A retainer of Masamune Date, daimyo of Sendai, Hasekura was appointed in 1613 as Japan's first ambassador to the West. Accompanied by traders, sailors and European missionaries, he traveled via Mexico and Cuba to Spain and Italy. His primary duty was to discuss trade with the Spanish king. But he also went to secure missionaries from the pope. Date was sympathetic to Christianity, and Hasekura was baptized in Spain. The Sendai City Museum still possesses a portrait of the ambassador kneeling in prayer in Rome, where he was made an honorary citizen.

But Hasekura's mission was a failure. It took a year and half even to reach Europe. During that interval, the shogunate proclaimed an edict expelling missionaries from Japan and forbidding the practice of Christianity. When news of this reached Europe, the Spanish king refused to sign trading agreements. The pope, likewise, retracted his initial decision to send more missionaries to Japan. Hasekura's epic voyage had no concrete results. Yet it is fascinating to speculate on what might have been.

The rejection of Christianity in Japan was part of a general drift toward isolationism. By the mid-17th century the country had opted for sakoku: closure to the outside world. Japanese were forbidden, on pain of death, to travel abroad; foreigners were confined to a small enclave in Nagasaki. For some 250 years, Japan became an irrelevance to world affairs.

This was paradoxical. Japan, like Britain, Spain or Portugal, was a maritime nation, and the ability to undertake a long-distance sea voyage placed the country at that time in an elite club. It was potentially a naval and imperial power. During the 1590s, under the orders of ruler Hideyoshi, Japanese forces twice invaded Korea, to be repelled through the tactical genius of one man, Korean Adm. Yi Sun-sin, and the military assistance of China. But Japanese ambitions stretched further afield. Hideyoshi had claimed dominion over the Philippines, and for some years Spain protected its colonists in Manila by paying tribute to Japan.

What if the Tokugawa regime had made colonial expansion a priority? Historian Richard Storry has speculated that "a Japanese conquest of the Philippines would have been well within their capacity during the 17th century,'' and suggested that an imperialist Japan might have reached Australia before the British. This would have led to direct conflict with the West. Japan would have competed for territory not only with the Spanish in the Philippines, but also with the Dutch in the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago. The European colonial powers would not have looked kindly on an expanding pagan empire. Japanese imperialism might have provoked a war; ultimately, Japan might itself have become a European colony.

But what if Japan had been a Christian country? Jesuit missionary activity in the 16th century had converted some 5 percent of the Japanese population; Japan was their most fertile field in Asia. The isolationist trend, bolstered by official fears that Christianity might destabilize the country, put an end to this. International trade was not the only victim. A Christian Japan would likely have been treated as an equal on the world stage. It might have been encouraged to build an Asian empire to match those of its European competitors ﾑ or the one that it was to seek, abortively, during the few decades up to 1945.

Hasekura returned to a hostile and increasingly introverted Japan. It seems that he remained Christian despite official policy; some of his descendants were martyred for refusing to recant their faith. Ultimately, he was forgotten; only in the 19th century was the record of his voyage rediscovered. Catholic author Shusaku Endo made him the subject of a novel, The Samurai. Yet had things been different, he might be celebrated today as the father of a Christian Japan, and his portrait, rather than languishing in a provincial museum, would stand by the altar of Tokyo's cathedral. History's heroes, like its victims, are so often the products of chance.

The Japan Times Weekly: May 26, 2007
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