Japanese In Sixteenth Century Alcudia

The Portuguese are credited with having been the first Europeans to have genuine contact with Japan. In 1543, Portuguese ships arrived at the island of Tanegashima. It would seem that the Japanese were somewhat taken aback by these Europeans. They ate with their fingers rather than with chopsticks and they couldn't understand written characters. The culture clash was immense. The Portuguese were to come to be known as "nanban": southern barbarians. It wasn't long before all Europeans were given this title.

By that time in the sixteenth century, there was intense rivalry among the Spanish, Portuguese, English and Dutch to take control of trade routes. In the Far East, the Spanish were in a rather better position to do so than others. The Philippines were to prove to be an important base for trade with China and other Far-Eastern countries, albeit that the Portuguese dominated China-Japan trade for a time. As important as trade was religion. In 1549, a Jesuit missionary, Francisco Xavier, arrived in Japan. He was already experienced in spreading the Catholic faith. He had done so in Portuguese occupied India. He was responsible for Goa having the Inquisition.

The Spanish, with trade as much as religion and global power in mind, for a brief while contemplated armed invasion of Japan. Felipe II was to heed advice (from Francisco Xavier) that this might not be such a great idea. The Japanese, he was informed, were very warlike. Defeat was all that Spain could expect. The advice was very sensible.

So the Spanish settled instead on a strategy of trying to foster good relations, exploiting their pivotal Manila System of trade. The advance of Catholicism, though it did advance, wasn't to be as successful in Japan as it had been in Portuguese territories. For one thing, the Japanese struggled with the notion of equality of all men before God; their caste system simply didn't fit such a philosophy. To try and get round this, a comparison was made between hierarchies. The emperor and the shogun were equated to the pope and the king in terms of, respectively, divine roots and earthly justice.

Another Jesuit, Alessandro Valignano of Naples, arrived in Japan on this day (25 July) in 1579. It may have been a coincidence, but the significance would have been recognised: the feast of Saint James - Santiago, whose remains lay in Compostela. Valignano was the Jesuit inspector (or visitor) of all Jesuit missions stretching from Goa to Japan. He hit on the idea of bringing Japanese boys, taught by the Jesuits, to Europe. His reasoning was twofold. It would raise awareness of Japan among European elites and it would impress upon the Japanese the glory of Christian religion.

This has been described as a Tensho Embassy (Tensho referring to the Japanese era of that time). It wasn't in fact a formal embassy, though the Europeans took it to be. There was, however, some official element. Two of the four boys, all aged around fourteen when they left Japan, were representatives of Christian feudal lords. The boys, each with a European Christian name - Mancio, Michael, Julian and Martin - left Nagasaki in 1582. They finally arrived in Lisbon in 1584 and returned to Nagasaki in 1590.

This Thursday (27 July) in Alcudia, the Via Fora performance of scenes from the town's history (the second of this summer's series) includes one about the Tensho Embassy. In 1585, while travelling from Alicante to Rome, the boys and their delegation stopped off in Alcudia. Quite what the boys made of Alcudia is anyone's guess. Compared with other places they went to in Spain, Portugal and Italy, Alcudia would have been somewhat less representative of the glory of Christian religion than others. Nevertheless, it was at that time something of a bastion of the Holy Roman Empire in Mallorca, having been made a city - only the second one after Palma. Carlos I of Spain, also Carlos V, the Holy Roman Emperor, had granted Alcudia the title of "most faithful city of the emperor" because of the defiance of the Germanies uprising of 1521.

As to what happened to the boys, well on this day (25 July) in 1591, this time not a coincidence, they were fully admitted to the Jesuit society. But their fates were not to be entirely blessed. Mancio died in 1612, Martin left Japan in 1614, Michael quit the Jesuit order and may well have joined a Buddhist sect. Julian suffered the worst fate. He defied the 1614 order for all Christians to leave Japan. There was repression because of alarm at the influence of Christianity. He was eventually arrested, tortured and martyred.

* Photo: Via Fora, credit Ajuntament de Alcudia Facebook.

Stories Of The Squares: "Café de Plaça"

Plaça. Plaza. Square. Anyone fancy having a guess as to how many squares there are in Mallorca? A thousand? Ten thousand? More? I've no idea and I'm certainly not about to try and count them, but even were I to, the task would be made more difficult by what constitutes a square. It should be obvious - things on all four sides, as a general guideline - but there are squares that don't conform to this model: they are just parts, bits of something else, a promenade or a street which, for unknown reasons, acquire a plaça in their names.

The square is the heart of the village, but at times it's hard to be sure which square is most at heart. A Plaça Major should be a clue. Or a Plaça de l'Ajuntament perhaps, the square in front of the town hall. In some places, they could have either name. Sa Pobla, for instance. Its Major is looked across from the Ajuntament, and from the Major one can look to the first floor and observe the mayor on the phone. Squares, town halls, mayors - essences of Mallorcan life.

There are squares in some towns or villages which have attained such square-like status that they no longer both referring to it by name. It is just the square. Sa Plaça. Sineu is probably a good example.

The squares have their stories to tell, the ones that exist in some of the names. Some stories are simple and obvious. Mercat, the market. Vila, the town. Others require explanation. Puerto Pollensa has its market/church square, but the name is actually Plaça Miquel Capllonch, a composer and pianist who was born in Pollensa. Lloret has Jaume I, the conquering king of the thirteenth century. Petra has its Ramon Llull and its Fray Juniper Serra, tributes to two of the greats of Mallorca's history, one of whom, Serra, was born in Petra.

Integral to the stories of the squares are the bars and cafes. The social lives of the years have been played out, related and discussed and been abstractly engrained into their walls by the coffee, wine and cigarettes of reminiscence. Their stories are those of the oral tradition, the hand-me-down, word-of-mouth transmission of the collective memory. Some bars become iconic, enduring; some change, modernise. But whatever happens to the bar, the square remains unaltered, save for paving, for new town hall street furniture, for renewed lights.

Alcúdia has its squares but it is a town that has more than just the conveying of stories over tables and on terraces. It has a story, a written one and one that has been dramatised. The bar, the cafe, the square combine. In 1965, Alexandre Cuéllar put them together. He wrote the "records" of the "Café de Plaça", loosely based on a cafe in the Plaça Constitució - Constitution Square.

Cuéllar was actually born in Catalonia, but he came to Mallorca and was, from 1943 to 1959, the secretary at Sa Pobla's town hall. He then returned to Olot in the Gerona province and worked at its town hall until he retired in 1979. But he had retained his links with Mallorca and was to strengthen them on his retirement. He had a summer residence in Barcares, a hamlet of enchantment on Alcúdia's Pollensa bay extremity.

It was while he was summering in Alcúdia that he would go to the square. He was, as he said in a 1996 interview (he died in 2006 at the age of 92), suffering a great nostalgia for Mallorca back in Olot. He felt separated from the island and from the people. Hence, he wrote his finest work - "Café de Plaça". The stories in the book, or the records as they are referred to, were, he was to admit, a reflection of an idyll, of a passing from a former time to a modern one, with the regret that came with it. In 1965 tourism was changing everything, even though the square remained as it had been and the cafe was still unaffected.

Cuéllar's book can be misunderstood. A key theme of it was what he called "blessed laziness". It can be taken as a criticism, but mostly everyone at the time he wrote it (and nowadays also) fully understood his point. The laziness was part of life, as was the contrariness that the stories identify. They were stories that accurately portrayed the almost total stillness of Mallorcan village existence. Nothing much happened. Everyone would congregate at the cafe and when there was actually work to be done, a good excuse would be found to have lunch instead.

The dramatisation is the final scene of the five-part Via Fora production which takes place around Alcúdia's walls (the next one is on 27 August). It is of course all in Catalan, but the high farce of the laziness is easy to appreciate. It is a performance of a story of one cafe, in one square, in one village at one time in the past: fifty years ago. It could have been written about any of the ... . How many squares do you reckon there are?

The Stories Of History: Alcúdia's Via Fora

It was one thing after another in the fourteenth century. In March, 1348, the Black Death claimed its first victims in Mallorca. Alcúdia is generally cited as having been the place where the plague broke out. It cannot be said with certainty how many people succumbed to the plague, though a figure of 80% of the population having died is almost certainly an exaggeration. There is a story about the first death in Alcúdia. It goes like this. The people of Alcúdia are unsure what to do with the body, but they hit on a plan. They'll take it to Santa Margalida, a town relatively nearby but far enough away to be safe. The people of Santa Margalida don't take too kindly to the offer of the body, as might have been expected.

The story is just that. A story. Probably. It merges historical fact, the arrival of the Black Death, with the black comedy of legend or fiction. When later plagues and diseases afflicted Mallorca, Alcúdia had something of a strategic advantage. Its walls. The town could go into lockdown behind its walls and no one could come in who might spread disease. Unless, that is, they found a way of bribing the guards at the gates to the town. That's another story, one told of the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1870.

But to return to the fourteenth century, no sooner had the Black Death ceased to be black than the good citizens of Alcúdia, those of them who remained and who hadn't been deposited in Santa Margalida, were faced with a different type of enemy. One by the name of Pedro, who had the nickname of Pedro The Cruel, the King of Castile. Pedro was, to be totally blunt, a bit of a bastard. Not literally, but he had a brother, called Henry, who was of illegitimate origin. It was Henry who eventually did for Pedro. But before Henry could get round to dethroning him, Pedro engaged, for several years from 1356, in an on-off war with another Pedro, the King of Aragon. This Pedro wasn't exactly a model of virtuousness himself, but history suggests that the people of Mallorca were fairly well disposed to him. He deposed James III, the King of Mallorca, who was far from popular on account of his tax impositions. Anyway, the two Pedros have found their way into history by having a war named after them, and it was the Aragonese Pedro who was to play a part in the development of Alcúdia's walls. Concerned that the other Pedro might launch an attack, he ordered the hurry-up in finishing the walls, a job that had started at the end of the previous century. This, at any rate, is the story.

The walls of Alcúdia contain and reveal all sorts of stories. Being certain as to what is story or historical fact isn't entirely straightforward, but there again, as the Spanish word "historia" means both story and history, then we shouldn't be totally surprised if there is some blurring of the edges between the facts of history and the fancifulness of story-telling, and the stories above, those of the Black Death, Yellow Fever and the War of the Two Pedros, all come from a theatrical production. Its name is the Via Fora.

Ten years ago, Alcúdia town hall was instrumental in establishing a series of productions that combined the history of the walls with the history (or stories) of the town. The Via Fora was the result. It takes its name from a word, "fora", which means a cry for help, be this help because of the Black Death or the imminent arrival of Pedro The Cruel. On summer nights in Alcúdia, the illuminated old walls of the town form the spotlights for the actors and musicians as they make their way around the walls and tell of the stuff of yore and of more modern times. They start from the Moll gate, the Porta des Moll, a name which itself is dripping with history. Moll means port or pier. Why is there a gate with such a name in the old town? The port is some distance away. Ah yes, but once upon a time it hadn't been such a distance away. The sea and thus the ancient port came as close as right by the Roman theatre.

The Romans, typically, don't get a look in on the Via Fora agenda. There is a certain Catalan correctness about the starting-points of Alcúdia's history in this theatrical production. They are always post-conquest of Jaume I, James the First. The Germanies uprising of the sixteenth century is a firm favourite of the Via Fora, a story so ingrained in the island's Catalan culture because of its part in attacking repression and unfairness. But let's not dwell on the politics. The Via Fora is not propaganda. It is a celebration of history in story form, and the first production of this summer takes place this coming Thursday. It starts at 9pm with the cry for help and the final construction of the walls that form its backdrop. Pedro The Cruel was on his way. Or maybe he wasn't. There's nothing better than a good story.

* Programme for the Via Fora at: http://thehotguide.blogspot.com.es/2014/07/via-fora-alcudia-2014.html