To be fair, "Japón" is a Spanish family name since Date Masamune send a bunch of people over and some of them didn't return after Christianity was outlawed in Japan / stayed as an embassy. Could be that some of them gave their kids Japanese names*, I don't know.
The references to Englishmen and "saving France" would seem to imply period something akin to the Hundred Years' War though (the realm scarcely needed saving after booting les Rosbifs off the continent in 1453 after all), at which point Europeans were barely starting to poke around the Far East and Japan was ways off from hermetically sealing itself...
And it's just a few hundreds years off from knights. Barely an inaccuracy in the grand scheme of things.
Knights (properly men at arms or gendarmes in French, "knight/chevalier" having long since become a honorary title by that time) remained militarily relevant well into the 1500s during which time the Japanese were famously busy beating each other up with gusto and the "long-nosed southern barbarians" were nosing around Asia in earnest, a handful taking up service with diverse daimyo, so there's that... FWIW Japanese merchants and mercenaries (not to mention pirates) were a common enough sight all over East Asia those days so it's not like there wasn't window for interaction.
last edited at Jul 16, 2018 9:44AM