Who was Adams?
William Adams (1564–1620) was an English navigator who reached Japan in April 1600 aboard the Dutch ship De Liefde, the only one of five ships in the expedition to complete the crossing. Of about a hundred men who had set out, roughly two dozen were still alive.
He was brought before Tokugawa Ieyasu, then months away from the Battle of Sekigahara, and made a strong enough impression to be kept in Japan as an adviser. He never returned to England. He was granted an estate at Hemi near modern Yokosuka and the Japanese name Miura Anjin, "the pilot of Miura".
Why is Adams important?
- He was the first Englishman known to have reached Japan, and one of the very few Europeans of the period to be granted retainer status by a Japanese ruler.
- He advised Ieyasu on navigation, gunnery and shipbuilding, and supervised the construction of Western-style ships in Japan.
- He helped open Dutch and English trade with Japan, acting as an intermediary for both companies.
- His story is the historical basis for James Clavell's novel Shogun and its adaptations.
Arrival in 1600
De Liefde drifted into Bungo Province in Kyushu with a starving crew. Portuguese Jesuits already established in Japan identified the newcomers as Protestant rivals and, by Adams's own account in his letters, urged that they be executed as pirates.
Ieyasu interviewed Adams instead — repeatedly, through interpreters — about European geography, politics, religion and ships. Adams's value was that he could explain the wider world from a viewpoint the Jesuits could not control.
In Tokugawa service
Adams supervised the building of two Western-style vessels in Japan, one of which later carried a Spanish delegation across the Pacific. He was given a stipend, an estate in Miura with attached households, and the standing of a retainer — the basis for the popular description of him as an "English samurai".
He was also, effectively, not allowed to leave. His letters home describe years of asking for permission to return to his wife and children in England. He eventually married in Japan and had children there as well.
Trade and later years
Adams helped the Dutch establish a factory at Hirado in 1609 and the English East India Company one in 1613, and he travelled on trading voyages to Southeast Asia. The English factory was not commercially successful and closed in 1623, three years after his death.
He died at Hirado in 1620. Under the following decades of Tokugawa policy, foreign contact was progressively restricted, and the door he had helped open closed almost completely.
Legacy
Adams is commemorated in both countries: at Hirado and Yokosuka in Japan, and in Gillingham in Kent. The Japanese name Anjin-cho, a district of Tokyo, comes from the residence he was granted there.
Clavell's Shogun turns him into the character John Blackthorne and compresses, rearranges and invents a great deal. The core is real: a stranded European pilot who became a trusted adviser to the man who was about to become shogun.
