True Story of an English Samurai
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THEY were the knights of Japan, born into a life of chivalry and service to the sword.
The Last Samurai is a block-busting movie about a Westerner who is adopted by the ferocious warriors - but it is a mere shadow of the story of a Kentish sailor who became a real Japanese samurai.
In the film, Tom Cruise plays an American Civil War veteran who is hired by the rulers of 19th-century Japan to eliminate the samurai but, after being captured by them, is converted to their way of life.
But the Hollywood epic, which took £2.7million in its opening weekend in the UK, pales in comparison to the escapades of William Adams, a 16th Century Englishman who became the unlikely friend and confidante of Japan's mightiest general.
Adams' astonishing story is worth a movie of its own...
He was born into grinding poverty in Gillingham, Kent, in September 1564. Like so many of his class he was sent away at 12 to work in the shipyards in London's squalid East End.
But Adams was no ordinary pauper boy and for years he studied ship building, astronomy and navigation - and in 1598, when he was in his 30s, signed on as a pilot and navigator for a Dutch-led expedition to the Far East.
It was a trip into the unknown. In Elizabethan Europe there were rumours of a fabulously wealthy advanced civilisation - but Japan was still just that. A fabulous rumour.
The stakes were high. The sailors risked tropical diseases, scurvy, hostile cannibals at supply stops and attacks by Spanish and Portuguese ships - who had divided the world between them.
YET, if successful, the rewards for the expedition would be astronomical.
In June 1598, William Adams, with the glint of gold in his eyes, kissed his wife Mary and two-year-old daughter Deliverance farewell on the Limehouse dockside. He would never see them again...
As the Dutch fleet of five tiny boats slipped into the Atlantic and headed for South America, nothing could have prepared them for the appalling two-year ordeal that lay ahead of them.
Four of the five ships were either lost or captured and the crew of the remaining boat, the Liefde, were devastated by starvation, scurvy and dysentery.
But Adams' luck was good - and early in 1600 the lookout spotted land. They had arrived, almost by accident, in the fabled Japan. It was not an auspicious arrival. The hapless sailors had, in fact, drifted into the Japanese province of Bungo, a stronghold of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who detested the heretic English and Dutch Protestants.
The Jesuits were relentless and convinced the local Japanese governor that the heretics, Adams among them, should be executed - very slowly and very painfully.
They would be strapped to a cross and slowly skewered by executioners skilled in the art of inflicting terrible pain without actually killing their victims - until they were ready.
But Adams luck held out again. The warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu had heard of the arrival of the Liefde and demanded that the crew be brought to his castle in Osaka.
The prisoners, weak, sick and dishevelled were delivered to Ieyasu - the Shogun - the Japanese emporer's mightiest and most trusted warrior.
Astonishingly, though the pair spoke only through translators, the Shogun and Adams hit it off almost immediately. Adams was a trained shipbuilder and Ieyasu craved Western ships to prop up his own dilapidated navy.
And Ieyasu was fascinated by the world beyond Japan, which was barely accessible to his own poorly-constructed ships.
Adams, for his part, was mesmerised by Japan and its warriors. He marvelled at the city's size, far bigger than London, while he was awe-struck by Ieyasu's castle, which was one of the wonders of Japan. Behind its three-metre thick walls were enormous gardens and towers with gold-leaf roofs while its rooms shone with silver and silks. And it was in this exotic setting that Adams won over the fearsome and hugely-fat Ieyasu.
"He demanded of me what land I was and what moved us to come to his land, being so farre off. He viewed me well and seemed to be wonderful favourable," wrote Adams.
But their friendship was sealed forever when Ieyasu's 70,000-strong army defeated the combined forces of Japan's other war lords. Adams' ship the Liefde turned its 19 cannons on the enemy - and won the day for his new master.
In return for the warlord's protection and a salary of two pounds of rice a day - a small fortune - Adams was commissioned to build a smaller version of the ship.
Delighted at the resulting 80-tonner, Ieyasu rewarded Adams with a huge country estate near Edo - the ancient name for Tokyo - a world away from the poverty of Limehouse.
The estate had dozens of villages in its borders, complete with more than 80 slaves and whenever Adams returned to his home, they would line the road to greet him.
One visitor wrote: "There is above 100 farmes upon it besides others under them, all of which are his vassals, and he hath power of life and death over them."
By now Adams and the Shogun had become so close that Ieyasu insisted that the Englishman become a samurai - in effect bestowing a peerage on him. Adams gave up his English name and became samurai Miura Anjin.
Adams had gone native, abandoning his English clothes for exquisite silk kimonos, sporting the two lethally-sharp swords worn by all samurai and learning the language. He finally put the last vestiges of England behind him - his wife and daughter in Limehouse - and married the daughter of a highways official. They had two children, Joseph and Susanna, and Adams wrote: "God hath provided for me after my great misery."
He would go on to become a vital link between England and Japan, forging trading treaties and negotiating on behalf on the English with the wary Japanese.
Adams died in 1620, 55-years-old and probably wracked by malaria.
Half his estate was sold and sent to his family in England while the rest went to Joseph and Susanna.
But today his legend lives on. A suburb of Tokyo, Anjincho, is named after him. And close to his estate, pilgrims still burn incense in honour of William Adams, the sailor from Kent who became an English samurai.
John Lindsey
Oderint, dum metuant-Let them hate, so long as they fear.
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Originally Posted by RayCorrea
