The Journal of Japanese Studies

With conference volumes, an editor's hope (and challenge) is that the whole will add up to more than the sum of its parts. In the case of Il grande viaggio, edited by Teresa Ciapparoni La Rocca, those parts—individually small—are numerous and wide-ranging. The long-gestating fruit of an international conference held in Rome in 2015 to mark the 400th anniversary of the so-called "Keichō mission," this volume brings together 44 essays and a hefty bibliographic and reference apparatus, seeking to address "most questions surrounding the mission" (p. 1). At the heart of the collection lies the last major diplomatic overture made by the new Tokugawa regime in the early seventeenth century. Sponsored by the northern daimyō Date [End Page 178] Masamune with the blessing of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the mission led a Japanese embassy across the Pacific Ocean to New Spain (Mexico) in 1613, and then across the Atlantic to Spain and Italy the following year. In Mexico and Spain, Hasekura Tsunenaga, the Japanese ambassador, attempted to revive flagging efforts to forge commercial agreements between Japan and the Iberian empire. In his final stop, in Rome, where the mission arrived late in 1615, the newly converted ambassador sought the pope's support in the mission's negotiations with Spain, but also his commitment to a more robust missionary presence in the Japanese archipelago.

On most if not all counts, the mission was a failure. By the time Hasekura found his way back to Japan, in 1620, the whole enterprise had become an awkward reminder of abandoned policies. In recent years the Tokugawa authorities had soured on the prospect of forging ties with Spain, and after Ieyasu's passing, his successor, Hidetada, had tightened enforcement of policies curtailing missionary activity throughout Japan. Hasekura found himself disgraced and his conversion to Christianity a dangerous political liability for his lord, Date Masamune, under an increasingly anti-Catholic shogunate. Luis Sotelo, the Franciscan friar who had helped conceive the mission and had accompanied Hasekura around the world, was apprehended in 1622 upon reentering the country clandestinely and put to death two years later.

Despite its lack of success, the Keichō mission (named after the year the embassy set sail, the thirteenth of the Keichō era) has long represented tantalizing possibilities: What if Japan and Spain had forged commercial and diplomatic ties? What if Japanese ships had traversed the Pacific Ocean and become more active participants in the trade between New Spain and China? And, of course, what if Catholicism had been allowed to gain a firmer foothold in Japan? As the drawn-out coda to a long and ultimately futile series of attempts by Tokugawa Ieyasu to engage with the court in Madrid, the mission's voyage around the world encapsulates the tensions, contradictions, and aspirations of the age in a singular fashion. Its multilingual paper trail of eyewitness accounts and official documents, as well as its strikingly vast and various artistic half-lives, represent unique opportunities for world historians. And yet the mission remains understudied, even in the context of scholarship on Japan's century of engagement with the Iberian powers, which has been more copious in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian publications than in English ones.

Il grande viaggio proposes to remedy the situation by considering every aspect of the embassy and analyzing every step in the itinerary. Its essays are organized in two parts. Part 1 covers Japan in the "Nanban century," 1543–1640, and is divided into sections on the sociocultural situation and the religious environment, all intended to provide context to nonspecialists. Part 2 is about the mission itself, with an ostensible focus on the events of [End Page 179] 1613–16; its three sections, on the international context, the voyage, and the legacies of the mission, are where many of the volume's most significant contributions may be found. As its structure suggests, the book attempts to be all...