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The Spaniards, like the Portuguese, regarded the Japanese as "white," and associated their whiteness with comeliness. "The inhabitants of these islands are good-looking, white, and bearded ." wrote the Spaniard Garcia de Escalante Alvarado in 1548.76 The Spanish merchant Bernadino de Avila Girón wrote in 1600 that the Japanese "are well-built and for the most part have short, flat noses, albeit there are many people with goodly features, aquiline noses and large eyes...." The Chinese, in contrast, had been depicted by Caspar da Cruz as "ill- featured, having small eyes, and their faces and noses flat, and ... beardless...." 78 "77 If the Japanese were a white people, their women were particularly white. Garcia de Escalante Alvarado declared that "... the women have mostly very white complexions and are very beautiful." "9 Avila Girón was perhaps most enthusiastic about the whiteness and beauty of Japanese women, which indeed he found required less cosmetic assistance than the pulchritude of western women. The women are white and usually of good appearance; indeed, many are extremely comely and graceful ... The women use neither perfume nor oil on their faces, neither do they use those filthy things which the women of our country are wont to employ. For indeed there are [Spanish] women who possess more bottles, phials and jugs of cosmetics than any apothecary, yet for all that they do not have a better complexion than the Japanese woman who merely washes her face in water from any pond. But it is true that as a mark of honor married women are accustomed to putting on a little powder dissolved in water (although it is not really necessary) and a touch of color on their lips.... 80 Like Portuguese commentators, Avila Girón praised the Japanese woman's virtues, suggesting, indeed, that as a group, these "white" women might be the very best people in the world. The Japanese were not always viewed as honorary Europeans or long- estranged kin, however. Many accounts emphasize their uniqueness and contrariety. Frois penned many distichs emphasizing how opposite the Japanese were from westerners in their eating, clothing, education, battle tactics, architecture, and various habits.54 Yet they were eminently civilized and they were white in a period which, as Donald Lach has noted, "the whitest peoples" encountered by an expanding Europe "generally met European standards," and were even regarded as "superior in some regards...." 55 Reports on Japan, as early as that of Marco Polo, noted the pale coloration of the inhabitants. The people of "Cipangu," wrote the Venetian, "are white, civilized, and well-favored," and the first European visitors to the country in the sixteenth century uniformly made the same observation.56 The Florentine Francesco Carletti (b. 1572) recalled that the women he had met in Japan between 1597 and 1598 had been "moderately pretty, with a rather pale complexion." 57 "The Japanese are white," wrote the Portuguese Jesuit João Rodrigues (1561-1633) ... although not excessively pale as the northern nations but just moderately so. They have goodly, somewhat round features, and as regards facial appearance they look like the genuine Chinese of the interior, not those of Canton; they also resemble the Koreans on account of their hair, dark eyes and small noses.58 Meanwhile, the Portuguese missionary Luis Frois (1532-97) declared, "In their culture, deportment, and manners" the Japanese excelled Europeans "in so many ways that one is ashamed to tell about it." 51 Organtino Gnecchi (1530-1609), a Genoan priest, wrote in 1577 that It must be understood that these people are in no sense barbarous. Excluding the advantage of religion, we ourselves in comparison with them are most barbarous. I learn something from the Japanese every day and I am sure that in the whole universe there is no people so well gifted by Nature.52 Given the attitudes and views about race and skin color discussed above, this identification of the Japanese as a white people had major implications. While Portuguese kings pointedly condemned discrimi- nation against non-white, Christianized peoples in the colonies, and while Portuguese readily mixed with non-European peoples, many linked dark skins to moral and intellectual failings. The Italian Alessandro Valignano, who was in Japan throughout much of the period between 1579 and 1603, regarded (East) Indians and other "dusky races" as "very stupid and vicious, and of the basest spirits," and linked the fact that they were "blacks" to their putative shortcomings as Christian converts. On the other hand, he associated Japanese converts' positive qualities with their whiteness: Withal there is this difference between the Indian and Japanese Christians, which in itself proves that there really is no room for comparison between them, for each of the former was converted from some individual ulterior motive, and since they are blacks, and of small sense, they are subsequently very difficult to improve and turn into good Christians; whereas the Japanese usually become converted, not on some whimsical ulterior motive... but only in obedience to their lord's command; and since they are white and of good under- standing and behavior, and greatly given to outward show, they readily frequent the churches and sermons, and when they are instructed they become very good Christians... [emphasis added]. Few achievements were more likely to capture western attention than victory in battle, and when the small, quaint nation of Japan defeated Chinese forces in Korea in 1895, thereby acquiring the island of Taiwan and the beginnings of a colonial empire, western powers were much impressed. In 1900 Japanese forces provided the bulk of an allied force rescuing western diplomats in Beijing during the Boxer rebellion; they received high marks for their discipline and professionalism. The U.K. entered into a naval alliance by treaty in 1902. By 1905, when the Japanese navy destroyed the Baltic Fleet and defeated the Russian Empire, it was apparent that Japan was no ordinary "oriental" nation. Their difference had to be understood racially; to some westerners, the country's feats obviously indicated a white component in the Japanese gene pool. After the Russo-Japanese War, the American scholar William Elliot Griffis (1848-1928) declared the Japanese the most "un- Mongoloid" people in Asia, and suggested they had much "A---- blood in their veins."

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European missionaries on Japanese people and Japanese women


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