Until this month, I associated Nagasaki, Japan, with the dropping of the atomic bomb. Now, I associate Nagasaki with slavery, just as I would Fort James on Kinta Kinteh Island off Africa’s Smiling Coast:  The Gambia.  

My thoughts about Nagasaki changed as I read about the Asian Slave Trade in preparation for creating a new exhibit at the Juffureh Slavery Museum. My desire not to cast slavery as an evil that Allah only bestowed on West Africans led me to many places, but surprisingly, it also led me to the land of the rising sun.

Though not a specialist on the period, George Washington University professor Daqing Yang sent me the scholarly article “Slavery in Medieval Japan,” by Thomas Nelson. If you want a copy of the 30-page piece, I can email it to you. Here is an excerpt of the concluding overview of the article, followed by the passages that held my attention.

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The supply of slaves in the ports of Kyushu depended upon the fact that seizing slaves in Japan's own domestic wars was a well-established custom, as was the selling of children by debtors and the indigent.

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To conclude, many Japanese suffered the indignity of being taken as slaves and carried to distant shores, just as elsewhere African princelings sold prisoners of their own to Portuguese merchants. The Portuguese were able to buy these slaves because slave trading between Japan, China, and Korea already existed. This fact is confirmed in Korean, Portuguese, and Japanese sources.

The supply of slaves in the ports of Kyushu depended upon the fact that seizing slaves in Japan's own domestic wars was a well-established custom, as was the selling of children by debtors and the indigent. Genin were held within the household as bound servants. They could be bought and sold quite legally and returned to their masters if they ran away.

They could not seek justice from the courts and could be put to death at their master's wish. They could, however, dispose of their own property as they wished. The law stepped in primarily when third parties were involved and when the seizing of and trading in human beings was carried out on a large and impersonal scale.

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As soon as their foremen, often the kafirs and blacks of the Portuguese, fall ill, the slaves receive succor from no one.

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The increasing ineffectuality of government from the middle of the fourteenth century made such restrictions harder to apply, and they were largely ignored throughout the Muromachi era. With the coming of the Portuguese and Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea, the slave traders were able to develop lucrative new markets.

These events helped tie Japan into the worldwide trade in slaves developing at the time, the legacy of which has left a huge imprint upon the world to this day.

The following a short passages the held my attention:

As a result, many of the slaves die at sea. This is because they are piled up one body on top of another, there being so many. As soon as their foremen, often the kafirs and blacks of the Portuguese, fall ill, the slaves receive succor from no one.

The East Asia Slave Trade includes Japan’s official slave system from about 200 C.E. until Imperial Regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi abolished slavery in 1590 along with a series of edicts restricting the spread of Christianity
Very probably, the first Japanese who set foot in Europe were slaves. As early as 1555, complaints were made by the Church that Portuguese merchants were taking Japanese slave girls with them back to Portugal and living with them there in sin.

I might be able to bear it if they were only sold to Portuguese, as the Portuguese are merciful and kind towards slaves and teach them the true faith. However, who can bear with equanimity that our people have ended up scattered all over the heathen kingdoms of the world.

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According to Catholic church doctrine of the time, it was legitimate to treat as slaves prisoners taken in a "just war"

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Moreover, they buy several hundred men and women and take them aboard their black ships. They place chains on their hands and feet and throw them into the holds of their ship.

One major source of slaves, they noted, were captives seized in warfare. According to Catholic church doctrine of the time, it was legitimate to treat as slaves prisoners taken in a "just war," and, to salve their consciences, the Portuguese were wont to argue that many of the wars waged by one local daimyo warlord against another were legitimate, making it acceptable to treat as slaves the prisoners taken in them.

You may not retain Japanese people. You are Westerners and so of what use are Japanese to you when you [can] use blacks?

In 1429, Pak Sosaeng was sent on a diplomatic mission to Japan. Upon his return, he immediately presented the following report preserved in the chronicles of the Yi dynasty: Previously, the Wa pirates would invade our country, seize our people, and make slaves of them. Alternatively they would sell them to distant countries and cause it that they could never come home. . . . Wherever we went and whenever our ships put into port in Japan, [Korean] slaves would struggle against each other in their efforts to flee to us, but they were unable to do so because of the chains that their masters had put on them.

It also was possible, however, for a child to be of mixed parentage, with one free and one unfree parent. In such cases gender determined status, with boys being slaves if their fathers were, and girls if their mothers were. This was clearly stated in article 41 of Goseibai shikimok.

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