400-year-old documents reveal evidence of Japanese opium production and winemaking

Research from the Eisei Bunko Research Center of Kumamoto University reveals that Tadatoshi Hosokawa, a 17th-century lord of Kyusyu, Japan, ordered his people to produce not only wine but also opium for medical purposes.

Winemaking appears in Japanese trade documents, diaries, catalogues, and other texts dating to the 15th and 16th centuries. Christian missionaries and trade merchants delivered wine to Japan from Western Europe, and it continued as a luxury import item for over a century. It was believed that large-scale Japanese wine brewing began in the 1870s. However, as reported in 2016 by Kumamoto University’s Eisei Bunko Research Center, the wine produced by the Hosokawa family in the Kokura Region began more than 200 years earlier in 1627. The researchers also showed that Lord Hosokawa ordered his liegeman, Taroemon Ueda, to make wine from wild grapes and send it to Edo, the former name of Japan’s capital city. Read more.