Under “Japanese accounts of Europeans”, it’s claimed that the Japanese were shocked the Europeans could not understand “the Japanese writing system”, but it does not make logical sense, as the Portugese were not the first and only foreigners the Japanese knew of, and any other foreigner, European or not, most likely couldn’t read written Japanese either. What I think “They cannot understand the meaning of written characters” actually means is they were surprised Europeans could not read Kanji. Maybe they tried to write in Classical Chinese initially, as that was the lingua franca in the Sinosphere, but found that the Europeans couldn’t recognize even the characters themselves, which had been adopted and adapted by Ryukyu, Korea, Vietnam, and practically every country for that matter as far as the Japanese were concerned. Either way, a foreigner not being able to read written Japanese is imo very unlikely to have shocked the Japanese. 2607:FEA8:529E:C300:3988:F488:A989:D89F (talk) 00:58, 6 May 2025 (UTC)
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