Parenting & Family Quote by Will Adams

A man who helped redraw Japan's relationship to the wider world is, here, reduced to the oldest plotline in travel writing: I want to go home. Will Adams - shipwrecked in 1600, absorbed into Tokugawa Japan, and elevated to the status of trusted foreign adviser - frames his request to leave not as rebellion, but as "supplication". That word does a lot of political work. It acknowledges the king's power over his body and movements, and it signals Adams' understanding that in this court, freedom is a grant, not a right.

The phrasing "this land" carries a double edge: Japan is both refuge and enclosure. Adams isn't describing exile in dramatic terms; he's describing a life that has become structurally difficult to exit. The subtext is that success can look like captivity when patronage is total. His European instincts about personal agency have to be translated into the language of hierarchy and permission.

Then comes the emotional alibi: "my poor wife and children". It's strategic tenderness. By invoking family, he offers a motive that is morally legible across cultures and, crucially, non-threatening to the regime. He isn't pleading for ambition, profit, or allegiance elsewhere - the very things that would trigger suspicion in an era anxious about European influence.

"According to conscience and nature" is the most quietly radical clause. Conscience gestures toward Christian duty without preaching it; nature suggests a universal human claim that sidesteps politics. Adams is arguing that even in a world run by rulers, there are obligations older than states: to kin, to the self, to the moral order that survives borders.