Monday, October 20, 2008

Japan: The crops

The Portuguese and the Spanish brought Christianity to Japan in the 16th-17th Century. And they brought a lot else:
Tobacco had its first planting about 1600, with the result that Japanese authorities legislated gainst it while James I of England was composing his Counterblast To Tobacco, and with little effect. Cotton ... became a major agricultural and industrial crop in the course of the next two centuries. Portatoes and sweet potatoes were seventeenth-century importations ...

--RHP Mason and JG Caiger, A History of Japan 188 (Rev. ed. 1997)
One thing that is interesting about this list is that none of these were, strictly speaking, Iberian. In particular, the tobacco and the potatoes came all the way from "the new world," the product of American Indian enterprise of which the Portuguese and Spanish were only the conduits. Oh, and one other thing the Japanese apparently got from the Portuguese: tempura.

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