Background
Chaya Shirojiro Kiyotsugu was born in 1584 in Japan.
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Chaya Shirojiro Kiyotsugu
Edit Profile茶屋四郎次郎
Career
Kiyotsugu was assigned by Ieyasu to help oversee shogunal operations at the formal trading post in Nagasaki, where he could keep an eye on the foreign traders and Christian missionaries, while working to his own commercial benefit as well.
Beginning in 1612, the family obtained official licenses (shuinjō) from the shogunate to continue trade with Cochinchina (aka Dang Trong, present-day southern Vietnam); these merchant vessels thus came to be known as chaya-sen (茶屋船, "Chaya ships").
Personality
A friend of artist Honami Koetsu, Kiyotsugu was active socially in the Kyoto art world, and was known as both a patron of the arts in general, and a collector of tea bowls and other implements of the Japanese tea ceremony.
