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In 1542, the first European contact with Japan had occurred when three Portuguese on board a
Chinese junk laden with hides bound from Siam to China was shipwrecked at Tanegashima,
an island only twenty miles southwest of Kyushu. Portuguese trade with Japan began three years later.
The Basque Francis Xavier -- one of the seven co-founders
of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits -- headed a Jesuit
mission which landed at the southern Kyushu city of Kagoshima
in 1549. Used to dealing with overlords, he soon made friends with members of Japan's ruling class who were
primarily interested in Western technology and culture. They gave Xavier permission to teach Catholicism
in exchange for some of his knowledge of the outside world. Backlash to the rising influence of the
missionaries resulted in the first interdictions in 1587 and the first martyrdoms in Japan a decade later.
The success of the Dutch in Japan during the next two and a half centuries was primarily due to their nonalliance
with the Roman Catholic pope.
Until the latter part of the sixteenth century, a bonsan was indispensible to the classic setting of the formal tea ceremony held typically in the aristocratic drawing room ( shoin ) of a lord's mansion. The background for two prominent examples of this is as follows: The warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) had led two thousand men to route an invading army twelve times its size in 1560. Eight years later he proceeded against the capital in Kyoto, leading a force of 30,000, setting up a rival to the Ashikaga's shōgun. Three years after this, in the most terrifying act of his career, he torched three thousand temple buildings in the capital area, slaughtering thousands of Buddhist monks whose great sects had for years held much independent power and political influence. In 1573 the last Ashikaga shōgun was driven out of Kyōto. Two years later Nobunaga won a major battle by employing three thousand musketmen -- relatively new technology courtesy of Portuguese traders -- in recurring waves. Nobunaga soon became de facto leader of the home provinces of Japan. He ordered land surveys and a unification of weights and measures, as well as patronage of the merchant class. Responding in 1582 to a call by his general Toyotomi Hideyoshi for reinforcements, Nobunaga and his eldest son were slain by a treacherous other general. Three years later Hideyoshi himself was the undisputed successor and continued the task of unification set in motion by Nobunaga with his own military alliances, domestic reforms, and foreign adventures. Hideyoshi's successor, Tokugawa Ieysau, established a new régime. These three men completely changed the course of Japanese history. Now, in contrast with his sect-breaking infamy, Nobunaga was also known to be an enthusiastic collector of both Zen-inspired garden stones and miniature landscape stones. In one incident, he is said to have sent one of the latter, named "Eternal Pine Mountain" (Sue no Matsu-yama), together with a fine tea bowl, in 1580 in exchange for the Ishiyama fortress (currently the site of Ōsaka castle). Nobunaga, a greedy collector of tea implements, was apparently also a fancier of bonsan. Luis Frois, S.J. (1532-1597) was born in Lisbon and after his entrance into the Society of Jesus, left for the missions. He arrived in Japan in 1563. For the next 34 years he sent a constant stream of news back to India and Europe and over a hundred of his letters -- many of them running into thousands of words -- have been listed. He was also the author of the valuable Historia do Japão, and a treatise, since lost, on Japanese religions. He died in Nagasaki only a few months after the February martyrdom there of 26 Christians. In a letter written in November 1582, Frois stated that just before his doom, Nobunaga installed the emblem of his divinity in the Sokenji, his temple on Azuchi Hill -- " someone having brought him a stone suitable for the purpose, called Bonção " -- and guaranteed prosperity and a long life to all who came in to venerate it. This particular bonsan has been historically documented and listed as a feature of one of the second-floor rooms of the Azuchi Donjon and was located within a special enclosure there (Naitō, room B, bonsan no ma). 
"The temples of the kami in Japan usually have a stone which is called shintai, meaning the heart or essence of the guardian kami. Now there was no such stone in Azuchiyama temple because Nobunaga declared that he himself was the very shintai and living kami [celestial god/nature spirit] and hotoke [a reincarnated Buddha], and that there was no other lord of the universe and author of nature above him. He thus desired to be worshipped on earth, and in order to please him and win his favour his servants openly proclaimed that no other being save Nobunaga should be worshipped. So that his cult might not be inferior to that of the other idols which had been assembled there, a man named Bonção brought along a stone suitable for the purpose . Nobunaga ordered it to be placed in a kind of tabernacle or small enclosed chapel in the most prominent place above all the hotoke in the temple. He further commanded a proclamation to be made throughout all the kingdoms under his sway that every class of people, men and women, ruling lords and common folk alike, should come from all the cities, towns and villages of these kingdoms on the fifth month (the month of his birth) of this year and worship his shintai which he had placed there in the temple. The crowd of people who converged there from many different kingdoms was indeed incredible." The impressive and extravagantly decorated Azuchi Castle -- with seven internal levels (plus an underground level) and a 138 foot tall tower on a 600 foot high hill above the waters of Lake Biwa -- was begun in 1576, inaugurated in 1579, and burnt down in the aftermath of Nobunaga's own terrible end in early July 1582. It had been among the first constructed to be able to withstand brute cannonfire. It was one of the typical grand homes designed to please the rude and self-made men who had fought their way to mastery of the country, and to demonstrate their power and wealth. Most of its internal rooms were highly decorated with the bold and lavish-painted gold screens and colorful relief carvings subtlely of the previous age's almost purely religious themes. Nobunaga was fastidious regarding cleanliness of the structure and grounds. Only a stone base now remains of the great castle. But enough illustrations and descriptions of it have survived to allow its appearance to be reconstructed with some confidence. One feature of Azuchi, never repeated anywhere else, was the building of an octogonal tower as the uppermost of its seven storeys. (In 1586 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who succeeded Nobunaga, commissioned Osaka Castle, which was to add its own chapter to the history of Japanese castle-building.) 1 |