In 1983, French historian Thomas Calvo, a specialist in the study of colonial Guadalajara, published an article in the Spanish journal Revista de Indias, about a group of “white-collar” Japanese people who lived in seventeenth-century Guadalajara. Two personalities stood out in this group, their names Luis de Encío and Juan de Páez. In 1980’s, the Japanese ambassador in Spain, Eikichi Hayashiya, who had been in Mexico previously as his country’s cultural attaché, discovered this fascinating article.  Most of all, Ambassador Hayashiya found his attention drawn to the signature in Japanese characters on one of the documents that Calvo reproduced.   

Upon returning to Japan, Hayashiya had the signature examined. In kanji (Chinese written characters), it represented the man’s name in Japanese as Fukuchi Soemon or Hyoemon;  and in phonetic hiragana script, it indicated that his name in Spanish was Luis de Encío. With this information, Hayashiya’s research led him to the conclusion that the man probably came from the town with this very same name: Fukuchi, near the city of Sendai, to the north of present-day Tokyo. This finding by Hayashiya was important in order to determine how Fukuchi had arrived in New Spain, since in 1613 he might have left from Sendai with the famous Hasekura mission sent by the Sendai Damiyô (feudal
 lord), Date Masamune, one of Japan’s first converts to Catholicism.

In 2002, Hayashiya traveled to Guadalajara to deliver a lecture at the University of 
Guadalajara, entitled “The Japanese who Stayed in Mexico in the Seventeenth Century: About a Samurai in Guadalajara.” That was our first encounter with these Japanese gentlemen. Four years later, we started a formal research about the two most outstanding Japanese men in the group, Luis de Encío and Juan de Páez. Armed with Calvo’s seminal work, and through a thorough examination of the historical documents of the time, our objective was to recover the story of these two Japanese in colonial Guadalajara. Three years after the process had started; we published the results of our research in the book El japonés que conquistó Guadalajara. La historia de Juan de Páez en la Guadalajara del siglo XVII (The Japanese Who Conquered Guadalajara: The Story of Juan de Páez in Seventeenth-Century Guadalajara).

In this paper, we underscore the role Páez and Encío played as merchants in the Guadalajara of 
the time. This work is divided into four sections. The first section is a glimpse into the historical context in which the earliest contacts between Mexico (then Nueva España or New Spain) and Japan took place. It is followed by 
a second section where we present our hypothesis about how these Japanese might have arrived in Guadalajara; at this point, it is still a hypothesis, because we have not been able to prove it definitively on the basis of the available documents. In the third and fourth sections, we deal with the role played by Luis de Encío and Juan de Páez respectively, the former as a merchant and businessman, the latter as a financier.