f.25 defines Bonção (bonsan) as "a stone or rough piece of wood" which serves as the base of a miniature landscape made with "green mosses, & a tiny tree planted there, &c."

      Until the latter part of the sixteenth century, a bonsan was also indispensible to the classic setting of the formal tea ceremony held typically in the aristocratic drawing room (shoin) of a lord's mansion.  The background for one prominent example of this is as follows.
      The warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) had led two thousand men to route an invading army twelve times its size in 1560.  Eight years later he proceeded against the capital in Kyoto, leading a force of 30,000, setting up a rival to the Ashikaga shogunate.  Three years later, in the most terrifying act of his career, he torched three thousand temple buildings in the capital area, slaughtering thousands of Buddhist monks whose great sects had for years held much independent power and political influence.  In 1573 the last Ashikaga shogun was driven out of Kyoto.  Two years later Nobunaga won a major battle by employing three thousand musketmen -- relatively new technology courtesy of Portuguese traders -- in recurring waves.  Nobunaga soon became de facto leader of the home provinces of Japan.  He ordered land surveys and a unification of weights and measures, as well as patronage of the merchant class.  Responding in 1582 to a call by his general Hideyoshi for reinforcements, Nobunaga and his eldest son were slain by a treacherous other general.  Three years later Hideyoshi himself was the undisputed successor and continued the task of unification set in motion by Nobunaga with his own military alliances, domestic reforms, and foreign adventures.  Hideyoshi's successor, Ieysau, established the Tokugawa shogunate.  These three men completely changed the course of Japanese history.
      Now, in contrast with his sect-breaking infamy, Nobunaga was also known to be an enthusiastic collector of both Zen-inspired garden stones and miniature landscape stones.  In one incident, he is said to have sent one of the latter, named "Eternal Pine Mountain" (Sue no Matsu-yama), together with a fine tea bowl, in 1580 in exchange for the Ishiyama fortress (currently the site of Osaka castle).   Nobunaga, a greedy collector of tea implements, was apparently also a fancier of bonsan.

      Luis Frois, S.J. (1532-1597) lived in Japan for thirty-four years, and he wrote numerous energetic and dramatic accounts to his colleagues in Europe and India.  In a letter written in November 1582, Frois stated that just before his doom, Nobunaga installed the emblem of his divinity in the Sokenji, his temple on Azuchi Hill -- "someone having brought him a stone suitable for the purpose, called Bonção" -- and guaranteed prosperity and a long life to all who came in to venerate it.   This particular bonsan has been historically documented and listed as a feature of one of the second-floor rooms of the Azuchi Donjon and was located within a special enclosure there.
      The impressive and extravagantly decorated castle with seven internal levels and a 138 foot tall tower on a hill above the waters of Lake Biwa was begun in 1576, inaugurated in 1579, and burnt down in the aftermath of Nobunaga's own terrible end in early July 1582.  It had been among the first constructed to be able to withstand brute cannonfire.  It was one of the typical grand homes designed to please the rude and self-made men who had fought their way to mastery of the country, and to demonstrate their power and wealth.  Most of its internal rooms were highly decorated with the bold and lavish painted gold screens and colorful relief carvings characteristic of this period, sharply contrasting with the muted subtely of the previous age's almost purely religious themes. 1

1      Elison, George "The Cross and the Sword: Patterns of Momoyama History" in Elison, George and Bardwell L. Smith (eds.)  Warlords, Artists, and Commoners (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1981), pp. 50, 62-63, 264, Volcabvlario references on pp. 74-75, 301; "Eternal Pine Mountain" stone from Covello, Vincent T. and Yuji Yoshimura   The Japanese Art of Stone Appreciation, Suiseki and Its Use with Bonsai (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle; 1996, 1984), pp. 22-23; Hall, John Whitney  Japan, From Prehistory to Modern Times (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1970), pp. 136-159; "The Humour and Virtues of Muromachi Bonsai," Bonsai, BCI, May/June 1989 (reprinted from The East, June 1986), pg. 4, contains the following: "A dictionary edited by a Portuguese missionary in Japan and published in 1603, listed the term "bonsan" and defined it as "a Japanese-style arrangement of dwarf trees, stone, and green moss to represent a rock in water."
      Note that in 1542, the first European contact with Japan occurred when three Portuguese on board a Chinese junk laden with hides bound from Siam to China was shipwrecked at Tanega Shima, an island only twenty miles southwest of Kyushu.  Portuguese trade with Japan began three years later.  The Basque Francis Xavier -- one of the seven co-founders of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits -- headed a Jesuit mission which landed at the southern Kyushu city of Kagoshima in 1549.  Used to dealing with overlords, he soon made friends with members of Japan's ruling class who were primarily interested in Western technology and culture.  They gave Xavier permission to teach Catholicism in exchange for some of his knowledge of the outside world.  Backlash to the rising influence of the missionaries resulted in the first interdictions in 1587 and the first martyrdoms in Japan a decade later.  The success of the Dutch in Japan during the next two and a half centuries was primarily due to their nonalliance with the Roman Catholic pope.