'Tenjiku Tokubei Riding His Fire Toad' by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, ca. 1828. This image is also available on:
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Tenjiku Tokubei was born in 1612, and was only fifteen when he left home to go to sea on one of Japan's Red Seal ships (so called because they carried the seal of the Shogun, stamped in red, to authorize their commercial activities). Japan's trading fleet had expanded rapidly in the latter half of the 16th century, and Tokubei's Kyoto-based employers sent the young merchant sailor as far afield as Vietnam and Thailand. He later signed on with a Dutch captain, and eventually reached as far as India and travelled up the Ganges - hence the nickname 'Tenjiku', which was the Japanese name for India at the time. Travelling the world and reaching the birthplace of Buddhism carried considerable cachet in Japan, and this - combined with the fact that Tokubei's trading career had made him fabulously wealthy - made him a minor celebrity when he finally settled in Japan again many years later. His popular memoir was one of the last Japanese accounts of the outside world published before the Tokugawa Shogunate's isolation policy tightened to the point where foreign travel became totally illegal.
Tokubei's memoir became the basis for further retellings of his life story, which diverged considerably from the actual historical Tokubei as subsequent generations of authors added more and more embellishments to entertain their customers. Tokubei's adventures were a popular subject for puppet theatre and Kabuki theatre, and Kuniyoshi would have probably been most familiar with them from the very successful 1804 Kabuki play: Tenjiku Tokubei Kokubanashi, by Tsuruya Nanboku. By this point Tokubei had been recast as a rogue, a rebel and a wizard, who could turn rocks into giant toads not only capable of carrying him around, but also able to breathe fire on his enemies.
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