The country to which Fate had brought them was the Land of the Rising Sun, born it is said when the sun first rose above the earth. The country was originally ruled by an emperor, the selfstyled ‘Lord of Heaven’. In 1192, a new government position, the ‘Shogun’ or ‘greatest warrior’, was established as the emperor's protector, although in fact it was a manipulative role. He had complete political and military power over the whole of Japan, made up at that time of three principal islands; Main (Honshu), Eastern and Western (Shikoku), Southern (Kyushu) .

For Japan, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a golden age, in which some unique Japanese cultures were created. There was exquisite calligraphy and painting on scrolls, lacquer art, and delicate textiles for kimomo. Poetry, Kabuki and Noh lyric dramas, all flourished. Yet it was also a terrible era of feudalism and civil wars.

In 1600, and fortunately for Adams, the emerging ‘power behind the throne’ Tokugawa Ieyasu was a particularly enlightened leader. A master of the art of patronage, he was greatly to increase the number of feudal lords in the provinces (about 280 in all) to ensure control over the whole of Japan. Usuki Bay, Bungo, where Adams and his crew landed, belonged to Kyushu province. The feudal lord of Bungo was Fukuhara Nobutaka. However, he relied for advice on the former lord, O￣ tomo Yoshimune, whose title and estate had been confiscated by the Shogun because of his disloyalty in a civil war. Yoshimune was a son of Lord O￣ tomo Yoshishige, one of the first Japanese warlords to be involved with Portuguese missionaries and later their merchants.

The first Portuguese had arrived in Tanega-shima, Kyushu, in 1543. Six years later, on 15 August 1549, the first Portuguese Jesuit, Francis Xavier, landed on the island of Kagoshima, Kyushu. He was actually Spanish but worked for the Portuguese Compagnia de Iesus. He had met a Japanese refugee, Anjiro, during his missions in Malacca and was encouraged by Anjiro to go to Japan. Six years later, the first Portuguese merchant ship sailed into the port of Hirado, Nagasaki. With Chinese merchants suspicious of Japanese aggression, the Portuguese were able to take advantage and act as a middle-man.