THE Englishman soon became Ieyasu’s trusted confidant, and a tutor to his officials.* He was created a Samurai, named Miura Anjin, and granted an estate ‘like (he wrote) unto a Lordship in England.’ But to his lasting grief Will was forbidden to return home to his wife and two children. Ieyasu married him off instead to Oyuki, a well-to-do Japanese girl; they had two children, Joseph and Susanna.
In 1613, on Adams’s initiative, the British East India Company in Indonesia established a factory next to the Dutch on Hirado Island near Nagasaki. Both location and wares were ill-chosen, but the Company ignored Adams’s warnings; only his own trading ventures, to Siam and Cochinchina,* kept the struggling factory alive, and it folded three years after he died on May 16th, 1620, aged fifty-five. But Japan remembers Adams fondly; every August at the Miura Anjin Festival in Ito, fireworks crackle and taiko drummers play as glowing lanterns sail down the Matsukawa River to sea in his honour.
Adams became fluent in Japanese, and after the British established their factory on Hirado Island he did not seek out their society. On the other hand, he was able to use his influence at court to reconcile Ieyasu to the Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits in Japan, whose missionary activities had caused offence, thus (he remarks) ‘recompensing their evil unto me with good.’
That is, Thailand and southern Vietnam.