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Hideyoshi’s noh stage at Osaka Castle is one of many things of which no written record survives in Japan but on which the Jesuit Japan letters preserve valuable information. Osaka Castle was completely destroyed by the Tokugawa in 1615, and so one painting on a folding screen made some decades later is the only extant Japanese testimony to its appearance. This article introduces an eyewitness account by Luis Frois, S.J., to uncover new information about the original design of this noh stage which may in turn rewrite the history of the K?daiji makie style of interior decoration favored by Hideyoshi. Previous research on this topic by Amano Fumio approached the Jesuit account through a nineteenth-century Japanese translation of the eighteenth-century French history of Jean Crasset, S.J., who seems in turn to have relied on a seventeenth-century Latin printed translation of a Portuguese scribal translation of Frois’ 1596 letter, written in Spanish. Accordingly, this article also explores the transmission history of the Jesuit Japan letters by stepping back through the layers of translation, misreading, novelization, and overcorrection, all the way to Frois’ original.
Research papers (academic journals)
