William Adams (sailor) - Adams's Legacy

Adams's Legacy

Adams died at Hirado, north of Nagasaki, on 16 May 1620, aged 55 and was buried in Nagasaki-ken where his grave marker may still be seen to this day, alongside a memorial to Saint Francis Xavier. The English factory was dissolved three years later due to its unprofitability.

In his will, he left his townhouse in Edo, his fief in Hemi, and 500 British pounds to be divided evenly between his family in England and his family in Japan.

Cocks wrote: "I cannot but be sorrowfull for the loss of such a man as Capt William Adams, he having been in such favour with two Emperors of Japan as never any Christian in these part of the world." (Cocks's Diary)

Cocks remained in contact with Adams' family sending gifts and in March 1622, offering silks for Joseph and Susanna. He handed to Joseph his father's sword and dagger on the Christmas following Adams' death. Cocks also records that Hidetada transferred the lordship from William Adams to his son Joseph Adams with the attendant rights to the estate at Hemi:

He (Hidetada) has confirmed the lordship to his son, which the other emperor (Ieyasu) gave to the father. (Cocks's Diary)

Cocks was also in charge of using Adams' trading rights (the shuinjō) for the benefit of Adams' children, Joseph and Susanna, a task he performed conscientiously and which was handled by the Dutch after 1623.

By 1629, only two of Adams's shipmates were still surviving, living privately in Nagasaki: Melchior van Santvoort and Vincent Romeyn.

Adams' son also kept the title of Miura Anjin and was a successful trader until the closure of the country in 1635 when he disappeared from historical records.

Adams's memory is preserved in the naming of a town in Edo (modern Tokyo), Anjin-chō (in modern-day Nihonbashi), where he had a house, and by an annual celebration on 15 June in his honour.

A village and a railroad station in his fiefdom, Anjinzuka (安針塚, "Burial mound of the Pilot"), in modern Yokosuka, bears his name.

In the city of Itō, Shizuoka, the Miura Anjin Festival is held all day on 10 August. Adams' birth town of Gillingham has held a Will Adams Festival every September since 2000. Today, both Itō and Yokosuka are sister cities of Adams' birth town of Gillingham.

On the seafront at Itō is a monument to Adams. Alongside it stands a plaque inscribed with Edmund Blunden's poem, "To the Citizens of Ito", which commemorates Adams' achievement.

A monument to Adams stands in Watling Street, Gillingham (Kent), opposite Darland Avenue.

The life of William Adams inspired James Clavell's best-selling novel Shōgun (1975), which was adapted to the very popular TV miniseries Shōgun (1980), the Broadway production Shogun: The Musical (1990) and the computer game James Clavell's Shōgun (1989). Throughout these works, the fictional heroics of John Blackthorne are loosely based on Adams' adventures in the first few years after his arrival in Japan.

Clavell was not the first author to novelize the story of Will Adams, in fact there many earlier though less successful attempts. The first was by William Dalton called Will Adams, The First Englishman in Japan: A Romantic Biography published in London 1861. Dalton had never been to Japan and his book accurately reflects romanticized Victorian British notions of the exotic Asian. Richard Blaker's The Needlewatcher (London, 1932) is the least romantic of the novels, he consciously attempted to de-mythologize Adams and write a careful historical work of fiction. James Scherer's Pilot and Shōgun is less a novel than a series of incidents in Adams life. American Robert Lund wrote Daishi-san (New York, 1960). Finally Christopher Nicole's Lord of the Golden Fan was published just two years before Shōgun, in 1973. Adams is portrayed as sexually frustrated by the mores of his time and seeks freedom in the east where he has numerous encounters. The work is considered light pornography.