Jagatara-bumi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
_(Matsura_Historical_Museum).jpg)
Jagatara-bumi (ジャガタラ文), or Letters from Jacatra, is a series of surviving letters sent to Japan from children born of relationships between foreign men and Japanese women in the seventeenth century who were exiled to Batavia due to the Tokugawa policy of national seclusion.[1]
The year after the Sakoku Edict of 1635, which prohibited overseas travel by Japanese and placed strict restrictions on foreigners entering Japan, some 287 children born of Nanban traders from Portugal and Spain to Japanese women were banished to Macao. Three years later, in 1639, the children of red-haired English and Dutch traders with Japanese women were banished to Batavia along with their mothers, thirty-two in all. In the following years there were further expulsions. A series of letters to family and friends accompanying gifts and requesting necessities survives, a genre known as Jagatara-bumi.[1]
