History · Japan, 1600
The Northern Sailor Who Became a Samurai
Eira washes ashore in Japan with a sword and no language. In 1600, a real sailor from the North did exactly that.
An outsider from the cold end of the world is thrown onto a Japanese beach, half-dead, understanding nothing, and ends up at the heart of a warlord's court. Eira's Journey East sounds like pure invention. It has a real parallel, and it happened in the spring of 1600, just months before the battle that decided who would rule Japan.
Eighteen men on a dead ship
In April 1600 a battered Dutch ship, the Liefde, drifted into Bungo province on Kyushu. She had left Europe with around a hundred men. Only about twenty were alive when she arrived, most of them too weak to stand, and a few more died soon after. Her pilot was an Englishman, William Adams. The local lords locked up the crew and seized the cargo, and Portuguese Jesuits, who had no wish to see rival Europeans in Japan, called the survivors pirates who ought to be executed.
Summoned by the man who would be shogun
The castaways were saved by Tokugawa Ieyasu, then the most powerful of the regents ruling in a child's name. He had Adams brought to Osaka and questioned him for days about ships, navigation, and the wider world. Adams said the right things, or said them in the right way. Months later Ieyasu won at Sekigahara, and in 1603 he became shogun. The castaway had landed next to the winning side.
Miura Anjin — the pilot of Miura
Ieyasu never let him go home. He made Adams a hatamoto, a direct retainer of the shogun, with two swords, a new name — Miura Anjin, 'the pilot of Miura' — and an estate on the Miura peninsula. Adams built Western-style ships for Ieyasu, worked as his interpreter and adviser, and helped the Dutch and English open trading posts that broke the Portuguese monopoly. He married in Japan, raised a family there, and died at Hirado in 1620. One of his Liefde shipmates, the Dutchman Jan Joosten, is remembered too: Tokyo's Yaesu district is said to take its name from him.
The music it inspired
Shores of the Rising Sun
A storm throws Eira onto a foreign shore, and the wrong ally offers a blade she shouldn't trust. Chapter one of Eira's Journey East — she survives it broken open, not broken. Home of the cinematic film "Smiling Blade," a snowbound Sengoku banquet where nothing is drawn and nothing is said.
The Journey East albums tell this in order. Blood of the Shogun is the instrumental film of the arrival: a survivor with a sword and no language, taken in at the bottom of a foreign court. Shores of the Rising Sun opens on “Shipwrecked Under a Foreign Sky” and “Foreign Tongue, Familiar Blade,” then moves into “The Ronin's Oath” and “Whispers in the Dark Court.” The Warrior's Clear Eye and Unbreakable finish the arc.