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Sailors are up in the rigging and out along the crossbeams while the hull sits black and low in the water. Japan called it the black ship, and gave the same name back 250 years later to Perry’s steamers.

The storm does the introductions. In the autumn of 1543 a battered Chinese junk is blown onto Tanegashima, a slender island south of Kyushu. Among the traders aboard are two or three Portuguese, the first Europeans anyone in Japan has ever seen. They carry sticks that crack like thunder and kill a duck on the wing. The lord of the island, Tanegashima Tokitaka, is 16 years old, and he does what a 16-year-old with a treasury does. He buys both guns on the spot, for a sum his chroniclers report with awe. Then he hands one to his swordsmith with orders to make more. The smith could forge the barrel; the breech defeated him. Sealing the rear end of the bore needed a screw, and the screw, that small everyday miracle, did not exist in Japan. The island still tells the story that the smith, Yaita, bought the secret with his daughter Wakasa, who married a Portuguese captain and sailed away so her father could learn how the threads were cut. However the screw actually arrived, within a year Tanegashima was making guns, and the country, at war with itself for a century, was the best arms market on earth. Sakai and Kunitomo turned out matchlocks by the thousand; tanegashima became simply the Japanese word for gun. Three decades after the storm, Oda Nobunaga lined up 3,000 gunners in rotating volleys at Nagashino and shot the most famous cavalry in Japan off its horses. By 1600 there were probably more guns in Japan than in any country in Europe. The Portuguese came back on purpose, every year, in the great black carrack from Macao, trading Chinese silk for Japanese silver. They did not come alone. The Jesuits arrived with the trade, and for a while converted whole provinces. The engine under all of it was silver. Japanese mountains, above all the great mine at Iwami, were pouring out ore in quantities that put the islands among the largest producers on earth. By some estimates that was a third of the world's supply. China wanted the silver but had banned its own merchants from sailing to Japan. So the Portuguese carrack sat in the middle of the most profitable trade afloat: silk one way, silver the other. The mission rode the same hull in more ways than one. The Jesuits took an agreed share of the silk cargo to pay for their churches. In 1580 a Christian lord signed over to them the little port where the black ship called. It grew into Nagasaki. Faith, guns and exchange rates arrived so entangled that when Japan later cut two of the threads, the third had to go as well. Japan called the newcomers namban, barbarians from the south, since their ships rode up on the southern monsoon, and after two generations of contact its painters made the strangers a subject. The gilded screens of the Kanō workshops record the strangers with a straight face. There is the black ship, its crew doing acrobatics in the rigging, and the captain-major walking under a parasol. Everything Japan found remarkable is drawn exactly: the ballooning trousers, the long noses, the Africans and Indians among the sailors, the little dogs. Kanō Naizen painted this pair of screens around 1600, with clouds of gold leaf standing in for everything the painter chose not to explain. The century of contact ended by decree. From 1639 the Portuguese were banned on pain of death, Christianity was driven underground, and the islands closed to all but a trickle of Dutch and Chinese trade. The guns stayed. So did the screens: a record of the afternoon the world arrived, kept by the country that then showed it the door.