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The First Mexican Contacts with Asia
Legaspi and Urdaneta, who had sailed from Puerto de Navidad (to the south of Jalisco), arrived in Las Filipinas in February of 1565; and by the middle of that year, Urdaneta had found the route back to Mexico when he took a northerly course towards the Japanese archipelago, and from there he followed the Siwo Stream to the California coast; then, by hugging the coastline, he arrived in Acapulco.[1] Legaspi, in turn, stayed behind in Las Filipinas, founded Manila as the archipelago’s capital in 1571, and became its first governor. From that moment on, hundreds of Chinese vessels arrived annually in Manila to trade with the Spaniards. In 1573, the first official cargo of Chinese goods formally arrived in Acapulco. This transpacific trade significantly influenced the relationship with Japan, since that country would eventually become a supplier for the galleons and a necessary stopover in the long return voyage across the great Pacific Ocean.
Spaniards and Japanese diplomats established contact in the last decade of the sixteenth century.[2] In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (one of the three unifiers of Japan, along with Oda Nobunaga and Ieyasu Tokugawa), sent an envoy to Manila to demand tribute. Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas was able to handle the situation well diplomatically and managed to appease, to a certain extent, Hideyoshi’s menacing tone. For the following seventeen years, intermittent diplomatic exchanges took place between Japan and Manila with its respective ups and downs, but produced no substantial progress in building the relationship. The main reason was that the two parties’ interests were different: while Japan was interested in commercial exchange, aware of the growing importance of the Asian trade from Manila to Mexico, the paramount objective of the Spaniards was Christian evangelization. Japan's Christianization had begun in 1549 with the arrival of Jesuit Francisco Javier to Japan; for more than forty years, the Jesuits were the only Christian order in those lands, where they focused their evangelizing work mainly on the islands’ feudal elites.[3] Franciscans arrived in the 1590s, but their oppositional stance to the central Japanese authority led to the first executions of Catholics in Japan, which occurred in Nagasaki Harbor in 1597; except for three Japanese converted by Jesuits, all the others executed were Franciscans. Far from being deterred, Jesuits redoubled their missionary efforts in Japan, increasing their resident numbers from four to thirty between 1599 and 1600, resulting in 70,000 conversions, according to their records.[4] The beginning of the new century witnessed the rise of Ieyasu Tokugawa, ushering in a period of calm as more religious orders arrived, such as the Dominicans and the Augustinians. Peace was short-lived, however; for political reasons, the Japanese government ordered the Christian churches to close down in 1612, the missionaries stripped of their properties and ordered deported, thus initiating a systematic eradication of Christendom in Japan.[5]
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[1] CALDERÓN, Francisco R; Historia Económica de la Nueva España en tiempos de los Austrias; México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1ª. Reprint of the 1st . edition; 1995 [1988]. P. 565. Also: Antonio M. Molina; América en Filipinas; Madrid: Ed. MAPFRE; 1992; pp. 102-103.
[2] Not including the “Embassy of the Youth”, formed by four teenage Japanese members of the Kyushu island feudal nobility who arrived in Europe in 1584 guided by Jesuits (see: Judith Brown and Adriana Boscaro)
[3] Missing footnote
[4] According to Joao Paulo Oliveira e Costa, in 1600 there were around 300 000 Japanese who practiced catholicism in Japan, many of them noble people, of whom at least fourteen daimyô had been baptized. OLIVEIRA E COSTA, João Paulo; “Tokugawa Ieyasu and the Christian daimyô during the crisis of 1600”; Bulletin of Portuguese/Japanese Studies; December 2003, año/vol. 7; Lisboa, Portugal: Universidade Nova de Lisboa. P. 56.
[5] BORAO, José Eugenio; “La colonia de japoneses en Manila en el marco de las relaciones de Filipinas y Japón en los siglos XVI y XVII”, in Cuadernos CANELA: Actas de la Confederación Académica Nipona, Española y Latinoamericana, Vol. XVII, 2005; p. 13. Available at: http://www.canela.org.es
