Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga was a kirishitan Japanese samurai and retainer of Date Masamune, the daimyō of Sendai. He was of Japanese imperial descent with ancestral ties to Emperor Kanmu. In the years 1613 through 1620, he headed the Keichō Embassy, a diplomatic mission to Pope Paul V. He visited New Spain and various other ports-of-call in Europe on the way.
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Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga was a kirishitan Japanese samurai and retainer of Date Masamune, the daimyō of Sendai. He was of Japanese imperial descent with ancestral ties to Emperor Kanmu. In the years 1613 through 1620, he headed the Keichō Embassy, a diplomatic mission to Pope Paul V. He visited New Spain and various other ports-of-call in Europe on the way. On the return trip, he re-traced their route across New Spain in 1619, sailing from Acapulco for Manila, and then sailing north to Japan in 1620. He is considered the first Japanese ambassador in the Americas and in Spain, despite other less well-known missions preceding his mission. He died of illness a year later, his embassy seemingly ending with few results in an increasingly isolationist Japan. Japan’s next embassy to Europe would not occur until more than 200 years later, following two centuries of isolation, with the \”First Japanese Embassy to Europe\” in 1862. The Spanish started trans-Pacific voyages between New Spain and the Philippines in 1565. Spanish ships were occasionally shipwrecked on the coasts of Japan due to bad weather, initiating contacts with the country. Efforts to expand influence in Japan were met by stiff resistance from the Jesuits, who had started the evangelizing of the country in 1549, as well as by the opposition of the Dutch and Portuguese who wish to see Spain participate in Japanese trade.
Some Japanese, are known to have crossed the Pacific onboard Spanish galleons as early as 1587. It is known that gifts were exchanged between the governor of the Philippines and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who wrote a letter to him in 1597, writing a black elephant letter. In 1609, the Spanish San Francisco galleon encountered Japanese shugasu Ieyasu in Chiba, near Tokyo. The sailors were rescued and welcomed by the retired governor, Rodrigo de Vivero, retired governor of Tokugawa Iyerawa. The ship was wrecked on the coast of Japan, and was wrecked in bad weather on its way from Manila to Acapuulco, and the Japanese captain was killed in the incident. The Japanese captain, who was a former governor of Philippines, met with the retired governor, and retired Governor Iyerasu, and wrote to him a letter of thanks in which he thanked him for saving his life. The letter is known as the ‘Chiba Shugasu’ and is written in Japanese as ‘The Black Elephant’. The name of the place of origin of the family name Hasekuras is now HaseKura Ward in Kawasaki City, in Miyagi Prefecture, in Japan. He served as a samurai during the Japanese invasion of Korea under the Taikō Toyotomo Hideyashi, for six months in 1697. His father was indicted for corruption, and he was put to death in 1613. His son should have been executed as well.
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