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João Rodrigues Tçuzu

João Rodrigues (1561 or 1562 – 1633 or 1634), distinguished as Tçuzu and also known by other names in China and Korea, was a Portuguese sailor, warrior, and Jesuit interpreter, missionary, priest, and scholar in Japan and China. He is now best known for his linguistic works on the Japanese language, including The Art of the Japanese Language. He was also long erroneously supposed to have been the main compiler of the first Japanese–Portuguese dictionary, published in 1603.

Name[edit]

João Rodrigues's epithet "Tçuzu" was an early Portuguese transcription of his Japanese descriptor Tsūji (Japanese: 通事, "the Interpreter"). It distinguished him from a contemporary João Rodrigues in the Jesuits' China mission. João's surname sometimes appears in its Spanish form Rodriguez, the form he himself used in his Portuguese works; his epithet is sometimes mistakenly written as Tçuzzu.[2]


In Japan and China, Rodrigues used the Chinese name Lu Ruohan (陸若漢), abbreviating his family name to a single character Lu in the Chinese style and transcribing his given name's Latin form Iohannes to Ruohan. In modern Korean sources, Rodrigues's name is written with the pronunciation Yuk Yakhan[5] (육약한), although at the time his Chinese surname would have been pronounced Ryuk (륙). In 19th-[6] and early 20th-century sources,[7] his name appears as "Jean Niouk", a blend of the French form of his given name and Dallet's French transcription of the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese form of his surname.[8]

Legacy[edit]

The character of Martin Alvito in the James Clavell book Shōgun is loosely based on Rodrigues, while the protagonist is based on William Adams. In the 1980 miniseries adaptation he is portrayed by Damien Thomas and by Tommy Bastow in the 2024 adaptation. Clavell appears to have named the character Vasco Rodriques to acknowledge João Rodrigues in a similar way as he gave Vasco Rodriques's Japanese wife the name "Gracia" to honor Hosokawa Gracia. (In the book, the character "Mariko" is based on Hosokawa.)

, 'Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed., Vol. VI, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1878, pp. 390–394.

"Corea" 

Blue, Gregory (2001), , Statecraft & Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China: The Cross-Cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), Sinica Leidensia, Vol. 50, Leiden: Brill, pp. 19–71, ISBN 9004120580.

"Xu Guangqi in the West: Early Jesuit Sources and the Construction of an Identity"

Chan, Albert (1976), , Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644, Vol. II: M–Z, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1145–47, ISBN 9780231038331.

"João Rodrígues"

(1973), Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China, New York: Weatherhill.

Cooper, Michael

, ed. (2001), João Rodrigues's Account of Sixteenth-Century Japan, London: Hakluyt Society, ISBN 0904180735, a translation of the manuscript copy of Rodrigues's History of the Japanese Church.

Cooper, Michael

(1874), Histoire de l'Église de Corée (in French), Paris: Victor Palmé.

Dallet, Charles

D'Elia, Pasquale (1960), Suter, Rufus; et al. (eds.), Galileo in China: Relations through the Roman College between Galileo and the Jesuit Scientist-Missionaries (1610–1640), : Harvard University Press, Bibcode:1960gcrt.book.....D.

Cambridge

Fang Zhaoying (1943). . In Hummel, Arthur W. Sr. (ed.). Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period. United States Government Printing Office. p. 686.

"Sun Yüan-hua" 

Hulbert, Homer B. (1905), , Seoul: Methodist Publishing House.

The History of Korea, Vol. II

; et al. (1986), The Hall of Heavenly Records: Korean Astronomical Instruments and Clocks 1380–1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521616980.

Needham, Joseph

Park, Seongrae (2000), (PDF), Northeast Asian Studies, vol. 4, pp. 31–43.

"The Introduction of Western Science in Korea: A Comparative View with the Cases of China and Japan"

Ward, Haruko Nawata (2009), "Ōtomo-Nata Jezebel:... Priestess of Hachiman", , Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 111–126, ISBN 9780754664789.

Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, 1549–1650

Zwartjes, Otto (2011), , Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series III: Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, No. 117, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, ISBN 978-9027246080.

Portuguese Missionary Grammars in Asia, Africa and Brazil, 1550–1800

Arte da lingua de Iapam by father João Rodrigues Originally published in Nagasaki: Collegio de Iapao da Companhia de Iesv, 1604-1608, first grammar of the Japanese language, in Portuguese, by the missionary João Rodrigues

- Japanese web domain named after the Portuguese missionary João Rodrigues

Missionary Linguistics

Monuments to Father João Rodrigues