“Tilt your head back, boy,” said Zhang. “More, more, look at the ceiling. That’s good. Hold it right there.”
He carefully inserted the curved end of the tube into Hiraku’s right nostril. “This won’t hurt a bit.” Zhang blew the dried pox material into the boy’s nose.
“There, like sneezing in reverse, eh?” he said to Hiraku.
Zhang turned to face the parents, and they bowed to him. “Remember, he may only be visited by those who have already had the ‘heaven flowers.’” That was the Chinese euphemism for smallpox. “In six or seven days he will have a fever, and you may treat him with the herbs I gave you. The eruption will occur a few days later. Scabs should form after two weeks. I will return then, so I can collect the material. The scabs should fall off after another week or so, and he can then live a normal life.”
“We have prayed that it will be so.”
Zhang sniffed. “To your Christian God?” They nodded.
“And to Mary, the Mother of God,” Mizuki added.
“Well, I hope that’s sufficient. I still think you should have let me conduct the normal ritual.” That involved praying to the Goddess of Smallpox, who in turn was an incarnation of the Goddess of Mercy.
Zhang was a Chinese practitioner, from a medical family, who had come to Japan a few months earlier. A chance encounter with a bakufu official had led to him being questioned about his methods of preventing smallpox. Zhang claimed that dried and aged scabs, mixed with appropriate medicinal herbs, and warmed in his armpit pouch for a month, were efficacious.
He assured the official that if, on a lucky day according to the calendar, the preparation was blown into the nostril of a child (right for a boy, left for a girl), it provided immunity against the dread disease. Asked about survival rates, he asserted not even one in a hundred failed to recover from the treatment.
The bakufu official was impressed, and suggested to his superiors that perhaps condemned criminals might be allowed to volunteer, their lives spared if they survived the immunization. The suggestion made its way up the chain of command, and one of the junior councillors of the shogun had the bright idea, why not test Zhang’s methods out on the kirishitan instead? If they were successful, they could be adopted more generally. If they caused smallpox, well, then there were a few less Christians to worry about.
The first uses of Zhang’s han miao fa were limited by the supplies that Zhang had brought with him, but of course each patient became the source of fresh material.
Hiraku was one of Zhang’s first kirishitan patients; his parents had lost their first two children to smallpox. Their prayers were answered; Hiraku survived the immunization.
* * *
After several hundred were treated successfully, the bakufu invited Zhang to Edo, to treat selected members of the shogun’s household.
Date Masamune’s agents had quietly monitored Zhang’s experiment. After Zhang left, Masamune’s own physicians continued the immunizations, among the Christians as well as the people of Rikuzen, as they had been instructed by Zhang.
Some Christians objected to Zhang’s rituals, others permitted it, figuring that as long as it was Zhang praying, not them, they were committing no sin. And of course, in the shogun’s household, only the Buddhist ritual was practiced.
This came to Masamune’s attention, and he questioned his doctors as to whether it made a difference who was prayed to. “It didn’t appear to,” he was informed.
His reaction was just one word. “Interesting.”
May 1634,
Sendai Castle (Date Clan Family Home)
Captain Abel Janszoon Tasman of the Dutch East India Company earnestly hoped that this would not be a long meeting. He had not been in Japan long enough to feel at all comfortable squatting for hours. He tried as best he could to copy how the Japanese captain sitting beside him had locked his heels under his buttocks, but feared that his imitation was poor.
A flunky announced the coming of the great lord, bellowing “All kow-tow for Date Masamune-sama, Echizen no Kami, Mutsu no Kami, Daimyo of Rikuzen, Taishu of New Nippon.” Taishu meant “grand governor,” and was, according to Tasman’s colleagues, the local equivalent of a Viceroy.
Of course, the title by which Date Masamune was best known was dokuganryu—“one-eyed dragon.” This was a reference to the loss of his right eye. According to Tasman’s sources, Masamune had gone blind in that eye as a result of childhood smallpox. It was a common enough consequence of the disease. What wasn’t so common was Masamune’s reaction; Tasman had been told that Masamune had plucked it out so that an enemy couldn’t take advantage of it in battle.