Tuesday, October 19, 2004

More Cool History

They area that I live in, though seeming like an uneventful place compared to the mega-city a short train ride away, is loaded with history. My first cool history discovery was way back around when I first got here, and found a park where Matthew Perry (Of the US Navy, not friends) first landed in Japan, opening Japan up for broad international contact. A few months later, I discovered that my area was also the place that the first Japanese Constitution was drafted, a direct result of the influences and disruptions that international contact brought.

Today I ran across something that's been staring me in the face since I got here. I was looking up Gulliver's Travels in Wikipedia because, having never read it, I was wondering what all the fuss was about him in Japan (Japan was the only non-fictional place mentioned in the book). So one thing lead to another, and I ran across A Brief History of William Adams.

The story of William Adams may be familiar to people who have seen the movie Shogun or read the book by James Clavell. Though about as accurate as a child in a coloring book, the character John Blackthorne is based on William Adams. Adams was an English pilot on a Dutch ship that became stranded in Japan in 1600. Being told by the Portuguese that they were pirates, they were immediately captured by the Shoguns forces. The Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, took a liking to Adams and made him a vassal. But he could also never leave Japan, so Tokugawa William Adams dead, and gave him the name Miura Anjin and rank of Samurai. Since Adams was legally dead, he could remarry, so he married a samurai woman, and was given a fife.

Fast forward back up the the 21st century, and I find myself living on the Miura Pennensula, and passing through a station called Anjin-zuka every day. The Miura Peninsula is the domain that was given to Miura Anjin when he became a samurai, called Hemi at the time. Now, Hemi is the name of the station 3 stops from mine, and Anjin-zuka is the next stop, probably close to where he lived. There have been westerners in the area for far longer than I had ever imagined.