In November 1559, a Portuguese priest with a shaved head, wearing the rough kimono of a mendicant monk and carrying no visible sign that he was anything other than a particularly travel-worn pilgrim, walked through the gates of Kyoto.

He had no money. He had no patron. He had no command of the language beyond what a few years of stumbling through coastal Kyushu had given him, which was not much. What he did have was a companion, a half-blind former street musician named Lourenço, and a letter of introduction from an elderly Buddhist nun he had met on the road. The letter was addressed to the nun’s male relative in the capital and constituted, in its entirety, the sum of Gaspar Vilela’s social connections in the most sophisticated city in Japan.

Francis Xavier had tried Kyoto. He had arrived in the winter of 1551, trudging through snow, expecting to find the great imperial court of his imagination, the seat of the tennô, the spiritual sovereign of sixty-six provinces, the Athens of the East. What he found instead was a war-ravaged shell: temples burned, palaces crumbling, the Emperor a ceremonial figurehead with no army, no revenue, and no interest in granting Xavier the audience he wanted. Xavier left after eleven days, having accomplished nothing. He never went back.

Eight years later, Vilela was going to try again. The decision was not his. It belonged to Cosme de Torres, the aging Spanish Jesuit who ran the Japanese mission from the port of Funai in Bungo, and who had just received a tantalising piece of intelligence: an elderly monk from Mount Hiei, the great Tendai monastery complex that towered over Kyoto like a theological fortress, had written to the Jesuits requesting information about the Christian religion.

Torres saw an opening. The fact that it was almost certainly a trap, or at best a curiosity that would evaporate on contact, does not appear to have troubled him.

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Chapter One

The Priest from Avis

Gaspar Vilela came from the kind of deep Portuguese hinterland that existed primarily to produce soldiers, priests, and people who left. Born around 1525 in the town of Avis, seat of the ancient military-religious order of the same name, in the baked flatlands of the Alentejo, he received his early education from the Benedictines, was ordained as a secular priest, and in 1551, at roughly twenty-six years old, did what ambitious Portuguese ecclesiastics of his generation did: he boarded a ship for the East.

The Estado da Índia was swallowing men at a prodigious rate, and every outpost from Mozambique to Malacca needed priests. Vilela landed in Goa, the administrative nerve centre of Portuguese Asia, where he had the good fortune to meet the one man capable of redirecting his entire life.

Francis Xavier was in Goa, briefly, between missionary campaigns. He was already a legend, the co-founder of the Society of Jesus, the apostle of the Indies, the man who had baptised tens of thousands from the Coromandel Coast to the Moluccas and was now consumed by his vision of Japan. Whatever passed between Xavier and the young secular priest from the Alentejo was evidently persuasive: in 1553, Vilela entered the Society of Jesus. He had traded a respectable if unremarkable clerical career for one of the most demanding organisations in Christendom, a society that expected its members to go anywhere, endure anything, and report everything in meticulous detail.

In 1554, Vilela was selected to join a delegation to Japan under Melchior Nunes Barreto, the Jesuit Provincial of India. The group sailed via China and arrived in Bungo in 1556. For the next two years, Vilela underwent his apprenticeship under Cosme de Torres, learning the rudiments of the Japanese language, absorbing the customs, and grasping, slowly, the staggering complexity of the society he had entered.

Japan was in the savage peak of the Sengoku period, the century-long civil war that had shattered centralised authority and turned the archipelago into a patchwork of warring domains. The Emperor was a figurehead. The shōguns were puppets. The real power belonged to the daimyō. Into this maelstrom, the Jesuits were attempting to plant a universal religion.

Torres assigned Vilela to the port of Hirado in September 1557, a posting that ended badly. Vilela laboured among the small Christian community there with the support of sympathetic local lords, but ran afoul of a powerful Buddhist monk whose opposition was implacable and well-connected. Also, Vilela didn’t behave exactly well, burning Buddhist books and destroying holy images, encouraging his followers to do the same. The confrontation escalated until Vilela was expelled from Hirado entirely in 1558, forced back to Bungo with nothing to show for his efforts but an enhanced understanding of how quickly things could go wrong.

It was precisely this failure that produced his next assignment. Torres, assessing his options, concluded that a man who had been thrown out of one city might as well be thrown at a bigger one. If Vilela was going to fail, he might as well fail spectacularly. And if he succeeded, well, Kyoto was the prize that Xavier himself had been unable to claim.

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Chapter Two

The Blind Lute Player and the Road to the Capital

Vilela departed Bungo in September 1559 with two companions. The first was Brother Lourenço of Hirado. His story deserves its own paragraph, because without Lourenço, there would have been no Kyoto mission, no Nara debates, no Takayama conversion, and, it is not an exaggeration to say, a significantly different trajectory for Japanese Christianity as a whole.

Lourenço had been a biwa hōshi, an itinerant blind (or, in his case, partially blind) minstrel who wandered the roads of Japan playing the biwa, the four-stringed lute, and reciting epic tales of war and loss to roadside audiences. It was a venerable profession, associated in the Japanese imagination with the blind monks who chanted the Heike Monogatari, the great chronicle of the Genpei War. Lourenço had been converted by Francis Xavier himself, and had eventually become the first Japanese layman received into the Society of Jesus. He was not a priest, the Jesuits would not ordain a Japanese man for decades, but he was something arguably more useful: a native speaker with a performer’s command of rhetoric, an intimate understanding of the Japanese religious landscape, and the social invisibility that came from belonging to a class of wandering entertainers whom the aristocracy had been listening to for centuries.

In practical terms, Lourenço was the mission. Vilela could barely speak Japanese. Lourenço could debate theology in it, modulating his register to match the expectations of Buddhist scholars, Confucian tutors, samurai lords, and street audiences with equal fluency. Every significant conversion attributed to the Kyoto mission was, at root, a conversion achieved by Lourenço’s voice and Vilela’s authority, the Japanese catechist making the arguments, the Portuguese priest providing the institutional legitimacy that made those arguments matter.

The second companion was a Japanese lay assistant named Damião, a dōjuku, one of the catechists who formed the essential, often unacknowledged infrastructure of the Jesuit enterprise in Japan.

The three men adopted a disguise that tells us everything about how the early missionaries actually moved through Japan. They shaved their heads. They shaved their beards. They dressed in rough kimonos. They left behind the Mass kit, the vestments, the chalice, the liturgical apparatus that marked a Catholic priest as unmistakably foreign. They made themselves, as far as three men could manage it when one of them was a six-foot Portuguese, look like Buddhist monks.

This was not cowardice. It was survival. The roads of Sengoku Japan were controlled by whatever army happened to be marching along them that week, and a conspicuously foreign priest carrying silver liturgical vessels would not last a day. The route took them first to Sakai, the great merchant city on Osaka Bay, a place of such commercial wealth and political independence that the Jesuits compared it to Venice. From Sakai, Vilela and his companions travelled to Sakamoto, on the shores of Lake Biwa, and there attempted the approach that had prompted the entire mission: an ascent of Mount Hiei.

It was a disaster. The monks of the Enryakuji complex, the headquarters of the Tendai school, one of the wealthiest and most powerful religious institutions in Japan, a monastery that maintained its own standing army and had been burning rivals for the better part of five centuries, refused to see him. The elderly monk whose letter had sparked the whole enterprise had apparently reconsidered, or had been reconsidered by his superiors. Vilela could not even secure an audience with the monastery’s head. He was turned away at the gate.

He walked down the mountain and into Kyoto.

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Chapter Three

Cannibals in the Capital

What Vilela found in Kyoto in November 1559 was not encouraging. The city was the theoretical centre of Japanese civilisation, the seat of the Emperor, the home of the court nobility. It was also, by the late 1550s, a ruin. The great Ōnin War of 1467–1477 had burned much of it to the ground, and the subsequent century of Sengoku chaos had prevented any comprehensive rebuilding. The imperial palace was crumbling. The shōgun held his position at the pleasure of whichever warlord happened to be propping him up.

Vilela’s sole connection in this city was the letter from the Buddhist nun at Sakamoto, addressed to her male relative. The relative agreed to house the missionaries, but on conditions that reflected the precariousness of their situation with brutal clarity. Vilela was not to preach. He was not to leave the house. He was to stay inside, stay silent, and under no circumstances draw attention to himself or the bizarre foreign religion he represented.

Vilela complied. He had no choice. After approximately two weeks, even this minimal hospitality expired, and the missionaries were asked to leave.

What followed was, by Vilela’s own account and the reports of his contemporaries, one of the most miserable periods in the history of the Jesuit mission in Japan. Left to fend for themselves in a city that had no interest in their existence, the three men experienced what the sources euphemistically describe as “unspeakable hardships, vexations and molestations”. The Buddhist monks of Kyoto, representatives of the Tendai, Shingon, Nichiren, and other schools, viewed the foreign missionaries with a hostility that ranged from contempt to active violence. Vilela’s small chapel was pelted with stones day and night. Rumours circulated that the Christians consumed human flesh, a calumny that was not merely rhetorical but reflected genuine alarm about the Eucharistic ritual, which, when poorly explained (or deliberately misrepresented), could sound alarmingly like cannibalism to a Japanese audience that had no frame of reference for the doctrine of transubstantiation.

When Vilela attempted to preach in the streets, he achieved nothing. The language barrier was crippling. Even with Lourenço interpreting, the core concepts of Christianity, monotheism, original sin, redemption through a crucified God, had no natural analogues in the Japanese religious vocabulary. Xavier had already stumbled over this problem when he used the Buddhist term Dainichi to translate “God” and accidentally spent weeks promoting Shingon theology. The missionaries had since switched to the Latin Deus, but a term that means nothing to your audience is only marginally better than one that means the wrong thing.

And through it all, the stones kept coming.

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Chapter Four

The Shogun’s Paper

The breakthrough came, as breakthroughs in Sengoku Japan invariably did, through personal connections and political calculation.

A Christian doctor from Sakai named Paul Yesan had given Vilela a letter of introduction to a sympathetic Buddhist monk in Kyoto named Yengennan. This monk, whose motivations remain opaque, but who may have belonged to a faction within the Buddhist establishment that saw the foreigners as a useful counterweight to rival schools, used his own network to arrange what Vilela had been unable to achieve on his own: a formal audience with the shōgun.

Ashikaga Yoshiteru was twenty-four years old in 1560 and occupied one of the most precarious thrones in the world. The thirteenth Ashikaga shōgun, he was less a ruler than an elaborately maintained hostage. The real authority in the capital was exercised by Miyoshi Nagayoshi and his terrifying deputy, Matsunaga Hisahide, who kept the young shōgun alive because a dead shōgun was less useful than a captive one. Yoshiteru’s role was to sign documents, lend his name to other men’s decisions, and provide a veneer of constitutional legitimacy to whatever strongman happened to be running the Kinai region that month.

Yoshiteru was not, however, entirely without agency. He was intelligent, cultured, and received foreign visitors with the graciousness expected of his office and the curiosity of a man who had very few other diversions available to him.

Vilela was received amicably. The shōgun was, by the Jesuits’ account, impressed, whether by the novelty of the foreign priest, the diplomatic gifts that Vilela presented, or the simple pleasure of doing something that his handlers had not pre-approved. Whatever the reason, Yoshiteru issued a document of extraordinary importance: a kinzei, a public notice that officially placed the Christian missionaries under the shōgun’s personal protection and granted them the right to preach unmolested in the capital.

The kinzei was, in practical terms, a piece of paper. Yoshiteru’s actual power to enforce it was questionable at best. But in the symbolic economy of Japanese politics, it mattered enormously. The shōgun, the theoretical supreme military authority of the realm, had publicly declared that the foreign religion was legitimate and that its practitioners were under his protection. Any Buddhist monk who attacked the missionaries was, in effect, challenging the authority of the Ashikaga house. The stones stopped falling on Vilela’s chapel.

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Chapter Five

The Aristocratic Strategy

With the shōgun’s protection secured, Vilela made a strategic decision that would shape the trajectory of Japanese Christianity for the next half-century.

In Kyushu, the Jesuits’ converts were overwhelmingly peasants and lower-class townspeople, impressive baptismal numbers but very little political security. A thousand Christian fishermen were worth less, in terms of the mission’s survival, than a single Christian lord who could offer land, revenue, and armed protection. Vilela understood this. In Kyoto and the surrounding Home Provinces, the Kinai region, the audiences were different: aristocrats, scholars, samurai, Buddhist intellectuals. Vilela tailored his approach accordingly.

He targeted the elite. He and Lourenço engaged directly in theological debates with Buddhist scholars, mounting aggressive polemical attacks on the doctrines and, crucially, the moral conduct of the Buddhist clergy. The strategy was audacious: rather than presenting Christianity as a complement to Japanese religious life, Vilela treated it as a replacement, and he was willing to publicly humiliate his opponents to prove the point.

The most spectacular of these early confrontations involved a superior of a Nichiren monastery whom Vilela publicly exposed for keeping concubines, charging fees for his teaching, and eating meat and fish in violation of his monastic vows. The monk was deposed by his own sect, a humiliation that sent shockwaves through the Buddhist establishment and established the Jesuits as opponents who fought dirty and effectively.

Vilela also mobilised his converts’ children. He organised and trained young Japanese Christians, assigning specific youths to study the doctrines of particular Buddhist schools so they could confront the monks in public debate. He even summoned some of the brightest boys from Luís de Almeida’s foundling hospital in Bungo, the charitable institution that the Jesuits had established to care for abandoned children, and deployed them as theological shock troops in the capital. The spectacle of Japanese teenagers dismantling the arguments of elderly Buddhist monks in public was precisely the kind of theatre that attracted attention in a culture that prized intellectual combat.

The numbers reflected the strategy’s limitations and its strengths. The raw conversion figures in Kyoto itself remained small, fewer than three hundred Christians in the capital even by 1582. But the quality of the converts was extraordinary. Among the first notable conversions was a prominent Shingon monk, whose defection to Christianity was followed by fifteen of his fellow monks. Vilela established churches in five walled towns within a fifty-mile radius of Kyoto, including Sakai, Nara, and Imori. And in the surrounding provinces, where the ripple effects of the elite conversions spread through samurai networks of obligation and patronage, thousands of believers accumulated over the following decade.

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Chapter Six

The Inquisitors of Nara

The most dangerous of those enemies was the Nichiren sect, the school of Buddhism whose militant shakubuku practice of aggressive confrontation made them, in a sense, the Jesuits’ mirror image: absolutist, intolerant, and willing to make themselves profoundly disagreeable in defence of their exclusive claim to truth. They were also exceptionally well-connected in Kyoto. Matsunaga Hisahide, the warlord who effectively controlled the capital, was a fervent Nichiren adherent.

The Nichiren monks, supported by Matsunaga’s people, repeatedly petitioned Hisahide to have Vilela expelled, not merely from Kyoto, but from all the Home Provinces. For years, the shōgun’s kinzei held them at bay. But in 1563, the pressure found a release valve.

The confrontation was engineered by a samurai named Takayama Zusho, known by his court title Hida-no-Kami, a retainer of Matsunaga Hisahide who had no use whatsoever for the foreign religion. Takayama proposed that his master formally investigate the new doctrine being preached by Vilela and his interpreter. If their teachings proved contrary to reason or to the established religions of Japan, the missionaries should be beheaded.

Matsunaga agreed. He appointed two distinguished scholars to serve as judges: the astronomer Yuki Yamashiro no Kami Tadamasa and the Confucian tutor Kiyohara Ekata. Both men were respected intellectuals, precisely the kind of judges whose verdict would carry weight with the educated class. The investigation was to be conducted in Nara, the ancient capital, in an atmosphere of formal judicial inquiry.

What happened next was one of the most improbable episodes in the entire history of the Jesuit mission in Japan. Brother Lourenço did the talking. For hours, possibly over multiple sessions, the sources are imprecise, the half-blind former lute player argued the case for Christianity before two of the most learned men in the Kinai region. He argued in Japanese, from the ground up, constructing a case for monotheism, for the immortality of the soul, for the moral authority of a God who had created the universe with purpose, against an opposition that could draw on centuries of Buddhist and Confucian philosophical tradition.

He was devastating. Both judges, the astronomer and the Confucian tutor, were convinced. They requested baptism.

The investigation that was supposed to produce a death sentence for the missionaries had instead produced two of the most prestigious converts in the history of the Japanese Church.

But the real earthquake was still coming. Takayama Zusho, the very man who had proposed the investigation, who had advised that the missionaries be decapitated if their doctrine proved unsound, had sat through the proceedings and been shaken to his foundations. The samurai who had wanted to cut off their heads asked to be baptised. He took the name Dom Dario and, in 1564, led his entire household of 150 people to the font.

Among them was his eleven-year-old son. The boy was baptised Justo. History would know him as Takayama Ukon, Dom Justo, one of the most famous Christian daimyō in Japanese history, the warrior-lord whose refusal to apostatise under Hideyoshi’s 1587 edict cost him everything, who spent twenty-seven years in internal exile rather than renounce his faith, and who died in Manila forty days after being deported from Japan in 1614. He was beatified by Pope Francis in 2017. His story is told in full elsewhere in this series. But it began here, in Nara, in 1563, because a blind lute player argued so well that the man who wanted him killed decided to join him instead.

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Chapter Seven

The Samurai of Iimoriyama

The Nara debates sent shockwaves through the warrior class of the Home Provinces. The conversion of the judges was remarkable enough. The conversion of Takayama Zusho, a known opponent of the missionaries, a man with a reputation and a retinue, was sensational. News of the event spread through the samurai networks that connected the castles and fortified towns of the Kinai region with the speed and thoroughness that only gossip can achieve.

The most significant ripple reached the fortress of Iimoriyama, a stronghold of the Miyoshi clan. Yuki Tadamasa, the astronomer-judge, now baptised, had a son named Yuki Saemon no Jo, who took the Christian name Dom Antão and threw himself into evangelisation with the convert’s zeal. Working alongside the Jesuit missionaries, the younger Yuki preached to his fellow samurai serving under Miyoshi Nagayoshi, the powerful warlord who nominally controlled the region.

The result was a mass conversion of the military elite. Seventy-three bushi, professional warriors, accepted baptism, including major vassals like Sanga Hoki no Kami Yoriteru, baptised as Dom Sancho, and Ikeda Tango-no-Kami. Among the converts was a samurai named Miki Handayū, whose son would grow up to become Paul Miki, one of the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan, crucified on a hill in Nagasaki in 1597, the first state-sponsored execution of Christians in Japan and one of the defining events of the persecution that ended the Christian Century.

These were not peasant conversions. These were men with swords, with vassals of their own, with obligations to lords and obligations to their newly adopted God that might, and eventually would, come into irreconcilable conflict. Vilela had planted Christianity not in the fields but in the armoury, and the consequences would unfold over the next fifty years in ways that neither he nor his converts could have foreseen.

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Chapter Eight

The Sword-Fighting Shogun

The political foundation on which the entire Kyoto mission rested was a twenty-nine-year-old man with a collection of famous swords and an increasingly dangerous desire to exercise the authority his title theoretically conferred.

Ashikaga Yoshiteru had been a useful puppet for the Miyoshi-Matsunaga coalition. But as the years passed, the young shōgun grew restive, cultivating relationships with provincial daimyō outside Miyoshi control and attempting to broker peace settlements that served his own interests. He was a formidable swordsman, trained by the legendary Tsukahara Bokuden, and he possessed a temperament increasingly at odds with the decorative role his keepers had assigned him.

For Matsunaga Hisahide and the Miyoshi Triumvirs, the three retainers who had assumed de facto control after the death of their lord Miyoshi Nagayoshi, a wilful shōgun was intolerable. A shōgun who could be managed was an asset. A shōgun who could not be managed was a threat. The distinction was, in Sengoku Japan, typically resolved with violence. On the morning of June 17, 1565, it was.

Under the pretext of a visit to the Kiyomizu temple, troops loyal to the Miyoshi Triumvirs and Matsunaga Hisahide massed in the capital and launched a surprise assault on the shōgunal palace. Yoshiteru, alerted to the attack, did not flee. He armed himself with the swords he had spent years collecting, legendary blades from the great swordsmiths of Japanese history, and fought.

The image is extraordinary: the last effective Ashikaga shōgun, surrounded in his own palace, cycling through sword after sword as each blade dulled against the armour of his attackers, pulling a fresh weapon from his collection, cutting down men, discarding the blade, reaching for another. The sources, both Japanese and Jesuit, agree that Yoshiteru fought with spectacular courage and killed a significant number of the attackers personally.

It was not enough. The numbers were overwhelming. When Yoshiteru saw that his position was hopeless, he set his own palace ablaze and took his life. His mother, his wife, and his younger brother were killed by the attackers. The Ashikaga shogunate, already a hollow institution, received a wound from which it would never recover.

For the Jesuits, the assassination was a catastrophe. Their sole political protector in the capital, the man whose kinzei had given the mission its legal standing, whose personal patronage had kept the Buddhist monks at bay, was dead. And the man who had orchestrated his murder was Matsunaga Hisahide: the fervent Nichiren adherent, the patron of the very monks who had spent years trying to destroy the Christian mission.

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Chapter Nine

The Imperial Edict

Matsunaga Hisahide moved with the efficiency of a man who had planned this moment carefully. With the shōgun dead and effective control of the capital in his hands, the Buddhist opposition, principally the Nichiren monks who had been lobbying for years, finally had the leverage they needed.

The bonzes descended on the imperial court. The Emperor, who had even less practical power than the now-deceased shōgun, but whose edicts still carried symbolic weight, was pressured to act against the foreign religion. The exact degree of coercion involved is debated, but the result was unambiguous: the Emperor issued an edict that officially proscribed Christianity, declared it an abominable doctrine, and ordered the Jesuit missionaries expelled from the capital.

It was the first imperial decree against Christianity in Japanese history, a distinction that gives it a significance beyond its immediate practical consequences. The edict that Hideyoshi would issue in 1587, and the comprehensive ban that the Tokugawa would promulgate in 1614, both followed precedents established here, in 1565, in the chaotic aftermath of a political assassination.

For Vilela, the situation was now existential. He had been joined in Kyoto by Luís Fróis, the brilliant, sharp-tongued Jesuit chronicler who would go on to produce the most detailed European account of sixteenth-century Japan, and together they faced the prospect of being murdered in a city where they no longer had a single powerful protector.

The first attempt on their lives came through hired assassins. Matsunaga’s people, and the hostile bonzes who backed them, apparently judged that an edict of expulsion was insufficient and that a more permanent solution was desirable. The plan failed because the small community of Japanese Christians in Kyoto, the samurai converts, the townspeople, the members of that fragile congregation that Vilela and Lourenço had built over five years, armed themselves and stood guard around the missionaries’ residence.

The image is arresting: a handful of Japanese Christians, swords drawn, forming a cordon around two Portuguese priests in a burning city, daring the hired killers to come. The killers, calculating the odds, did not.

Matsunaga, unwilling to provoke a street battle that would further destabilise his already tenuous control of the capital, opted for a negotiated withdrawal. Through the intervention of a Christian secretary employed by the Miyoshi clan, a man whose name the sources do not record but whose courage they acknowledge, and a local Japanese parishioner, Vilela and Fróis were permitted to leave Kyoto alive. They fled south to Sakai, the autonomous merchant city whose pragmatic neutrality and commercial wealth made it the safest harbour in the Kinai region.

The Kyoto mission, six years after Vilela had walked through the gates in the disguise of a Buddhist monk, was over.

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Chapter Ten

Sakai, Nagasaki, and the Grave in Goa

Vilela spent over a year in exile in Sakai. The merchant city, governed by a council of wealthy townsmen who valued trade above theology and stability above everything, offered a chilly but secure refuge. Christians from Kyoto made the journey south in secret to receive the sacraments from the two Jesuits, a clandestine traffic that kept the faith alive in the Home Provinces during the darkest period it had yet faced.

On April 30, 1566, Cosme de Torres recalled Vilela to Kyushu. The old superior, whose decision to send Vilela north seven years earlier had produced results that exceeded anything a reasonable person could have predicted, needed him in the south. Vilela departed Sakai, leaving Luís Fróis behind to continue the work in the central provinces, a handover that proved inspired, because Fróis would go on to establish the relationship with Oda Nobunaga that would transform the mission’s fortunes a decade later.

Back in Kyushu, Vilela conducted highly successful missionary work in the domains of Ōmura and Shiki. And then, at the end of 1568, Torres gave him one more assignment, one that, in its long-term consequences, would rival even the Kyoto mission.

A small fishing village on the western coast of Kyushu had been selected as the new anchorage for the Portuguese trade ships. The village was called Nagasaki.

Vilela arrived in late 1568 and was granted property near the residence of the local lord, Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage. He converted a Buddhist temple into a Christian church, the Church of All Saints, Todos os Santos, the first church in what would become the most important Christian city in Japan. Over the next two years, Vilela baptised approximately 1,500 people and laid the spiritual foundation for a community that would endure persecution, martyrdom, and two centuries of clandestine worship. The site where he built the Church of All Saints is today occupied by the Shuntoku-ji temple, Buddhism reclaiming, with patience, what Christianity had briefly borrowed.

The physical toll of sixteen years of missionary work in the most gruelling conditions imaginable had by now broken Vilela’s health. In the spring of 1570, Torres himself, the man who had directed the Japanese mission for nearly two decades, retired to Vilela’s church in Nagasaki, gravely ill. Torres was later moved to the island of Shiki, where he died in October 1570. Vilela delivered the funeral oration for the superior who had sent him to Kyoto, who had trusted him with the impossible assignment that had defined both their careers.

The new superior of the Japanese mission, Francisco Cabral, recalled Vilela to India to recover. Vilela knew he would never return. He sailed from Nagasaki in late 1570, arrived in Cochin by 1571, and made his way to Goa, where he wrote one final, comprehensive letter to his superiors on October 20, 1571, reporting on the state of Christianity in Japan with the thoroughness that the Society of Jesus demanded and the love that the man himself could not suppress.

Gaspar Vilela died in Goa on February 4, 1572. He was forty-seven years old. He was buried near the remains of Francis Xavier, the man who had inspired his vocation, who had failed at Kyoto where Vilela had succeeded, and who had departed Japan twenty years earlier having set in motion a chain of events that neither of them could have imagined.

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Sources & Further Reading

Boxer, C.R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650. Carcanet Press, 1951. The indispensable foundation for any study of the Jesuit mission in Japan, with detailed coverage of the Kyoto enterprise and its political context.

Cooper, Michael, S.J. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640. University of Michigan Press, 1965. Includes translated excerpts from Vilela’s and Fróis’s letters describing conditions in Kyoto and the Kinai region.

Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 1973. Essential for understanding the Buddhist opposition to the Jesuit mission and the intellectual context of the Nara debates.

Fróis, Luís, S.J. Historia de Japam. Edited by Josef Wicki, S.J. Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, 1976–1984. 5 vols. Fróis’s monumental chronicle is the most detailed primary source for the Kyoto mission, containing eyewitness and near-contemporary accounts of the events described in this article.

Higashibaba, Ikuo. Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice. Brill, 2001. Valuable for its analysis of how Japanese converts understood and practised the faith introduced by missionaries like Vilela.

Costa, João Paulo Oliveira e. O Japão e o Cristianismo no Século XVI: Ensaios de História Luso-Nipónica. Sociedade Histórica da Independência de Portugal, 1999. The most comprehensive Portuguese-language treatment of the institutional and political dynamics of the Jesuit mission.

Schurhammer, Georg, S.J. Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times. Vol. IV: Japan and China, 1549–1552. Jesuit Historical Institute, 1982. Provides essential context for Xavier’s failed Kyoto attempt and the conditions Vilela encountered eight years later.

Turnbull, Stephen. The Samurai and the Sacred: The Path of the Warrior. Osprey Publishing, 2006. Useful for the military and political context of the Sengoku period and the samurai conversions in the Kinai region.

Üçerler, M. Antoni J., S.J. The Jesuit Enterprise in Japan, 1573–1580. In The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture, 1573–1580, ed. Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004. Covers the institutional development of the mission in the period immediately following Vilela’s departure from the Kinai.

Valignano, Alessandro, S.J. Sumario de las Cosas de Japón (1583). Edited by José Luis Álvarez-Taladriz. Sophia University, 1954. Valignano’s assessment of the Japanese mission includes reflections on the Kyoto mission’s legacy and the accommodation practices that Vilela pioneered.