Japanese objects in New Spain: nanban art and beyond

Abstract

Between the 1550s and 1650s, Japan, Portugal and Spanish America played a leading role in artistic globalization, which led to the wide circulation of Japanese objects, both in the Iberian Peninsula and in Spanish America. Between 1544 and 1571, Portuguese merchants and Jesuits established trading ports in Goa, Macau and Nagasaki, creating an intra-Asian network. In 1565, the Spanish settlement in Cebu, as well as the discovery of the return route across the Pacific, coincided with the fact that the Ming dynasty loosened its ban on maritime trade in 1567, allowing Chinese merchants to engage in commercial activity. The Spanish trade route between Manila and Acapulco was launched in 1573. Once the port of Nagasaki was open to trade exchange with Portugal in 1571, ‘The Portuguese became essential agents in the trade between China, Japan, and India, on one hand, and the Philippines, on the other’ (GaschTomás 2019, 58). In turn, material evidence and documents testify to the circulation, consumption, and adaptation of Asian commodities in the Americas, whose role in these processes has long been underestimated. Dobado (2014) and Gasch-Tomás (2019) are among the recent scholars who have demonstrated New Spain’s central position in the making of connections between the Spanish Empire and Asia during the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries. This led to the ‘greater commoditisation of Asian goods in the viceroyalty of New Spain than in Castile’ from 1580 to 1630 (Gasch-Tomás 2019, 42). But even into the eighteenth century, a large number of Japanese porcelain pieces circulated in New Spain, proof that Japanese-Spanish American artistic relations were complex throughout the colonial period. In 1614, the shogunate banned Christianity and expelled Catholics from Japan, closing itself off in 1639, yet leaving some ports open to international trade. Under these conditions, how did Japanese goods continue to circulate in the Americas after 1640? They must have been transported by Manila-Acapulco galleons. But since neither the Portuguese nor the Spanish could land in Japanese territories, it is possible to propose different routes: 1) the Dutch transported commodities to Batavia, and then Chinese merchants took them to Manila; 2) Chinese traders carried Japanese goods from