Why Date Masamune Sent Samurai to Rome: The Keichō Embassy of 1613

On the twenty-eighth day of the ninth month of Keichō 18 — October 28th, 1613 — a five-hundred-ton galleon called the San Juan Bautista left the small port of Tsukinoura on the Tōhoku coast and turned east into the Pacific. On board were 180 men: 22 samurai, 30 sailors, 40 merchants, 12 Spanish-speaking interpreters, and the Franciscan friar Luis Sotelo. Their leader was a forty-year-old Date retainer named Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga. Their destination, by way of Mexico City, was Madrid and Rome. They were ambassadors not from the Shogun of Japan, who had not authorized the mission, but from the lord of Sendai — Date Masamune.

It was the first formal Japanese diplomatic mission to Europe. It would also be one of the last for two and a half centuries. Understanding why Masamune sent it requires understanding the very narrow window of possibility he was trying to push his domain through.

The Window

In 1613, the Tokugawa peace was ten years old and not yet hostile to Christianity. Ieyasu had favored Spanish trade through Manila and Mexico for two decades. Christianity was tolerated, with major Christian populations in Kyūshū and minor ones in central Japan. The eventual closure of the country — sakoku — was a dozen years away and not yet visible from where Masamune sat.

From Sendai, what was visible was opportunity. The Spanish empire ran the world's largest silver economy through Acapulco; if Tōhoku could establish a direct trade with New Spain, Masamune could bypass the Tokugawa-controlled Pacific shipping routes through Nagasaki and import European arms, technology, and silver on his own account. To do that he needed two things: a Pacific-class galleon, and a treaty.

The Ship

Masamune got the ship by recruiting Sebastián Vizcaíno, a Spanish navigator stranded in Japan after his own ill-fated 1611 mission. Vizcaíno designed and supervised the construction of the San Juan Bautista at the Date naval yard at Tsukinoura. Built in forty-five days by Japanese carpenters working from Spanish drawings, it was the first Japanese-built ocean-going galleon — a 500-ton vessel modeled on the Manila galleons that crossed the Pacific yearly. Spanish accounts described it as 'larger than any ship that had ever entered Acapulco harbor.'

The Voyage

The crossing took three months. The San Juan Bautista reached Acapulco on January 25th, 1614. The mission then crossed Mexico overland to Veracruz, where it boarded a Spanish galleon for Havana, then sailed to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Andalusia. Hasekura Tsunenaga reached Madrid on January 30th, 1615, and was received by King Philip III. The Spanish were politely curious but noncommittal: a Pacific trading partnership with Sendai was theoretically interesting and politically inconvenient. They sent the embassy on to Rome.

Hasekura entered Rome on November 3rd, 1615, in formal samurai dress, riding through the Porta del Popolo in the company of cardinals and Roman nobility. Pope Paul V received him in private audience. The Pope listened to Masamune's letter — which proposed a Spanish trading station in Sendai and the dispatch of more Franciscan missionaries — and committed to nothing. The Roman senate granted Hasekura honorary citizenship. A portrait was painted. The embassy began the long return journey.

The Return

By the time Hasekura reached Manila in 1618, the Japan he was sailing back to had changed. Tokugawa Ieyasu had died in 1616. The new shogun Hidetada had begun the systematic prohibition of Christianity, and the Date domain — though Masamune still ruled it — was no longer in a position to host Spanish missionaries openly. Hasekura sailed into Sendai in 1620 to find his country a different place from the one he had left seven years before.

He died two years later, by some accounts a Christian to the end, by others a man who had quietly renounced his faith to spare his family. The treaty he had negotiated with Spain was never ratified. The trade route to Acapulco was never established. The mission was, in every measurable diplomatic sense, a failure.

Why It Still Matters

What the Keichō Embassy proves is that the closure of Japan was not inevitable from the inside. A great daimyō with a coastal port and a working relationship with Spanish Mexico could imagine, and even attempt, a Japan integrated with the Pacific economy. Masamune was not a maverick; he was reading the same opening Ieyasu had been reading. The closure happened because the Tokugawa decided that the spiritual and political risks of Christianity outweighed the economic benefits of trade. It was a choice, not an inevitability.

Hasekura's portrait — a Japanese samurai in formal kamishimo and katana, painted in Rome in 1615 by an Italian master — still hangs in the Galleria Borghese. It is the earliest known European oil painting of an identified Japanese individual. The man it depicts crossed the Pacific twice, met three popes and a king, was made an honorary Roman citizen, and died in obscurity in his own country, having attempted something his country was not ready for and would not attempt again until the 1860s.

"Rectitude carried to excess hardens into stiffness; benevolence indulged beyond measure sinks into weakness."