan, called titles (títulos), were required whenever owners wished to resell Japanese slaves or list them in their wills.³²With no bishop yet in Japan, the bishop of Macao asked the Jesuits to examine Japanese bought by the Portuguese, and the fathers gave each buyer a certificate stating the titles they had found.³³In 1587 Fr Gaspar Coelho (コエリョ) admitted that the fathers issued such certificates for the bishop of China.³⁴The Jesuits later explained that, when the Portuguese were carrying off young people as perpetual slaves, they had advised contracts for a fixed number of years of service as the lesser evil, on the recommendation of the bishops of China.³⁵³⁶A Jesuit handbook for confessors of 1570 records girls taken to Macao complaining that the superior had licensed their sale.⁴

In July 1587 the regent Hideyoshi (豊臣秀吉) made the slave trade one of his charges against the Portuguese and the missionaries.⁷⁸⁹Among the questions he sent to Fr Coelho by night at Hakata was who had given the Portuguese permission to buy Japanese and carry them as slaves to India.⁷The priest answered that the Japanese themselves sold them, that the fathers had often reproved the merchants, and that the trade could easily be stopped if the daimyo were forbidden to sell captives and criminals to foreigners.³⁷⁹Item 10 of Hideyoshi's notice of July 23, 1587 declared: "The sale of Japanese to China, South Barbary, or Korea is miscreant."³⁸It added that trade in human beings was prohibited in Japan.³⁹Under the old principle the regent applied, such a sale was void, the person was sent home, and both buyer and seller were punished.⁴⁰A Japanese chronicle of the campaign, the Kyūshū go-dōzaki, accused the padres of buying several hundred Japanese and shackling them hand and foot in the holds of the black ships.⁴¹⁴²Fr Alessandro Valignano (ヴァリニャーノ) later wrote that the Jesuits stopped issuing their certificates when Hideyoshi took Nagasaki and forbade any Japanese to be sold as a captive.³³In De missione (1590), the dialogue on the Tenshō embassy, the speakers grieve over Japanese men, women, boys and girls carried off for a low price and sold into slavery across the world.⁴³⁴⁴The dialogue laid the blame on the Japanese who sold their own people, and claimed that Japanese held by the Portuguese were treated almost as free and released after a few years.⁴³⁴⁵

After Japan invaded Korea in 1592, Korean captives flooded the market at Nagasaki and displaced the trade in Japanese.¹⁰¹¹¹²Prices collapsed: the merchant Francesco Carletti bought five Koreans for little more than twelve escudos.¹²⁴⁶Japanese living near the port bought captives in other provinces, and some even crossed the sea to seize people, in order to sell them to the Portuguese for silk.⁴⁷¹⁹In 1596, after the town's Christian leaders pointed to Hideyoshi's law and its death penalty, Bishop Pedro Martins excommunicated anyone who bought Japanese boys and girls and took them out of the country, with a fine of ten cruzados for each person.⁴⁸⁴⁹⁵⁰That sentence lapsed at his death.⁴⁹On September 4, 1598 his successor, Bishop Luís de Cerqueira (セルケイラ), held a consultation at the Jesuit house in Nagasaki with Valignano, the vice-provincial Pedro Gómez, Organtino, Francisco Pasio, Valentim Carvalho and other senior fathers, with Mateus de Couros as notary.⁵¹⁵²⁵³The meeting found that most of those sold had been seduced or taken by force, and that "of a hundred, not one is bought legitimately" (translated).⁵⁴It held that Koreans carried off since the invasion were not lawful captives either, because the war on Korea was unjust.⁴⁷The fathers rejected the claim that slaves found a better life with the Portuguese, saying that Japanese masters often adopted their servants and married them to their daughters, while the Portuguese treated slaves like dogs.⁵⁵⁵⁶Nor, they said, was slavery needed for conversion, since the Christian community in Japan was already large.⁵⁷Their unanimous view was that one must always incline towards liberty.⁵⁸⁵⁹The meeting advised the bishop to renew the excommunication, grant no licences, and ask the king to republish and enforce King Sebastian's law on the freedom of the Japanese in India, China and Japan.⁵⁴⁵²⁶⁰In 1606 the bishop again condemned the slave trade.⁶¹

In Portuguese India the ban met strong resistance from slave owners.¹³¹⁴When Viceroy Aires de Saldanha proclaimed the law in Goa in 1603, the merchants blocked it in the chancery and petitioned the king.¹³The city's judges argued that owners had invested over a million in gold, that the slaves held certificates signed by the bishops and Jesuits of Japan, and that armed Japanese slaves defended Portuguese towns.¹⁴In 1604 and 1605 Philip III ruled that the law was not retroactive, so that slaves held in good faith stayed in bondage, though those claiming illegal captivity could seek justice.⁶²¹³In January 1607 the king ordered a new law, now lost, which seems to have forbidden abuses without forbidding the enslavement of Japanese.⁶³At Macao, records still give 2,000 to 3,000 Japanese sold there in 1610.⁶⁴In Japan, enslavement became a weapon of the persecution: after 1614 Christian women and children of Ōmura (大村), Shimabara and Kuchinotsu (口之津) were threatened with slavery, and the wife of a Christian named Luis Sotar was enslaved for refusing to give up her faith.⁶⁵Friars ransomed with alms many of the young Christian women seized and enslaved in the persecution.⁶⁶In Europe, the case of the Japanese became a standard example for moral theologians such as Fr Luis de Molina.⁶⁷⁶⁸In the end the missionaries' efforts did not stop the trade; it was Japanese law, and the shogunate's tight control of ports, shipping and trade, that finally made it all but impossible.⁶⁹⁷⁰⁴⁸