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15th October 2024

Professor Nandini Das explores the life of the first Englishman to arrive in Japan

If you’ve watched the 2024 historical drama, Shogun, you’ll be familiar with the story of John Blackthorne, a British sailor shipwrecked in seventeenth century Japan. The drama is based on a 1975 novel by James Clavell and follows Blackthorne as he becomes a samurai under Yoshii Toranaga, a powerful warlord. However, the show is not only based on the novel, but on historical events. In BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature, Exeter Tutorial Fellow in English, Professor Nandini Das, recently introduced listeners to the story of John Blackthorne’s real-life inspiration—William Adams.  

Known in Japan as Miura Anjin (the Pilot from Miura), Adams was the first Englishman ever to arrive in Japan. He was the navigator on a Dutch trading ship, De Liefde, which arrived in the country in 1600. De Liefde was the only remaining vessel out of a five-ship expedition, whose other ships perished in typhoons or at the hands of hostile civilisations en route: the crew of one ship, the Trouw, was killed by the Portuguese in Tidore. The Portuguese merchants and Jesuit Catholic missionaries already in Japan did not take kindly to the arrival of potential Protestant rivals. The mutual distrust between Adams and the Portuguese soon became obvious to the Japanese.  

Adams steadily gained influence at court when shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu identified Adams and his crewmate Jan Joosten as people with knowledge he could use. Under Ieyasu, Adams was promoted to the role of Hatamoto, a high-ranking Samurai. He became fully assimilated into Japanese culture, even establishing a Japanese family, despite having left an English wife at home.  

With Japan scholars Timon Screech and Richard Irving, Professor Das opens a window into Adams’ life in the programme, which is now available as an easily digestible 15-minute podcast. She concludes the programme by observing that Adams’ story, like the show, is ‘a little window into a moment in the past when the destinies of two island nations intersected for the very first time. It would not be the last.’  

Professor Das regularly presents TV and radio programmes as a scholar of sixteenth and seventeenth century literature and culture. Her most recent book, Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, won the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. It is also shortlisted for the prestigious Wolfson History Prize, the winner of which will be announced in December. 

Listen to the podcast, Anjin, the Pilot, here

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