Signature of Luis de Encio
1 2016-04-29T08:52:58-07:00 Melissa Cruz-Rivas 0a034a0b704a67825beab59b1779a5eeed5e8783 8401 3 Luis de Encio signed a document with his Japanese name, Fukuchi Soemon or Hyoemon. Luis de Encio is the he phonetic equivalent to his original Japanese name. In the 1980's, this signature led Eikichi Hayashiya, Japanese ambassador of Spain, to follow the paths of Luis de Encio and Juan de Paez from Japan to New Spain. plain 2017-04-12T14:28:48-07:00 Jalisco State Archives SONY DSC 20090311 040859-0600 Caroline Frank a1a5e7e9a2c3dba76ecb2896a93bf66ac8d1635eThis page has tags:
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Introduction
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2016-05-05T13:52:03-07:00
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.