ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an account, by the Japanese travellers, of the multitude of servants and the pomp which the princes of Europe use at home and abroad. Jesuit observers found Japanese banquets rather stiff and formal and, in comparison with Europe, frugal. Richard Cocks, the head of the English factory in Japan 1613–23, enjoyed Japanese-style banquets, admittedly in informal surroundings, together with the pleasures of the caboques (kabuki), or ‘dancing bears’ (prostitutes) as Cocks called them, who were not, of course, procured for the Jesuit guests of the Japanese. In Europe the fork was first used in Italy as a personal eating utensil and then only by the upper classes before spreading elsewhere. Its use remained limited to those classes until the late 17th century. Valignano probably had in mind Erasmus’s description, and condemnation, of prevailing eating habits and table manners in De civilitate morvm puerilivm (1530).
