Samurai Dawn at Fukuda Bay

It was beneath an October sky that the swan song of the Imperial Japanese Navy could be heard at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The fleet of the Rising Sun would struggle on to the end of the Pacific war, but as a crippled, increasingly depleted vestige, its fate seeming more and more foregone.

And it was also beneath an October sky, one long ago, that history’s first-ever naval battle between Japan and the West broke out—a clash between the samurai and the encroaching Portuguese, whose black ships brought luxury goods, modern weapons, and a new religion that took root as the Kirishitan movement when it reached Japanese shores.

It had all begun with a shipwrecked Chinese pirate junk. She had been transporting a party of Portuguese trader-adventurers when a typhoon hit and washed them up on the island of Tanegashima, off the southern tip of Kyushu, in 1543. These first Europeans to set foot on Japan carried with them something of consuming interest to their rescuers: guns. Specifically, the arquebus, that cumbersome matchlock that in its day was the state of the art. In a land of swords and arrows, a land where rival daimyos (samurai feudal lords) were embroiled in the incessant warring of the bloody Sengoku period, the revolutionary technology of a firearm was an exponential battlefield advantage.

The desire for it opened the door for the Portuguese, and more traders arrived, and with them, the Jesuits. The Christianity the black robes brought with them was allowed, at first. The daimyos gleaned that the priests were good for business, for the desired traders generally went where the priests went, and vice versa. But when the Christian—Kirishitan—faith began to attract a larger following, and the Jesuits began throwing their weight around, in the eyes of some samurai leaders, the welcome had been overstayed.

One such samurai was Matsuura Takanobu, daimyo of the port city of Hirado—a bustling hub for the Portuguese traders. Livid at the Jesuits for burning books and destroying Buddhist shrines, Takanobu ousted the local padre. Now unwelcome in Hirado, the Jesuits relocated to the territory of a friendlier daimyo: Ōmura Sumitada, who himself had converted to Christianity.

And when a Portuguese carrack laden with valuable goods hove to along Ōmura Sumitada’s shore while en route to Hirado, the Jesuits convinced the ship’s captain-major instead to come to an Ōmura anchorage nearby, at Fukuda Bay.

Back in Hirado, Matsuura Takanobu was incensed that the trade ship full of riches had been drawn away from his port. He got local merchants to pony up several large junks for his use in exchange for a cut of the plunder he was going to go wrest from the detoured carrack. Rounding up dozens of smaller craft to augment the junks, he mustered a fleet of some 60 to 80 vessels, loaded it with hundreds of samurai, and set sail for Fukuda Bay.

There, the carrack lay at anchor, not far from the companion galleon that had accompanied her in her travels. It was the morning of 18 October 1565. Many of the carrack’s crew were ashore. And the samurai fleet from Hirado attacked.

“The battle lasted almost two hours,” recounted the Portuguese missionary Lúis Fróis, who penned the first European writings on life in Japan. “Both sides fought with a strange fierceness, the Portuguese to defend themselves, and the Japanese to carry away in their claws their victory and prize.”

As the samurai swarmed aboard the carrack, they were brandishing more than their traditional katanas; the arquebus had by now become part of the arsenal as well—and one of the boarders managed to take a shot at the carrack’s captain-major—a clean shot to the head that was deflected by the captain’s now-dented helmet. He retreated to his cabin. They ran him down and cornered him there, seizing him.

But now, a new element had entered the fight—the roar of cannon from the companion galleon, blasting away at the Japanese fleet, sinking three junks, killing and wounding men by the score, scattering the smaller craft in disarray. Abandoning the carrack, the dispirited Japanese withdrew, defeated by the superior firepower of the big guns from the sea. Someday, they would adopt them too, as they had the arquebus.

In the years that followed the Battle of Fukuda Bay, the territory of the Christianized Ōmura Sumitada would become the main center for the Portuguese in Japan, both Jesuits and traders. Sumitada allowed them to settle around a sleepy fishing village not far from Fukuda Bay; the settlement would thrive and expand. And there, at that place where Japan and the West saw their first-ever seaborne conflict, a major city would rise, one fated to be indelibly associated with their final conflict—a city called Nagasaki.