FLAIL!!!!!

[gurdymonkey]

First load of laundry is in. Goop is on hair. But I need more Rustoleum and I'm just going to do the whole gameboard top from scratch.  Pagano's didn't have small cans of Rustoleum. This stuff I bought is taking for freaking ever to dry, even with a high intensity worklight shining on it and a fan going.

Better image of the four Japanese emissaries found on the German version of Wikipedia: 

ACK! Timer went off. Must rinse hair!!!!

So, gurdymonkey , if you're writing up a timeline for a class on Japanese contact with the West in period, why does it keep going as far as 1854? Yes, the SCA period ends at 1600, a lovely, round number that allows those of you who insist on wearing Big Damn Clothes (TM) with lots of frippery to do so. However, context is everything, particularly on this subject, Portuguese traders, Jesuit missionaries, the Random English Guy with the ear of the Shogun. It doesn't just stop at 1600.  The important bits span only about 100 years: 1543 to 1641. But I had to stick 1854-1854 on the end, simply to illustrate just how adamantly Japan managed to resist the perils of outside influence for the next two hundred years.

Excellent scholarly article on the Jesuits in Japan. I can't even begin to get into their interpretations of Buddhism as described in letters home, but it does have a good chronology on the mission at the time: 
http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/pdf/361/36100206.pdf

Google Books had a nice 30 page chunk of Tanegashima: the arrival of Europe in Japan available online.

Still feel like I'm scratching the surface, but at least I have some information organized that I can present if anyone takes the class.

And check out this well dressed samurai doing the Grand Tour of the courts of Europe in 1615. 
Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga, as painted by Claude Deruet.

Comments

[crimsongriffin.livejournal.com]

Lord, that German pic...reminds me of why every Elizabethan female portrait has a basic Elizabethan style... I suppose to modern eyes, it makes more sense to paint a picture true to life! Those poor guys look like weedy Europeans, down to the down-drooping Germanic noses.

The Deruet portrait is more the thing! You can see character, and the artist was obviously in raptures over the Japanese fabrics. Though it's funny, it looks as the artist tried to give him European fashionable silhouette - doublet and pouffy pants sort of thing. I wonder if the dog was meant to give a sense of scale...looks big, or Tsunenaga looks small.

[crimsongriffin.livejournal.com]

And the idea of a Japanese doing the Grand Tour! Considering Japanese pride in being a race descended from gods, and he was in the barbarian courts, it was probably more the Grand Sneer.

[bronx-baroness.livejournal.com]

I love the pants... and I would have loved to be able to see what was on the back of his "coat". Just gorgeous!

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

It's great. It also appears to me that the artist is European and was working from certain European preconceptions of how clothing fits, hangs and is decorated. It almost looks like he's wearing tight blackworked sleeves under his dofuku, so I checked the collar line in case he might possibly have a Western shirt on under it all, but no, he's got overlapping collars.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

I'm also sure the woodcut artist never saw the emissaries and had to work from whatever hearsay description he had. "What do they look like?" "Well, they're all really short......"

It's also easy for an artist to succumb to painting what he knows rather than what he sees. I think some of that happened in the Hasekura portrait. See comment below to Bronx Baroness.