Portuguese Slave Trade in Japan

What Portuguese merchants did in Sengoku-period Japan was incredibly cruel.

Textbooks only say the Nanban trade was about foreigners coming to sell rare goods, but...

behind the scenes, they were also buying and selling Japanese slaves.

In fact, back then, the Portuguese enslaved Japanese people in large numbers and shipped them back home.

And not as laborers, but targeting beautiful Japanese girls and married women as concubines,

locking them in cabins to use them for sexual purposes.

This alone is shocking enough, but...

what's even worse is that they chained the limbs of the enslaved women

and crammed them into the ship's hold, with records describing it as a literal living hell.

Everyone learns about the 16th-century African slave trade in world history,

but few know that Westerners were doing the exact same thing in Japan at the same time.

The one who was absolutely furious at this situation was the ruler of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

Hideyoshi witnessed the Japanese slave trade firsthand in Kyushu.

Furious, he demanded, "What is this?" and immediately interrogated the Christian missionary Coelho.

To which he received an unexpectedly defiant reply: "It's the Japanese who are to blame for selling them."

This was the final straw, and Hideyoshi immediately issued the Bateren Expulsion Order.

He expelled Christian missionaries from Japan and immediately banned the slave trade.

Thus, Japan was protected from the cruel slave trade.

Although it's not in the textbooks, this was the background behind why Hideyoshi expelled the Christians.