Japanese Context of the ‘Good Manners’ of the Legates of the Tensho Embassy in Italy (1585): The Buke Kojitsu, the Ise, and Kyūshū

Abstract

The Tensho Embassy has been predominantly portrayed from the ecclesiastical, European, or missionary perspectives, largely because of the availability of relevant sources. This article attempts to acknowledge the implicit agency of the legates by looking at their behavioural context through the buke kojitsu of the warrior class in sixteenth‑century Japan. It partially uncovers a Japanese cultural layer that their hosts in Italy and even Jesuit missionaries in Japan may not have perceived. It thus offers a non‑European, novel approach to the historiography, while introducing Japanese textual sources on the buke kojitsu to Western readership.