Page 315 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

conquer or to claim. The Japanese daimyo and have bemused him, but an insightful visitor wick, N.J., 1959). Fernando was only an infant at the
their samurai would resist such claims with would perhaps have perceived that an aesthetic time of the first voyage.
armed force. They did not yet have access to the of austere simplicity, of wabi and sabi, could be 7. Bartolome de Las Casas, Historia de las indias, 3
technology of the gun, but their martial tradi- as satisfying as an emphasis on gilded, florid vols. (Mexico, 1951).
the
tion and fine blades made them formidable beauty. 8. Peter Martyr, "The Firste Booke of First Decades of
Three Books
the
Ocean," in Richard Eden, The
antagonists. Like Francisco Xavier a few decades on America (\ 1511^-1555 A.D. (Birmingham,
?
later, a Columbus in Japan might have con- England, 1885).
cluded that Japan, although ripe for conversion, 9. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, Historia
was unlikely to become Christian without the N O T E S general y natural de las indias, 14 vols. (Asuncion,
backing of at least some of the daimyo. Advo- 1. On Marco Polo's travels, see Leonardo Olschki, 10. 1944). 3.
Marco
Polo's Asia, An
to his
Introduction
Cited above, n.
'Descrip-
cates of Buddhism and Shinto could be expected tion of the World' called 'II Milione/ trans. John A. 11. Some of the books known to have been read by
to protest any Western missionary effort. Scott (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960). Columbus, most of them with marginalia in his
Without the encouragement of their feudal 2. Marco Polo, The Travels, trans. Ronald Latham hand, have survived. Among them are a copy of
lords few samurai or farmers would have dared (London, 1958), 243-248. For a close comparison of Marco Polo's Orientalum regionum and an Italian
to espouse an alien faith. variant texts, see A.C. Moule and Paul Pelliot, eds., resume of it dated to 1485. and Columbus
Vignaud, Toscanelli
(New
Like the actual European visitors of the fol- Marco Polo, The Description of the World, 2 vols. 12. Henry For brief discussions of the controversy
York, 1902).
(London,
1938), vol.i, 357-363.
lowing century, our hypothetical visitor of 1492 3. The implications of Marco Polo's travels for contem- over Columbus' objectives, see Cecil Jane, The Four
would no doubt have reported that the Japanese porary estimates of the size of the globe and the bal- Voyages of Columbus, xiii-cxii, and Kirkpatrick Sale,
language seemed a veritable "devil's tongue/' At ance between land and sea are discussed by Samual The Conquest of Paradise: Columbus and the
the same time he could hardly have failed to Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (reprint, Columbian Legacy (New York, 1990).
13.
notice the widespread respect for literacy, for 4. Boston, 1983), 65. of the First Voyage, known in 14. Cited in Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 354.
fifteenth
century, see Peter J.
Ouchi in the
On
the
The original Journal
the written word, and for fine calligraphy as an Spanish as the Diario de Colon, does not survive. Arnesen, Medieval Japanese Daimyo (New Haven,
expression of the writer's personality. Inter- What we have today is a paraphrase, with some Conn., 1979).
twined with the powerful martial tradition was direct quotations, made from a copy of the original 15. John W. Hall and Takeshi Toyoda, eds., Japan in the
an equally strong tradition of civilian arts of prepared by a scribe. It was compiled by Friar Muromachi Age (Berkeley, Cal., 1977).
1530.
Bartolome de Las Casas about
In writing his
government and literary culture. He would have journal Columbus had Ferdinand and Isabella in 16. G. Cameron Hurst, Insei: Abdicated Sovereigns in
1086-1185 (New
the
Japan,
Politics of Late Heian
seen this expressed in the poetry meetings of mind. Columbus was not above exaggeration, even York, 1976).
courtiers, warriors, and Zen monks, in No and outright falsification. Other misrepresentations may John W. Hall and Jeffrey P. Mass, eds., Medieval
Kyogen performances, and in the linked-verse have crept in before Las Casas' version was com- Japan, Essays in Institutional History (New Haven,
meetings in which commoners participated. He pleted. There are several English translations of the Conn., 1974).
would have compared the early Japanese castles, Journal. Citations in this essay are from The 'Diario' 17. For the political events of the thirteenth and early
fourteenth
centuries, hinted at only cryptically here,
with their great stone foundations and wooden of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America see Hall and Mass 1974 and Mass, Court and Bakufu
1492-1493, transcribed and translated into English
superstructures, with the stone ramparts of by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. (Norman, in Japan: Essays in Kamakura History (New Haven,
Europe. He might have found wooden Japanese Okla. and London, 1989). This edition has the Span- Conn., 1982).
residences flimsy in comparison with European ish transcription and English translation on facing 18. H. Paul Varley, Imperial Restoration in Medieval
houses, but he would also have noted their airy pages. Japan (New York, 1971). They
Voyages
suitability to the climate and their simple, 5. Discussed in Cecil Jane, ed., The Four cxxiii-cxliii. of 19. Balthasar Gago, S.J. Cited in Michael Cooper, Reports
Anthology
of European
Columbus
to Japan,
Came
An
(paper, New
1988),
York,
uncluttered interiors. The passion for Tea, and 6. Ferdinand Columbus, The Life of Admiral Christo- on Japan, 1543—1640 (Berkeley, Cal., 1965), 316.
the ritual care with which it was served, might pher Columbus, trans. Benjamin Keen (New Bruns- 20. See 'Art in Japan," by Sherman E. Lee, below.

314 CIRCA 1492