William Adams (Miura Anjin)

Born in 1564 in Gillingham in Kent, England (the modern County of Kent). He studied shipbuilding and navigation from boyhood, and served as a naval navigator in the Anglo-Spanish War (including the Spanish Armada campaign of 1588).

In 1598, as navigator of one of the five ships of the Dutch squadron that departed Rotterdam — 'de Liefde' — he took part in a circumnavigation voyage.

After the difficult voyage of crossing the Pacific via the Strait of Magellan, on April 19, 1600 (the sixteenth of the third month of Keichō 5), he drifted ashore at Usuki Bay in Bungo Province (around the modern Usuki City, Ōita Prefecture).

Of over one hundred crewmembers, some twenty-odd survived, many in ill health. Tokugawa Ieyasu summoned Adams to Ōsaka and Edo and interviewed him personally.

He evaluated Adams's knowledge of navigation, shipbuilding, and Western affairs highly, and elevated him as a foreign policy adviser.

In 1605, Ieyasu granted Adams a fief of 250 koku at Hemi in the Miura District of Sagami Province (the modern Nishi-Hemi-chō in Yokosuka City, Kanagawa Prefecture), and received him as hatamoto.

Adams took the Japanese name 'Miura Anjin,' married the Japanese woman Oyuki, and held a residence at Nihonbashi in Edo.

He played a central role in the foreign policy of the early Edo period — mediation of Japan-Dutch and Japan-English trade, foreign-policy counsel to Ieyasu and Hidetada, construction of Western-style sailing ships at Itō in Izu Province, and more.

He died at Hirado on May 16, 1620, aged fifty-five. As the first foreign samurai in Japanese history, he became a symbolic figure in the history of Japan's foreign relations that followed.

“I was treated as an adviser of Lord Ieyasu of Japan, and permitted to wear the two swords.”

Adams, as the first foreign samurai in Japanese history, became a symbolic figure in the history of Japan's foreign relations.

As Tokugawa Ieyasu's foreign policy adviser, he opened the road of Japan-English and Japan-Dutch trade, and contributed to the opening of the English and Dutch factories at Hirado.

After Ieyasu's death in 1616, foreign policy grew conservative under the second shōgun Hidetada, and Adams's scope of activity narrowed; but he continued to be involved in East India trade from Hirado until his death in 1620.

The Anjin Grave in Yokosuka City, Kanagawa Prefecture, survives as the graves of Adams and his wife. In 2024, the Disney+ series 'SHOGUN' (starring Sanada Hiroyuki, John Blackthorne modeled on Adams), based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell, took the record eighteen Emmy Awards, and overseas interest in Adams exploded.

He continues to leave influence on the modern era as one of the most important figures in the history of Japanese cultural contact with the outside world.