When I was browsing Vigenere's voluminous book, Traicté des chiffres (1586), in studying the history of reception of the Vigenere cipher some months ago (see here), I found illustration of Japanese characters in the appendx. Vigenere was the first to introduce Japanese syllabary (if not Japanese characters) to Europe. Although I soon found this is known, I described it in a new article, "Vigenere's Introduction of Japanese Characters in Europe".
