ABSTRACT
Tanegashima is an oblong island to the southeast of Kyushu, stretching 60 kilometers from north to south and 20 kilometers from west to east at its widest.2 To this blessed island the first Europeans came. A Chinese junk with two Portuguese on board was driven by storms to Cape Kadokura, the southernmost tip of the island.3 It anchored in a cove, Maenohama, to the east of the cape, and there it was detected by surprised and excited local peasants on 23 September 1543 (the 25th day of the 8th month of Tenbun 12).4 The village chief, Nishimura Oribenojō of the Nishi(no)mura Village, who happened to be a Chinese scholar,5 was called to the shore, and on the sandy beach he met a Chinese man, Gohō (Ch. Wu-feng),6 together with two strange-looking men. Strange they must have looked, these Portuguese in their European clothes, differing in facial complexion, and possibly displaying long noses and bushy beards. Nishimura knew no spoken Chinese and Gohō no spoken Japanese, but as in other encounters between the two nations they turned to written conversation in Chinese. Nishimura wrote in the sand with a stick and asked who those strange people were, and Gohō replied that they were Southern barbarians and merchants, and that, among other things, they ate with their hands and used no cups when they drank. One can imagine that the continued conversation in the sand explained how the junk had been damaged in a storm and had drifted to this cove on Tanegashima by chance.7
