William Adams

William Adams (born 1564, Gillingham, Kent, England—died May 26, 1620, Hirado, Japan) was a navigator, merchant-adventurer, and the first Englishman to visit Japan.

At the age of 12 Adams was apprenticed to a shipbuilder in the merchant marine, and in 1588 he was master of a supply ship for the British navy during the invasion of the Spanish Armada. Soon after the British victory, he began serving as a pilot and ship’s master for a company of Barbary merchants. In June 1598 he shipped out as pilot major with five Dutch ships bound from Europe for the East Indies (present-day Indonesia) via the Strait of Magellan. The trouble-ridden fleet was scattered by storms, and in April 1600 Adams’s ship, the Liefde (“Charity”), its crew sick and dying, anchored off the island of Kyushu in southern Japan, the first northern European ship to reach that country.

Adams and the other survivors were summoned to Ōsaka, where Tokugawa Ieyasu—soon to become the shogun (generalissimo) of Japan—interrogated mainly Adams about a variety of political, religious, and technological topics. Ieyasu was so impressed with Adams’s knowledge, especially of ships and shipbuilding, that he made the Englishman one of his confidants. Adams was given the rank of hatamoto (“bannerman”), a retainer to the shogun, and was awarded an estate at Miura, on the Miura Peninsula south of Edo (now Tokyo). Despite those honours, in the early years of his sojourn Adams repeatedly expressed his desire to return to England (where he had a wife and family, whom he eventually was able to continue to support) but was refused permission. He thus became permanently settled in Japan, married a Japanese woman, and came to be known by the name Anjin (“Pilot”; later called Miura Anjin).

Adams oversaw the construction of Western-style ships, wrote letters on behalf of the shogun encouraging Dutch and English traders to come to Japan, and then officiated between the shogunate and the traders who began visiting the country. In 1613 he helped to establish an English factory (trading post) for the East India Company at Hirado, in Kyushu northwest of Nagasaki. Adams was allowed to undertake several overseas voyages between 1614 and 1619, traveling as far as Southeast Asia.

Ieyasu died in 1616, however, and under his successor, Tokugawa Hidetada, Japan became increasingly isolationist. The activities of the English traders were curtailed (eventually the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan), and Adams found his influence with the shogunate greatly diminished. By 1620 Adams was ill, and while in Hirado he died and was buried there. The English factory was shut down soon thereafter.

Adams’s career in Japan was the inspiration for a number of English- as well as Japanese-language books, notably James Clavell’s best-selling novel Shogun (1975), which was also the basis for a popular television miniseries of the same name (1980). In addition to his Kyushu estate, Adams had a house in the Nihonbashi district of Edo, and the neighbourhood where it was located is still called Anjin-chō. Among the annual observances for him in Japan are those held in Hirado (May) and in Itō, Shizuoka prefecture (August), the latter commemorating the place where the first Western-style ships were built and launched.