What happened to the descendants of Europeans (Portuguese, Spanish, various seamen) in Japan after foreigners were evicted from Japan and kept on one small island?

by WeighedButLacking

I understood at some point in the 1600s the Shogun evicted foreigners from Japan. At that point there had been quite a few converts to Catholicism, and there had been several European seamen who married Japanese women in for example the Nagasaki area, or trades representatives who kept Japanese concubines. Many of these unions produced children. When the "barbarians" got evicted, what happened to their families? Did they also join them back to Europe, did they go to the Dutch Indies or the Philippines, did they stay behind in Japan, abandoned by their fathers and husbands?

And, if they stayed, what sort of attitude did Japanese society have towards the descendants of "Northern Barbarians"? I would like to write a story about the life of such a child growing up in the 1600s in Japan, so I am trying to research this but can find very little about it.

y_sengaku
  • I, though as a non-specialist in this field, posted a brief answer on to the following question thread: Whatever happened to the descendants of William Adams, the white sailor who ended up in Japan in 1600 to become a samurai bannerman?, on Josef, son of Anjin MIURA (William Adams) weeks ago.
  • The case of Josef had been granted a fief and succeeded Anjin as a landlord seemed to belong to be an exception, though: The majority of Dutchmen and their families (including Dutch-Japanese children), such as Melchior van Santvoort I mentioned in my 2nd post in the cited thread, instead chose to leave for VOC's office in Batavia.
  • Shogunate expelled 287 Japanese-Portuguese to Macau in 1637 and 32 Dutch-Japanese or English-Japanese to Batavia in 1639 (Haneda 2007: 209f.).
  • Italian-Japanese Haru (Maria) who had been exiled in Batavia is famous as 'Jagatara (Batavia)- Oharu' in Japan, has been narrated as a protagonist of the tragedy in several novels in Japan. In fact, she married Dutch-Japanese employee of VOC in Batavia and well off as widow after his husband's death, with 9 slaves in her household (Haneda 2007: 210-212). It seemed to be not so rare for Dutch-Japanese women in Batavia to marry with one of the employee of VOC.
  • Another Dutch-Japanese woman who married with an employee of VOC was Cornelia van Nijenroode. As a wealthy widow, she re-married with Dutch lawyer, Johan Bitter, but their marriage failed miserably and she and ex-husband claimed respectively a right over her property bitterly. She travelled to the Netherland to resort to the court, and died there. Her episode is handled in detail in [Blusse 2002].
  • In the beginning of the 18th century, Shogunate changed the policy on Dutch-Japanese children born between the Dutchmen and Geisha in Nagasaki: Since then, these children had regarded basically as Japanese. The Dutchmen were not permitted to take their children either to Batavia or to the Netherlands (Haneda 2007: 219-22).

 

Works mentioned:

  • Blusse, Leonard. Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: M. Wiener Publishers, 2002. (Not referred to by myself. Sorry).
  • Tadashi, HANEDA. Higashi Indo Gaisha to Ajia no Umi (VOC in the maritime Asia). Tokyo: Kodan Sha, 2007. (in Japanese).