Araki Sotaro

Died: 1636

Araki Sotarô was a Nagasaki-based shuinsen merchant known for his travels in Southeast Asia and marriage to a daughter of a Vietnamese aristocratic family.

A samurai originally from Higo province (Kumamoto), he moved to Nagasaki in 1588, and shortly afterwards began sailing to Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. In 1619, he returned to Japan with a wife, a daughter of the Ruan family & adopted daughter of the King of Annam known as Wakaku or Anio in Japanese. He and Wakaku then established a trading emporium at Nagasaki.

The Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture owns a Vietnamese mirror in gilded and lacquer mounting which was first brought to Japan by Wakaku as one of her personal possessions, along with a Japanese manuscript translation of an original letter from the Ruan family to Araki.

Araki and his wife are buried in Nagasaki; their gravesite at the temple of Daion-ji has been designated a city cultural property.

This article is a placeholder or stub. You can help SamuraiWiki by expanding it.

References

Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, University of Cambridge Press (2012), 89.
"Mirror from Vietnam, owned by lady Araki Sotaro," Virtual Collection of Asian Masterpieces, 2013.