Were the any 'localised' disease outbreaks which could have been due to European missionaries and traders in Japan?

by GetRekt

That is to ask, in the ports in which those missionaries and traders were acting, were there any outbreaks that occurred as a result of the Europeans presence?

Also - this might be its own question - Was Japan affected by the Black Death, and if so to what extent?

y_sengaku

While it would be much better to wait for the answer from proper specialist in this field, I, though neither specialized in this era nor in this period, just make a brief notice of the situations in Sengoku and Edo Period Japan (Please delete this post if it does not meet the required academic standard of this subreddit).

 

Your question is actually quite interesting: Two diseases outbreaks in fact came to Early Modern Japan as a result of famous Columbian Exchange, but the known records of their outbreaks/ arrivals did not exactly corresponding with the arrival and activity of European missionaries and traders.

  1. The Arrival of Syphilis in the 16th Century
    The first known possible record of syphilis in Japan dates back to 1512, in a certain doctor's journal in Kyoto (Nakamura 1987: 44). It certainly predated almost a generation (ca. 30 years) to the first arrival of the Portugueses in Southern Japan in ca. 1543. It is not impossible to associate this early presence of siphilis with the Columbian Exchange, though: Around SE to Eastern maritime Asia, smuggling trader-pirates called Wako [lit. trans. Japanese pirates (in Chinese)] of mixed ethnicities, mainly Chineses and Japaneses, were very active at that period. Portguese sailors brought syphilis with them first to SE maritime Asia and spread the disease to prostitute, and then, these Wako probably got the disease from the afflicted prostitutes there and also came to Japan.
  2. The spread of Cholera in the early and middle of the 19th Century (Horiguchi 1972)
    The first outbreak of cholera in Japan occurred in 1822, corresponsing its second world-wide outbreak (1820-1837). Don't you wonder why the outbreak occured in Japan despite of its seclusion (Sakoku) at that time? The records tell us that the Dutch merchants of Eastern India Company who monopolized among the Europeans to trade with secluded Japan brought the disease from Indonesia (Batavia) to Nagasaki, where their trading post was located. There were three pandemic outbreaks of cholera in Edo period Japan from 1822 to 1868, and the origin of the first and the second outbreaks were Nagasaki. Thus, the seclusion policy of Tokugawa Shogunate was not enough to lock out the invasion of this infectious disease from Japan!

 

As for your additional question, in short answer, No. There is no known record of Y. pestis patients in Japan before the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The first record dates from 1899, and the last instance was in 1926 (Katow 2010: 43f.). The Mongols certainly attempted to invade Japan twice in 1274 and in 1281, but both attempts ended in failure, so the possible outbreaks of the Black Death in China in the 1330s and 1350s, mentioned by Abu-Lughod, did not apparently affect Japan. It is also worth noting that it was very difficult to identify the historical outbreak in pre-modern Eastern Asia like China and Japan due to their cremation burial practice, in contrast to Christian Europe. Thus, the microbiological studies that could identify the exact cause of the Black Death (see this thread) will unfortunately not work in this area also in future.

 

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