Tanaka Shōsuke

In August 1610 Tanaka Shōsuke was ordered by the retired shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu to accompany Rodrigo de Vivero y Aberrucia back to New Spain (Nueva España), together with 22 other Japanese representatives, on board the San Buena Ventura, a 120-ton ship built in Japan under the supervision of William Adams a few years earlier.

The viceroy confiscated the San Buena Ventura however, fearful that the Japanese would manage to master the art of trans-oceanic navigation.

Tanaka Shosuke is also reported as having brought back mulberry wood from the New World, which he offered to Tokugawa Ieyasu, who used it to build a bath in his Palace.

A contemporary journal, written by the historian Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, a noble Aztec born in Amecameca (ancient Chalco province) in 1579, whose Spanish name was Domingo Francisco de San Anton Muñon, gives some account of the visit of Tanaka.

And likewise the people of Japan will be able to come enter New Spain to do business, to come here to sell goods that are made there, and no one here will be able to impede them, for thus the lord Viceroy don Luis de Velasco, Marqués of Salinas, whom they came to see, informed them[1]He also says that they were allowed to walk with their sword at the side, something not usually permitted to traders, and that they were in formal Japanese attire: And they came gotten up as they are gotten up up there; they wear something like an ornamented jacket, doublet, or long blouse, which they tie at their middle, their waist; there they place a katana of metal, which counts as their swords. ...

Tanaka Shosuke helped prepare the first official Japanese embassy to the Americas and Europe, by meeting extensively with Hasekura Tsunenaga, who was in charge of the project.

He is recorded as again having left for the Americas in 1613 on board Hasekura's Japanese-built 500-ton galleon San Juan Bautista with the embassy and a total of 140 Japanese.