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In 1542, the first European
contact with Japan had occurred when three Portuguese on board a Chinese junk
laden with hides bound from Siam to China was shipwrecked at Tanega Shima,
an island only twenty miles southwest of Kyushu. Portuguese trade
with Japan began three years later. The Basque Francis Xavier --
one of the seven co-founders of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits -- headed
a Jesuit mission which landed at the southern Kyushu city of Kagoshima
in 1549. Used to dealing with overlords, he soon made friends with
members of Japan's ruling class who were primarily interested in Western
technology and culture. They gave Xavier permission to teach Catholicism
in exchange for some of his knowledge of the outside world. Backlash
to the rising influence of the missionaries resulted in the first interdictions
in 1587 and the first martyrdoms in Japan a decade later. The success
of the Dutch in Japan during the next two and a half centuries was primarily
due to their nonalliance with the Roman Catholic pope.
Until the latter part of the sixteenth century, a bonsan was indispensible to the classic setting of the formal tea ceremony held typically in the aristocratic drawing room ( shoin ) of a lord's mansion. The background for two prominent examples of this is as follows:
The warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582)
had led two thousand men to route an invading army twelve times its size
in 1560. Eight years later he proceeded against the capital in Kyoto,
leading a force of 30,000, setting up a rival to the Ashikaga's
shōgun.
Three years later, in the most terrifying act of his career, he torched
three thousand temple buildings in the capital area, slaughtering thousands
of Buddhist monks whose great sects had for years held much independent
power and political influence. In 1573 the last Ashikaga
shōgun
was
driven out of Kyōto. Two years later Nobunaga won a major battle
by employing three thousand musketmen -- relatively new technology courtesy
of Portuguese traders -- in recurring waves. Nobunaga soon became
de facto leader of the home provinces of Japan. He ordered land surveys
and a unification of weights and measures, as well as patronage of the
merchant class. Responding in 1582 to a call by his general Hideyoshi
for reinforcements, Nobunaga and his eldest son were slain by a treacherous
other general. Three years later Hideyoshi himself was the undisputed
successor and continued the task of unification set in motion by Nobunaga
with his own military alliances, domestic reforms, and foreign adventures.
Hideyoshi's successor, Ieysau, established the Tokugawa's
régime.
These three men completely changed the course of Japanese history.
Now, in contrast with his sect-breaking
infamy, Nobunaga was also known to be an enthusiastic collector of both
Zen-inspired garden stones and miniature landscape stones. In one
incident, he is said to have sent one of the latter, named "Eternal Pine
Mountain" (Sue no Matsu-yama), together with a fine tea bowl, in 1580 in
exchange for the Ishiyama fortress (currently the site of Ōsaka castle).
Nobunaga, a greedy collector of tea implements, was apparently also a fancier
of
bonsan.
In a letter written
in November 1582, Frois stated that just before his doom, Nobunaga installed
the emblem of his divinity in the Sokenji, his temple on Azuchi Hill --
"
someone having brought him a stone suitable for the purpose, called
Bonção
"
-- and guaranteed prosperity and a long life to all who came in to venerate
it. This particular
bonsan
has been historically documented
and listed as a feature of one of the second-floor rooms of the Azuchi
Donjon and was located within a special enclosure there (Naitō, room B,
bonsan no ma
).
cf. "As Nobunaga won more and more victories in battle, many
kingdoms [provinces] which were quite remote from the Kantō area (literally, East of the [Hakone] Barrier) and had not been
conquered by him by force of arms, sent ambassadors to pledge their
allegiance and submit to his rule merely on account of the fame of his
name, wealth and power. But instead of humbling himself and
recognising that he had received all these great favours and benefits
from the powerful hand of the Author of Nature, he became so proud and
boastful in his might that he was not satisfied with the title of
supreme Lord of Japan. As such he was honoured by more than 50
kingdoms with so much exact and profound veneration that the old people
of Japan say that they have never before seen or heard of such honour
being paid to the kings and princes of these kingdoms. And thus he
finally decided to imitate the temerity and insolence of
Nabuchodonosor [
Nebuchadnezzar
], demanding that everyone should worship him not as a
human and mortal man but as if he were divine and the lord of
immortality. In order to carry out his wicked and abominable desire,
he commanded a temple to be built next to his palace near the mountain
fortress...
The impressive and extravagantly decorated Azuchi Castle -- with seven internal levels (plus an underground level) and a 138 foot tall tower on a 600 foot high hill above the waters of Lake Biwa -- was begun in 1576, inaugurated in 1579, and burnt down in the aftermath of Nobunaga's own terrible end in early July 1582. It had been among the first constructed to be able to withstand brute cannonfire. It was one of the typical grand homes designed to please the rude and self-made men who had fought their way to mastery of the country, and to demonstrate their power and wealth. Most of its internal rooms were highly decorated with the bold and lavish painted gold screens and colorful relief carvings subtlely of the previous age's almost purely religious themes. Nobunaga was fastidious regarding cleanliness of the structure and grounds. 1 |
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1
Elison,
George "The Cross and the Sword: Patterns of Momoyama History" in Elison,
George and Bardwell L. Smith (eds.)
Warlords, Artists, and Commoners
(Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1981), pp. 50, 62-63, 74-75, 264.
Bonsan
referenced specifically on pp. 74 and 301, note 62.
Cooper, Michael, S.J. (ed.)
They Came to Japan, An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543-1640
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1965), pp. 145, 291, 409,
418. The long two paragraph Nobunaga quote is from Frois in
Cartas que os padres e irmãos da Companhia de Jesus escreverão dos reynos de Iapão e China...,
Evora, 1598, II, ff. 62-62v, as quoted in Cooper, pp. 101-102, with notes
on 106, 199, 418. Be aware of the subtle difference in translation of the two
colored phrases
above.;
"Eternal Pine Mountain" stone from
Covello,
Vincent T. and Yuji Yoshimura
The Japanese Art of Stone
Appreciation, Suiseki and Its Use with Bonsai
(Rutland, VT: Charles
E. Tuttle; 1996, 1984), pp. 22-23;
Hall, John Whitney
Japan, From
Prehistory to Modern Times
(New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1970),
pp. 136-159.
Another Jesuit impressed by the
temple gardens of Miyako [Kyōto] was Vilela, who describes in a lengthy
but fascinating account of his tour of the city their miniature
mountains,
stunted trees
[emphasis added by RJB],
rocks and waterfalls -- a setting which, he declares, inspires the spectator to contemplation (
Cartas,
1575, f. 229v, per Cooper, note on pg. 351). Gaspar Vilela, S.J.
(1525-1572) was born in Avis, Portugal and sailed for the missions at
an early age. He arrived in Goa in 1551 and thence sailed to
Japan in 1554. He worked on the Japanese mission, especially in
Miyako, until 1570 when as a sick man he was recalled to Goa where he
died shortly afterwards. At least on Japanese New Year, Feb. 1,
1565 Vilela was travelling with Frois. The former was known to
have acquired a good command of the Japanese language. Some of
his letters are also published in the 1598
Cartas, especially ff. 319-330v. (Cooper, pp. 17, 109-110, 182, 269, 351, 412)
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