Book launchThursday 13 December 2012
6:00pm – 7:30pm
Japanese Travellers in Sixteenth Century Europe: A dialogue concerning the mission to the Roman Curia (1590)
Drinks reception from 8:00pm
Daiwa Foundation Japan House, 13/ 14 Corwall Terrace, Outer Circle, London NW14PQ, Baker Street Tube
Organised by The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Edited by Derek Massarella, Translated by J.F. Moran
Published by Ashgate for the Hakluyt Society
In 1582 Alessandro Valignano, the Visitor to the Jesuit Mission in the East Indies, sent four Japanese boys to Europe. Until the arrival of this embassy (the Tenshō embassy) in Europe, the Euro-Japanese encounter had been almost exclusively one way: Europeans going to Japan. This book is an account of the travels of these Japanese pioneers, their long journeys out and back, and their 20 months in Europe being received by popes and kings. It was published in Macao in 1590 with the title De Missione Legatorvm Iaponensium ad Romanum curiam. The present edition is the first complete version of this rich, complex and impressive work to appear in English, and is accompanied with maps and illustrations of the mission, and an introduction discussing its context and the subsequent reception of the book.
About the contributors
Dr Derek Massarella
Dr Derek Massarella is Professor of History at Chuo University, Tokyo, where he teaches in the Faculty of Economics and in the Graduate School of the Faculty of Commerce. His research interests include: early-modern European-Asian relations, Japanese history, the history of globalisation and seventeenth-century English history. He is the author of A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1990), co-editor of The Furthest Goal: Engelbert Kaempfer’s Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (1995), and has contributed to a number of other books and scholarly publications. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the editorial board of the Society for Nautical Research and is the International Representative, Japan, for the Hakluyt Society. He is a past editor of The Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan.