Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
There were Christian nuclei in Sendai, Miwake (today Mizusawa), Yamori (today Maesawa), Shizu, Ichinoseki, Sannoseki and Ishuzumori and the port of Akita functioned, as today, as a maritime antechamber for isolated Hokkaido, the name through which it would be known, from 1868, the island of Yezo.
In Akita, the Jesuit Jerónimo de Angelis, disguised as a merchant, would embark in 1618, heading for the fishing port where, in 1606, the samurai Matsumae Yoshihiro, under the orders of the Tokugawa shogunate, had built the island’s first (and only) castle (he gave it his own name ), as it was up to his clan to defend this area and, by extension all of Japan, from the Ainu (Yeozojin), “the barbarians of the north.” Irony of fate: those Ainus – feared for the use of poisoned arrows as a lethal weapon – would later join the samurai army when they fell out of grace among the lords of the south.
Angelis collected interesting information about the Ainu, which can be seen in two reports sent to Rome. He tells us, for example, that annually the “Yezojin, from Menashi, east of Yezo” arrived at Matsumae “with 100 ships full of salmon and herring” and an indeterminate number of skins of rakko, a sea otter very similar to the sable.
De Angelis speaks of other islands near Rakkojima inhabited by people not as white or shaggy as the Ainu, known for their “shoulder-length long hair.” The Sicilian also tells us that “the Yezojin of Teshio, north of Yezo” brought to Matsuma various types of merchandise, emphasizing the “ornate and finely woven silk, similar to the cloth from China.” The Teshio region is located on the western tip of Hokkaido opposite the Manchurian island of Sakhalin.
While in Sicily, Jerome de Angelis had access to a map depicting a large island north of Japan, but it had seemed so unrealistic that he had assumed it was just the author’s imagination. Which wasn’t true at all.
The map in question was, most likely, the 1643 Atlas of the well-known Portuguese cartographer João Teixeira Albernaz I. It shows us, in the Pacific Ocean, the northern section of the “parts of Japan” and above the “Province of Yezo,” followed by some islands, as the caption says, “that João da Gama found,” in other words, the Curílias islands.
Inspired by this atlas, Angelis represented the Land of Yezo as “a huge island situated north of Honshū and close to Korea or Northeastern China,” as it was believed to be connected to the mainland. Only on his second visit in 1621 could Angelis prove that he was, in fact, on an island, due to the sea currents and because he had noticed that the Ainu, unlike the Tatars, had no social or political organization, concluding, therefore, that these two peoples had never had any kind of contact.
Follow
