The Japanese and the Jesuits

Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth Century Japan

Mr J F Moran, J. F. Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415756075
• eBook ISBN: 9781134881123
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Japanese and the Jesuits examines the attempt by sixteenth century Jesuits to convert the Japanese to Christianity. Directing the Jesuits was the Italian Alessandro Valignano, whose own magisterial writings, many of them not previously translated or published, are the principle source material for this account of one of the most remarkable of all meetings between East and West.
Valignano arrived in Japan in 1579. In promoting Christianity, he always sought the support of the ruling classes, but an important part of his strategy was also to have the missionaries adapt themselves thoroughly to Japanese customs, etiquette and culture. He was insistent that they must master the Japanese language, and he brought to Japan a European printing press, which turned out grammars and dictionaries for the missionaries, and works of instruction and devotion for the Japanese Christians.
Following Valignano's death, Christianity was proscribed and missionaries banished from Japan. This does not detract from his remarkable achievements. He understood perfectly well that foreign missionaries by themselves were not capable of converting Japan to Christianity, and one of his principal concerns was the training of Japanese Jesuits and priests, and breaking down the barriers between them and the Europeans. Few people have ever been more acutely aware of, or grappled more determinedly with, problems in Japanese-Western relationships.

1
Orientation

Funega Cuchinotçuye iruua, sate medetai cotoya.

[The ship is coming into Kuchinotsu. Isn’t that splendid!]

(from a lost monogatari quoted by João Rodrigues¹)

‘The ship’ is the Portuguese trading ship making the annual voyage which since 1555 had brought Chinese silk from Macao to Kyushu, the most western of the four main islands of Japan. In 1579 the ship came to Kuchinotsu, in the district of Arima, West Kyushu. That was the year when, according to the Jesuit chronicler Luis Frois,

there came from China to Japan the nao of Leonel de Brito, and in his company came Father Alessandro Valignano, a Neapolitan, a person highly qualified in letters and in virtue, and one of the most outstanding subjects of the Society ever to come to Asia.²

‘The Society’ is the Society of Jesus, usually referred to as ‘the Jesuits’, founded by Ignatius Loyola and recognized by Pope Paul III in 1540 as a religious order within the Catholic Church. Francis Xavier, disciple and friend of Ignatius, was the first Jesuit sent to preach Christianity outside Europe. Three Portuguese traders whose ship was blown to Japan in a typhoon in 1542 or 1543 are the first Europeans known to have set foot there, and Xavier was not far behind them. He reached India in 1542 and Japan in 1549, and in 1552 he died on an island off the coast of South China.

Alessandro Valignano was born in 1539, joined the Jesuit Order in 1566, and was the dominant figure among the Jesuits in Asia, and especially in Japan, during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The Jesuits were the only Christian missionaries in Japan until the arrival of Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars in the 1590s and 1600s, and the number of friars never rose above a quarter of the number of Jesuits. There were 115 Jesuits in Japan in 1614, the year when all Christian missionaries were ordered to leave and the persecution of Christians began.³ Not all of the missionaries did leave, but the majority had to, and in a sense it was the end of the era which began with St Francis Xavier.

Xavier came from Malacca to Japan in a Chinese junk, with a Chinese captain and crew. The Chinese captain died in Japan, in Kagoshima, and the saint wrote of him, sadly: ‘He was good to us throughout the voyage, but we were unable to do him any good, since he died in his unbelief; nor can we do him good after his death by commending him to God, since his soul is in hell.’⁴ For the most part the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century missionaries believed that those who had not heard the Christian message, as well as those who rejected it, would be damned,⁵ and accordingly that the work of evangelization, conversion and baptism was of extreme urgency.

When Francis Xavier left Japan in 1551 his work was continued by a very small band of Jesuits under the Spaniard Cosme de Torres. Torres died in 1570, only a few months after the Portuguese Francisco Cabral had arrived to take over from him, and Cabral was still Jesuit mission superior nine years later when the Italian Alessandro Valignano first reached Japan. The number of missionaries in Japan had risen to thirty in 1576 and to no fewer than eighty-five, including twenty-nine Japanese Jesuits, by 1584.⁶

Reports from the mission had been very encouraging, with Christian communities established in many places in Kyushu and some elsewhere, and substantial numbers of converts, including some very prominent persons. One of these was the lord of Bungo, in Kyushu, who had met Francis Xavier in 1551, had favoured the missionaries ever since, and had himself become a Christian in 1578. The importance of the goodwill of persons in positions of power was obvious to Valignano, but experience continued to underline it—for example in 1587, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi, ruler of Japan, decreed (although the decree was not enforced) that all missionaries were to leave the country; and in 1597, when twenty-six Christians were crucified in Nagasaki on the orders of the same ruler.⁷

The Jesuit Order is divided into ‘provinces’, each province being governed by a ‘(father) provincial’, who is subject to the general superior (known as ‘Father General’ or ‘the General’) of the Order. A modern provincial serves one or two terms of three years each. In earlier times the length of the provincial’s period of office was more variable, but always limited. The General was and is elected for life. From time to time the General may appoint a ‘visitor’ to conduct a tour of inspection, or ‘visitation’, of one or more provinces. The visitor represents the General and has authority over all others in the province, including the provincial.

The first four Jesuit Generals were Ignatius Loyola, Diego Laynez, Francis Borgia and Everard Mercurian. Mercurian became General in 1573, and in the same year he appointed Alessandro Valignano ‘visitor of the East Indies’, with authority over all Jesuit missions and all Jesuits from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan.⁸ The office of ‘visitor’ was the highest possible, apart from that of General, in the Society of Jesus.

Mercurian died in 1580 and his successor as Jesuit General was Claudio Aquaviva. Aquaviva, who was still General when Valignano died in 1606, was a fellow Neapolitan, a former classmate and a personal friend of Valignano. He made him provincial of the province of the East Indies (also known as ‘the Indian province’), and later reassigned him to his former post as visitor.

The province of the East Indies had its headquarters in Goa, in Portuguese India, and Valignano arrived there in 1574. Except for the years 1583 to 1587, during which he was provincial, Valignano was visitor until his death in 1606—until 1595 visitor of the entire province, from 1595 of only a part of it, namely China and Japan. It was 25 July 1579 when Valignano stepped ashore at Kuchinotsu for his first ‘visitation’ of Japan.

When the Visitor left Japan in 1582 he took with him four Japanese Christian boys from noble Kyushu families. They carried letters to the Pope from the lord of Bungo and two other Christian lords, on what was the first Japanese diplomatic mission to Europe. They did not return until 1590, when:

there arrived in Nagasaki on the 18th day of July the nao of Henrique da Costa, and in it there came the Father Visitor with the four Japanese gentlemen who went to Rome, namely Dom Mancio, Dom Miguel, Dom Martinho, and Dom Julião.⁹

On 9 October 1592 Valignano sailed again for Macao and India. He reached Japan for the third time on 5 August 1598, reporting to Aquaviva that ‘Our Lord brought us safely to these kingdoms of Japan in 22 days, with a very good voyage’.¹⁰ Most voyages were less pleasant. In 1580 Valignano had written to Mercurian asking to be relieved of his office, and mentioning that he would be glad not to have to spend the rest of his life on ‘these seas’.¹¹ In 1598, conscious of advancing years and declining strength, the Visitor had decided to stay in Japan. Four years later the financial plight of the Jesuits there forced a change of plan, but he writes to Aquaviva in Rome:

Your Paternity should understand that it is only the extreme urgency of our need which persuades me to set out yet again, at the age of sixty-four, over these so dangerous seas, and to leave the governing of this province, which Your Paternity has entrusted to me as visitor, in order to seek some remedy from the viceroy of India and from the Portuguese in Macao.¹²

On 15 January 1603 Valignano left Japan for the last time. On arrival in Macao, after a terrifying voyage, he was for two weeks close to death, but ‘with four bleedings and two purges, and with the prayers of Ours [Ours=the Jesuits], Our Lord was pleased to give me health’.¹³

In 1604 the Visitor is planning to return to Japan the following year, but again he asks the Father General to relieve him of his duties as superior. He is now sixty-five years old, weakening and tiring, and will probably be almost seventy by the time a reply reaches him. He asks particularly to be allowed to stay wherever he is when that reply reaches him, free from any obligation to undertake further voyages.¹⁴ A year later he writes that he will be able to leave for Japan in June 1606, ‘unless it please Our Lord to take me for the other life, which is what I would much prefer’.¹⁵ His prayer was heeded, there were no more voyages, and he died in Macao on 20 January 1606.

Japan was a turbulent and fragmented country when Xavier landed there in 1549, and when Valignano left it in 1603 it was unified and at peace. The emperor, who for centuries had resided in Kyoto, had always held authority over the entire country. It was a distant and nebulous authority, which the emperor himself had no means of enforcing, but those who did wield power would from time to time claim that they ruled as instruments of the imperial will. Power was in the hands of an aristocracy until the twelfth century, but it was then taken over by the military class. Local allegiances, however, were usually much stronger than allegiance to any central régimé, and in the early and mid-sixteenth century central government, under the ‘lord of the Tenka’, controlled only the areas close to Kyoto, and the word Tenka, literally ‘(all) under heaven’, had come to refer only to those areas. Local daimy, hereditary military lords, often acknowledged no authority above their own, and desperate struggles for power and territory were common.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century there were drastic changes, and three of the most celebrated figures in Japanese history dominated the political scene. Oda Nobunaga became lord of the Tenka in 1573, the year in which Valignano was appointed visitor, and when the Italian met him in 1581 Nobunaga was master of about half the country. Less than ten years later the whole of Japan was subject to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Nobunaga’s lieutenant and successor. Hideyoshi died in 1598, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the victor at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, set about establishing the centralized system of government and control of the nation which was to last for over two hundred years.

2
The ambassadors

It was Valignano who arranged the first Japanese embassy to Europe. The ambassadors were It Mancio, Chijiwa Miguel, Hara Martinho and Nakaura Julião, the Japanese boys whom the Visitor had brought with him when he left Japan in 1582. Mancio travelled as legate of the lord of Bungo, Miguel as legate of the lords of Omura and Arima, and Martinho and Julião as their companions. In December 1583 the Visitor saw them off from Goa as they set out for Lisbon and Rome. In May 1587 he welcomed them back, and on 4 June 1587, in the Goa Jesuit College, Hara Martinho delivered a Latin eulogy of Valignano, linking him in rhetorical conceit with his namesake Alexander the Great, and proclaiming:

Blessed are the eyes that see such things, and blessed are we who have seen them. But more blessed are you, Alexander great in virtue, for you were the principal cause of our participation in so much good.¹

The comparison is even more explicit in the peroration:

O Alexander greater far than Alexander the Great, you have conquered and pacified almost all India with the arms of Christ. There remains now only the world of Japan, no easy conquest to any other than Alexander…. Storm that country with the arms of God, conquer it with good works, wrest our fatherland from the enemy most cruel, and bring it to true freedom. [The cruel enemy is the Devil, and the reference is to spiritual conquest.] The Japanese call out to you, they long for you; the winds are favourable, the seas calm, the doors are open wide.²

Valignano is often at pains to distinguish plain truth from rhetorical embellishment, but this particular scholastic exercise can hardly have failed to please him, for he was delighted at the success of the mission, and very relieved to have the boys safely back in Goa.

In August 1586 word had reached India that they and a considerable number of Jesuits were in Lisbon at the beginning of that year, awaiting the spring sailings to India. In December 1586 Valignano reported to the General in Rome that in October four of the five ships expected from Portugal had reached India safely, but the San Felipe, with twenty-one Jesuits and the four boys on board, had not, and that he could only hope and pray that they were wintering in Mozambique.³

The San Felipe left Lisbon on 8 April 1586, but it was the end of August before it reached Mozambique. Prevailing winds made the Mozambique-Goa voyage almost impossible after mid-August, and the San Felipe had to turn back after an attempt to set sail for India in early September. Instead the ship headed back to Lisbon, leaving the boys and the Jesuits to spend the winter in Mozambique, with no ship to take them to India in the spring and no certainty that the 1587 ships from Lisbon would call at Mozambique in the summer. Meanwhile Valignano, fearing for their safety, had persuaded the Portuguese viceroy in Goa to send a small galleon to Mozambique. It arrived; they embarked on 15 March and were in Goa on 29 May, having managed to send word of their coming by another and faster Portuguese ship encountered at sea.⁴ There was joy, relief, and a splendid welcome from church and state, and only six days later Hara Martinho was giving his Latin oration in the Jesuit college. He and his three companions, boys no longer, are now usually ‘the gentlemen’ or ‘the nobles’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes
• Maps
• 1. Orientation
• 2. The ambassadors
• 3. The Visitor
• 4. Full and complete information
• 5. Ships and sealing-wax
• 6. The enterprise
• 7. Friars from the Philippines
• 8. High and low
• 9. The alms from the China ship
• 10. Rich and poor
• 11. The press
• 12. Japanese Jesuits
• 13. The Japanese language
• 14. Conclusion
• Appendix A. How land is owned and income reckoned in Japan*
• Appendix B. How and why we got the port of Nagasaki*
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index