Julia and Tokuan Naitō: The Abbess and the Lord of Tanba

Julia Naitō's Origins in Tanba, c. 1566, and the Name That Was Lost

The Woman Without a Name

She was born in Tanba, around 1566, into a warrior house that was about to lose everything. Her brother was a Christian before she was a teenager. Her family's castles fell to Akechi Mitsuhide when she was 13, and the Naitō name — once attached to a small territorial dynasty serving the Ashikaga shoguns — became one of those orphaned aristocratic lineages that drifted through the last decades of the Sengoku period looking for employment. She was widowed around 1588, at roughly the age of 22, and she did what widowed noblewomen of her station did: she shaved her head, took monastic vows in the Jōdo-shū Pure Land school of Buddhism, and disappeared into a small women's temple on the edges of Kyoto.

The sources will eventually call her Julia Naitō, Nata Jurija, Dona Julia, the Superiora, the Mother. None of these names were hers at birth. Her original name — the one she was given as a child of the Tanba aristocracy — did not survive the century she lived through. It is one of the smaller indignities of a remarkable life: history knows exactly what she said, how she preached, what she wore as a hair shirt, and how many days she spent freezing in a rice sack on the Kamo riverbank, but not what her mother called her.

She will be Julia here, as she was Julia to every Jesuit who knew her, because that is the name she chose.

Naitō Tokuan, Julia's Brother: From the Tanba Lordship to the Ming Court, 1573 to 1598

The Gold on the Helmet

In the spring of 1573, Naitō Joan brought an army from Tanba into Kyoto to support the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiaki against Oda Nobunaga. A Jesuit report dated April 20 counted 2,000 men and described crosses on their banners. Their commander wore a golden Christian device on his helmet. The missionaries had found something worth recording: a Japanese lord had carried the signs of their religion into the capital at the head of an armed force.

That summer, Nobunaga drove Yoshiaki out of Kyoto. The shogun survived his expulsion, and so did Joan, whose dealings with the missionaries continued in Tanba the following year. Defeat did not immediately remove every property or connection. It began a further contraction of his authority, ending in the loss of his territorial position as Nobunaga’s commanders subdued the province.

Joan’s birth year was less securely established than the later itinerary. Ishikawa Prefectural Library gave 1550; the older estimate of about 1544 depended on a reported age at the time of his expulsion. Either chronology placed his youth in the decades when the Portuguese mission was establishing itself in Japan. The uncertainty did not justify assigning him a precise age at each crisis, still less turning a calculation into a surviving birth record.

His baptismal name came from the Portuguese João, rendered Joan in Japanese Christian history and Juan in Spanish accounts. Tokuan was another name by which he became known. He also bore the title Hida-no-kami, conventionally associated with the governorship of Hida. Such a title was not, by itself, proof that its bearer governed that province. Treating each name as a separate identity, or every title as a territorial possession, made his career considerably more crowded than it had been.

The mission tradition placed his conversion in the mid-1560s. It connected his instruction with the Japanese Christian widow Catarina of Tanba and the preacher Lourenço, and his baptism with Luís Fróis. The account gave Japanese believers an active part in his introduction to the faith. A widow preaching among her neighbors and a Japanese brother explaining Christian teaching provided forms of access that a recently arrived European priest could not have supplied alone. The precise baptismal year remained less securely established than his public Christianity in the following decade.

Yoshiaki’s departure from Kyoto did not immediately extinguish the Naitō presence in Tanba. Joan met Fróis and Lourenço there in 1574. Nobunaga’s arrangements for provincial control and Akechi Mitsuhide’s subsequent campaigning then placed increasing pressure on the family. Nantan City’s historical account distinguished the traditional date of Yagi’s fall, 1579, from the possibility that it had fallen earlier in the campaign. A missionary source placed Joan with the exiled Yoshiaki at Tomo, in Mōri territory, in 1581.

Eventually Joan entered Konishi Yukinaga’s service. Konishi, baptized Agostinho, had risen under Toyotomi Hideyoshi and obtained a domain in Higo, on Kyūshū. An experienced Christian warrior could find a place in that household even after his own territorial position had disappeared. The appointment brought Joan back within the resources of a successful lord. It also made his security dependent on Konishi’s service to Hideyoshi, whose ambitions soon carried both men far beyond the circumstances of Tanba.

Hideyoshi launched his invasion of Korea in 1592. Konishi commanded one of the principal Japanese forces. The early advance carried the invaders through Seoul and into the north, but the war did not deliver the passage to conquest in China that Hideyoshi had envisaged. Korean resistance and Ming intervention prevented an easy settlement on Japanese terms. In early 1593, Ming forces recovered Pyongyang, and the Japanese position contracted toward the south.

Negotiation developed alongside continued occupation. Konishi and the Ming intermediary Shen Weijing became central to the effort to end the fighting. Joan traveled north in 1593 as an envoy associated with Konishi’s negotiations. The journey took him through Korea and across the Yalu into Ming territory, where admission to the imperial capital proved considerably less straightforward than physical arrival at the frontier.

Joan eventually reached Beijing in the winter of 1594–95. The negotiations led toward Ming recognition of Hideyoshi as king of Japan. From the Chinese court’s perspective, investiture placed a foreign ruler within an established hierarchy centered on the emperor. For the Japanese negotiators, the arrangement also raised the question of access to China and the commercial opportunities that might accompany diplomatic relations.

The investiture mission eventually reached Japan in 1596, but the negotiations failed to produce a durable settlement. The well-known scene in which Hideyoshi suddenly discovered the deception while hearing the imperial document read aloud depended on assumptions about his previous ignorance. His exact knowledge remained a problem for the evidence, rather than an opportunity to supply a dramatic revelation. Fighting resumed with the second invasion in 1597. Hideyoshi died in 1598, and the Japanese forces withdrew. Joan survived the diplomatic failure and the war; Konishi’s household survived them only briefly.

Kanazawa, Exile and Death in Manila: Naitō Tokuan after Sekigahara, 1600 to 1626

A Residence in Another Lord’s Country

In 1600, the struggle over the government left by Hideyoshi brought Konishi onto the losing side at Sekigahara. Tokugawa Ieyasu’s victory was followed by Konishi’s capture and execution. The domain that had sustained Joan’s second career was confiscated. Once again, his position had depended on a patron whose defeat removed the material basis of service.

The destruction of the Konishi house did not immediately place every Christian warrior beyond protection. Joan found assistance through Takayama Ukon and entered the orbit of the Maeda family in Kanazawa. Ukon had already experienced dispossession under Hideyoshi and had lived under Maeda protection for years. He offered Joan a connection to a household capable of accommodating an established warrior who no longer possessed a domain.

The prohibition of Christianity in 1614 ended the arrangement. Joan and Ukon refused to abandon their faith and were sent out of Maeda territory. The expulsion affected families as well as the two prominent men. It removed people whose religious commitments had been sustained within the protection of a great domain, and demonstrated that the protection could no longer prevail against central policy.

The records examined by Johannes Laures placed their route through Kyoto, where they passed into the custody of the city governor, Itakura, before proceeding to Nagasaki. Joan’s son Thomas was named among the exiles and described as already heading his own household. Wives, children and grandchildren traveled with the families. Julia and the women associated with her religious community also belonged to the departing group.

Ukon’s death soon after arrival gave his exile a short and readily commemorated ending. Joan lived on. The difference left him with a longer period of ordinary dependence and adjustment, about which the research assembled for his biography offered much less securely checked detail than it did about his departure. It would be convenient to make him Ukon’s successor as the recognized head of every Japanese Christian in Manila. The surviving material consulted here did not establish such an office or an undisputed community leadership.

Joan died in Manila in 1626. The date and place were recorded in Ishikawa Prefectural Library’s biographical entry, which also directed readers toward Japanese regional histories containing material on him. His history was not confined to a handful of European references, even though the missionary accounts preserved much of its most vivid detail. The exact circumstances of his funeral and the location of his burial were less securely established in the sources consulted.

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How Julia Naitō Became a Jōdo-shū Abbess and Teacher to Hideyoshi's Wife

The Abbess in the Pure Land

For nearly a decade — from her widowhood around 1588 to her conversion in 1596 — Julia lived as a Buddhist nun in an amadera, a small women's temple, somewhere in Kyoto. She was not merely another aristocratic widow taking the tonsure in grief. She was, by the testimony of men who had every reason to dislike her, a formidable religious intellectual. Padre Luís Fróis, the great Portuguese Jesuit chronicler of the Nanban period, described her in 1596 as living a "hermetic life" and being "widely revered for her blameless ethical conduct and profound religious knowledge." She rose through the ranks of her order and became an abbess.

The Jōdo-shū — the Pure Land school — was not a mystical tradition of silent meditation. It was a scripture-based, congregational, preaching-oriented form of Buddhism with a highly developed tradition of expository sermon, theological disputation, and popular catechesis. To rise to abbess in such an order, a Japanese woman of the late 16th century had to be a skilled reader of classical texts, a trained public speaker, a competent theologian, and a social operator of considerable subtlety. Julia was all of these things. She preached to noblewomen in the Kyoto aristocracy. Her reputation reached the inner court of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the peasant-turned-regent who had by 1590 unified Japan under his rule, and at some point during the early 1590s she was invited to become the personal Buddhist teacher of Kita no mandokoro — O'ne, Hideyoshi's formal principal wife.

This was not a small appointment. The Kita no mandokoro was one of the most politically influential women in the Japanese empire. Her household was a node in the network of power that radiated outward from Osaka Castle. To preach to her was to have, in effect, a private audience with the spiritual sensibilities of the Toyotomi court. Julia was teaching Pure Land doctrine to the woman whose husband had just issued — in July 1587 — the first national edict against Christianity.

It is one of the minor ironies of the Christian Century that the most successful female Catholic evangelist the Japan mission would ever produce was, at this moment, the Buddhist spiritual director of the kampaku's wife.

Julia Naitō's Conversion in 1596 and Her Public Debate with Her Buddhist Master

The Sermon and the Disputation

In the summer of 1596, Julia attended a sermon. The preacher was Irmão Vicente Hōin, a Japanese Jesuit brother reckoned one of the ablest vernacular preachers of the mission. Fróis, writing his annual letter that year, records that "immediately the light of God overcame her." Whatever the light consisted of — the particular argument, the specific cadence, the theological claim that landed in a mind that had spent nearly a decade parsing Pure Land soteriology — Julia walked out of that sermon a convert.

She was not, however, a quiet one.

An ordinary noblewoman might have accepted baptism in a private chapel and let her prior Buddhist life fade into silence. Julia chose to burn her bridges publicly. She demanded a formal religious disputation with her former Buddhist master — the senior priest under whom she had been trained, and whose intellectual authority she had until weeks earlier submitted to. The debate was staged in Kyoto. Julia took the offensive. She posed pointed questions on articles of Catholic faith and, deploying the technical apparatus of Jōdo-shū disputation that she herself had been taught, she dismantled her old teacher's replies. He was, in Fróis's delicate Portuguese phrasing, disgraced. He could not answer her. The debate ended in Julia's triumphant public rupture with the Pure Land establishment, and the news spread through the Kyoto aristocracy at the speed that news of a major intellectual scandal always spreads through a capital city.

Julia expected baptism the next morning. She did not get it.

Padre Gnecchi-Soldo Organtino, the veteran Italian Jesuit rector of the Kyoto residence and a man who understood Kyoto court politics better than most of the Japanese noblemen who inhabited it, called a consultation and decided to delay the sacrament. He recognized what he had been handed. A woman of Julia's rank, training, and intellectual capacity was not merely a convert. She was a weapon. If the Jesuits could hold her in the catechumenate long enough to train her systematically in Catholic dogma, she would become the finest female apologist the mission had ever possessed — a woman who could walk into any aristocratic women's quarter in Japan and argue circles around whichever Buddhist priest had got there first.

Julia was annoyed. She wrote to Organtino asking whether the postponement was really profitable for her soul. Organtino replied, diplomatically, that it was "for the glory of God." She accepted the answer. Several months later, in the Jesuit church in Kyoto, Organtino baptized her Julia.

Her timing was, characteristically, bad. Within weeks of her baptism, the Spanish galleon San Felipe would wreck off the coast of Shikoku, her pilot would make his notorious boast about Spanish conquest by missionaries, and Hideyoshi would order the crucifixion of the Twenty-Six Martyrs at Nishizaka on 5 February 1597. Julia's conversion was, from the first minute, a considered acceptance of mortal risk.

The Miyako no Bikuni: The Uncloistered Women's Order Julia Founded around 1600

The Nuns of Miyako

Hideyoshi died in September 1598. In October 1600 his former vassal Tokugawa Ieyasu settled the succession question on a foggy field in Mino Province, and the political machinery of Japan reset around a new hegemon who — for the first few years of his rule — maintained a pragmatic tolerance of Christianity in order to keep the Portuguese carracks calling at Nagasaki. It was a narrow window. Julia stepped through it.

Around 1600, in a house in lower Kyoto situated pointedly next door to the Jesuit residence, Julia and five female companions founded a religious society that the Jesuits would come to call the Miyako no bikuni — the Nuns of Kyoto. The Spanish sources preferred Congregación de las Señoras Japonas or, more commonly, Beatas de Miyaco. They shaved their heads. They adopted black habits reminiscent of the Buddhist nuns they had mostly once been. They took the three classical monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Julia, as Mother Superior, personally composed the Rule under which they lived.

The Regula had few parallels among the rules for women elsewhere in the Catholic world of 1600. Julia organized the community's day around meditation, mental prayer, the recitation of the office, and manual labor — principally sewing, which had the practical benefit of generating income. She added rigorous penitential practices: the daily wearing of a hair shirt and disciplina, self-flagellation, performed twice a day, which Julia modeled herself. The debt to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and the Jesuit Constitutions — mediated through Organtino and through the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Morejón, who served as the community's confessor — was explicit and structural.

What made the Miyako no bikuni genuinely radical was not the asceticism. It was the absence of a cloister.

The Council of Trent, concluding in 1563, had imposed strict enclosure — clausura — on all female religious in the Catholic world. Nuns were to live inside their convents, cut off from the outside, communicating with laypeople only through a grille. The Jesuit Constitutions, moreover, expressly forbade Jesuits from taking charge of women's religious orders or serving as their regular confessors. Both rules were carved in stone by 1600. In Europe at this same moment the English recusant Mary Ward was attempting to establish a Jesuit-modeled, un-cloistered "Institute of the English Ladies," and was being met by the Catholic hierarchy with an ecclesiastical fury that would eventually produce the papal suppression of her Institute in 1631. Ward died in disgrace in 1645.

Julia's Miyako no bikuni was the thing Mary Ward was being crushed for attempting. It was mobile. It was urban. It preached, disputed, catechized, and baptized in public. Its sisters walked through the streets of Kyoto on pastoral errands. And the Jesuits — whose own Constitutions barred them from the regular direction of religious women — situated the women's residence beside their own, heard their confessions, counseled the Superiora, and in the 1614 Annual Letter would claim quite explicitly that God had used Julia as the "necessary instrument" to open the doors of Japan's noble households to the Gospel.

The cynical answer to why the Society tolerated in Kyoto what it would not tolerate in London is the correct one. Japanese upper-class custom strictly forbade noblewomen from going out to meet men, including clerics. A European padre simply could not enter the oku, the secluded inner women's quarters of an aristocratic household. Julia could. Through her, the Jesuits could reach a demographic that would otherwise have been unreachable. The extreme circumstances of the Japanese mission had produced, by geographical accident, one of the very few early-modern spaces in which the active female apostolate was not only tolerated but essential.

By 1614 the community had grown to a core of 15 professed sisters, drawn largely from the Kirishitan aristocracy and including one Korean noblewoman — Marina Paccu, a survivor of Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea who had been brought to Japan as a prisoner of war and spoke only broken Japanese. The sisters taught doctrine in noble residences and in public squares. They disputed with Buddhist and Confucian scholars — Julia, whose years of Pure Land training gave her unmatched insider knowledge, was especially lethal in debate. They prepared catechumens for baptism. And they secretly baptized large numbers of women, and some men, in the closed household quarters where the padres could not go.

Fróis called Julia's intellectual style "rational and efficient prudence." The Japanese Jesuit Fabian Fucan, who in 1605 composed the Myōtei mondō — the most important Japanese-language Catholic apologetic dialogue of the Christian Century — almost certainly modeled his character of Myōshū, the noble Jōdo widow-turned-Kirishitan, directly on Julia and her circle. The Miyako no bikuni had become, in a decade, a kind of secret women's church operating inside the walls of the Tokugawa capital.

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The 1601 Arrest Order, Julia's Flight from Kyoto, and the 1614 Expulsion Edict

The Letter to Daifusama

In 1601, the Buddhist clergy of Kyoto, who had been watching Julia's success in baptizing upper-class women with mounting alarm, petitioned Tokugawa Ieyasu. They obtained an order for her arrest. The accusation was, effectively, that Julia was running an unlicensed religious insurgency inside the capital.

Julia's reaction was to write a letter to Organtino that is, even at a distance of four centuries, genuinely startling. "I had been wanting for martyrdom for a long time," she wrote. "By all means I will confront Daifusama" — Daifusama being the honorific by which she referred to Ieyasu — "to expose the lies and hypocrisy of the Buddhist priests."

She meant it. Organtino believed that she meant it, and that she would succeed in getting herself executed. He also believed — for the same kinds of pragmatic reasons that had made him delay her baptism five years earlier — that the Church needed her alive more than dead. He overruled her. He persuaded Julia to flee the city. She took refuge first in Nagasaki and then in Arima, continuing her ministry at the court of the Kirishitan daimyō Arima Harunobu, and returned quietly to Kyoto around 1603 to 1606, by which point Ieyasu's attention had shifted elsewhere and the Buddhist petition had lapsed.

The community she returned to was thriving. Marina Paccu, the Korean noblewoman, was baptized and admitted in 1606. Luzia de la Cruz — who had entered the Kirishitan cemetery outside Kyoto as a hermit after a dream in which St Ignatius and St Francis Xavier instructed her to climb a mountain staircase "to perfection" — was formally admitted around the same year. The Jesuits continued to build on the ground Julia had opened. And Ieyasu's pragmatic toleration held, tenuously, for another eight years.

Then came the Okamoto Daihachi scandal of 1612, in which Christian samurai were exposed as having bribed a Christian secretary inside Ieyasu's own administration to forge shogunal documents — and Ieyasu's long-standing suspicion of Christianity crystallized into policy. On 1 February 1614, the shogunate promulgated the Keichō Expulsion Edict, drafted by the Zen monk Konchiin Sūden, declaring Japan the "Land of the Gods," prohibiting Christianity, ordering the destruction of churches, and commanding the expulsion of all foreign missionaries and prominent Japanese Christian leaders from the country.

Julia's community in Kyoto was among the first to feel the edict's edge.

Tawarazume: The Three Days the Kyoto Nuns Spent in Rice Sacks in 1614

The Rice Sack

Itakura Katsushige was the Tokugawa shoshidai — the shogunal governor of Kyoto. When the 1614 edict reached him, he demolished the Kyoto Jesuit church and the Miyako no bikuni residence beside it. A special magistrate, Ōkubo Sagami-no-Kami Tadachika, was dispatched from Edo with armed men and the explicit threat that if the nuns refused to apostatize they would be burned at the stake.

The nuns refused to apostatize.

Because the shogunate had not initially granted Itakura explicit authority to execute the women outright, he resorted to an alternative: a ritualized public exposure torture called tawarazume — literally, "packing into rice sacks." The method is described with unusual precision in the sources, principally in the eyewitness accounts of Padre Pedro Morejón, the Jesuit confessor, and of the Spanish lay merchant Bernardino de Avila Girón, who was present in Kyoto through the ordeal.

The sisters were tied, hand and foot, and forced into coarse straw rice sacks — tawara — with only their heads left exposed. The sacks were bound shut with ropes in five separate places, drawn so tight that the women had no use of their limbs whatsoever. Observers compared the bound shapes to minomushi, the bagworm moths whose larvae live inside protective bundles of leaves and silk. In pairs tied to poles, the rice sacks were carried on the shoulders of armed guards through the streets of Kyoto, deliberately paraded for the ridicule of the crowd. They were dumped at Shijō Kawara — the dry riverbank of the Kamo River, a public execution ground at the southern edge of the city center — and piled on top of one another on the snow-covered ground.

The exposure lasted three days.

The shogunate's officers made the purposes of the torture explicit. The sisters were to apostatize. If they refused, they would be stripped naked in public and handed over to brothels, or — in the most graphic version of the threat, recorded by Avila Girón — probed with tongs and hooks and surrendered to "the heathens as subjects for their debauchery." The sexual dimension of the torture was not accidental. These were women of aristocratic Japanese birth whose entire social identity had been constructed around seclusion, honor, and sexual inviolability. The shogunate was attempting to break them by threatening to invert every marker of their dignity simultaneously.

Julia, anticipating the threats that were coming, had made a characteristically prudent pastoral decision before the arrest. She had secretly concealed the nine youngest and most beautiful sisters of the community, so that the brunt of any torture would fall on herself and the older women. It was the kind of calculation — cold, protective, strategically clear — that had defined her leadership from the beginning.

The sisters were not broken. They sang hymns from inside the sacks. They preached to the crowds on the riverbank. They publicly defended the articles of the faith. When a senior Buddhist priest was sent to induce Julia's apostasy — one tradition has him offering his mantle to cover the freezing abbess, another has him demanding her recantation — she spat in his face and, in the specific language of the Jesuit account, "laughing at his folly," gave him no other answer.

And then there was Luzia de la Cruz, whose non-Christian relatives saw an opportunity in the chaos. They bribed or bullied a guard, dragged Luzia out of her sack, and carried her away to her father's house in the hope of extracting an apostasy under family pressure. Luzia screamed "I am a Christian, I am a Christian!" the whole way there. Once inside, she escaped. She ran back to Shijō Kawara. She climbed into her empty rice sack. She rolled down the embankment of the Kamo River, sack and all, to rejoin her sisters — so that no one could credibly claim she had recanted.

Huge crowds gathered. Some of the onlookers mocked the women. Others were, in the sources' phrasing, "admired at their constancy" — moved to something that was not merely pity but something closer to reverence. After three days, the shogunate's officers — recognizing, in the withering summary of one account, that they had been "entirely conquered by women" — removed the nuns from the riverbank and placed them under house arrest. In November, the sentence was handed down. Not death. Permanent exile.

The Kyoto tawarazume is not the most famous episode of the persecution. It is overshadowed in the historical memory by the Great Martyrdom of Nagasaki in 1622 and by Shimabara. But in its specific combination of physical torture, sexual threat, and public theater, and in the failure of the shogunate to achieve its objective, it is one of the strangest and most revealing episodes the period produced. A group of women in rice sacks, on a frozen riverbank, preaching to the crowds that had come to watch them break.

Exile to Manila in December 1614 and Julia Naitō's Death There in 1627

The Passage to Manila

On 8 November 1614, Julia, her 14 sisters, her brother Naitō Tokuan João and his family, the Kirishitan daimyō Takayama Ukon and his household, Padre Morejón, and a considerable company of Jesuits and lay catechists boarded ship in Nagasaki and sailed for the Philippines. The sources record roughly 88 Jesuits expelled in this single deportation wave, along with 15 dōjuku — Japanese lay catechists.

The voyage was bad. It was early winter in the South China Sea, the ships were overcrowded, and the exiles were, by any reasonable measure, traumatized. They arrived in Manila on 21 December 1614. Takayama Ukon, the most famous Christian samurai of his generation, would die of illness 40 days after landing. Naitō Tokuan would survive in exile for 12 more years and die in 1626, "as a stranger in a strange land," in his mid-seventies.

Julia and her community were settled in the Village of San Miguel, just outside the walls of the Spanish colonial capital. The Spanish Jesuits received them as heroes of the faith. The Jesuit Colegio de Manila provided sustained institutional support. The sisters were, in the Spanish usage of the colony, beatas — pious women living a religious life without formal papal recognition — and they were referred to by the name that would stick for the next four decades: the Beatas de Miyaco, the Beatas of Kyoto.

And then Julia did something that, of everything she did in her life, is possibly the most unexpected.

She embraced the cloister.

In Kyoto, the active apostolate had been the entire point of the community. In Manila, there was far less need for it. The Philippines was already a Catholic colony. The streets were full of friars. Aggressive public evangelism was institutionally redundant. Julia looked at her new circumstances and made the decision herself — so far as the sources show, without pressure from the Spanish hierarchy — to reorganize the Beatas de Miyaco into a strictly cloistered, contemplative community.

They rose at dawn for meditation. They heard Mass at the adjacent church of San Miguel. They returned to their house for readings, private devotions, and manual labor — sewing and embroidery, the same industrial bread-and-butter that had sustained them in Kyoto. They reassembled at two in the afternoon for a further session of meditation and recitation. They communicated with the outside world only through a grille. Julia continued her personal regimen: the daily hair shirt, the twice-daily disciplina. She remained Superiora.

The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Colin, who served as the community's confessor in Manila and would write the most important account of her life, wrote that although they were not formally recognized as a religious order by the Pope, "they lacked nothing required for a perfect religious life." He referred to their era in Manila as tiempo de estas Santas — "the time of these Saints" — and dedicated four full chapters of his Labor Evangélica, published posthumously in Madrid in 1663, to their biographies. Modern scholars, notably Haruko Nawata Ward, read Colin's treatment as a deliberate exemplary framework — a proto-beatification dossier that the Manila Jesuits were assembling for a cause of canonization that, in the event, never reached Rome.

Julia lived 12 more years in this rigorous contemplative retreat. She left the house only to attend Mass and receive the sacraments. She died peacefully in Manila on 28 March 1627, aged approximately 61. Her successor was Mencia, a relative of the Ōtomo Kirishitan lineage from Kyūshū, whose practical administrative competence was credited with keeping the exile community fed and housed through the 1630s. When Mencia died in 1641, the Superiora-ship passed to Tecla Ignacia, a convert who had defended her virginity against an abduction as a young woman and later converted her own mother. Tecla Ignacia kept a private Japanese-language diary of her visions for 40 years. When she died in December 1656, her funeral was attended by the Archbishop of Manila and the Spanish Governor-General, and the community she had governed effectively died with her.

Julia Naitō as a Woman Apostle, and Why She Was Never Made a Saint

The Woman Apostle

There is a temptation, writing about Julia Naitō, to collapse her into a martyrological type — the heroic female confessor of the Christian Century, a Japanese Perpetua, a figure whose significance is primarily devotional. Modern historians, most notably Haruko Nawata Ward in her 2009 study Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, 1549–1650, have pushed hard against that framing, and rightly so.

What Julia did in Kyoto between 1600 and 1614 was not saintly endurance. It was the construction, by an aristocratic Japanese woman who had been trained in Pure Land Buddhist argumentation, of an active apostolic community that functioned as a shadow Jesuit order — doing the pastoral, intellectual, and sacramental work that the Japanese mission needed and that European padres, constrained by both Japanese custom and their own Constitutions, could not perform. The Miyako no bikuni had almost no institutional precedent in the post-Tridentine Catholic world. Julia's community survived and flourished, not because European Catholicism had quietly changed its mind about women's ministry, but because the extreme circumstances of the Japanese mission had forced the Jesuits to make, in practice, an accommodation that they would have resisted in any other geography. That accommodation was Julia's doing.

The transformation in Manila is, in its own way, equally interesting. The same woman who spent 14 years defying the post-Tridentine cloister in Kyoto chose, on her own initiative, to embrace it once she found herself in a country where her active ministry was far less needed. It is not the arc of a woman who had been reluctantly mobile. It is the arc of a woman whose religious imagination was entirely continuous — who understood the apostolic life as whatever mode of service the particular circumstances required, and who was, in Kyoto, as radical as the city demanded, and, in Manila, as enclosed as the colony permitted.

She has not been formally canonized. Nor, as far as the documentary record establishes, has her cause ever been opened in Rome. From the mid-17th century onwards her Jesuit chroniclers — Francisco Colin above all — treated her with unambiguously saintly reverence, and there is an argument to be made that her absence from the formal calendar of the Church is an accident of the 17th-century collapse of the Japanese mission rather than a judgment on her life.

She was also, at the end of everything, a woman who had been the Buddhist spiritual director of Hideyoshi's wife, who had spat in the face of a Buddhist priest while tied into a rice sack on a frozen riverbank, who had sailed across the South China Sea at the age of 48, and who had spent the last 12 years of her life governing a Japanese-speaking convent in a Spanish colonial city some 1,700 miles from the temple where she had, 40 years earlier, taken her first monastic vows. Her birth name is lost. Julia is the name she died with, and the name the sources record, and the name that will have to do.

Sources & Further Reading

Boxer, C. R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. The foundational English-language history of the Nanban mission; places Julia and the Miyako no bikuni within the broader arc of the Jesuit enterprise and its suppression.

Colin, Francisco, S.J. Labor Evangélica, Ministerios Apostólicos de los Obreros de la Compañía de Jesús, Fundación y Progresos de Su Provincia en las Islas Filipinas. Madrid, 1663. The single most important primary source for Julia's life in exile; four chapters are dedicated to the Beatas de Miyaco. Colin served as the community's confessor in Manila.

Fróis, Luís, S.J. Historia de Japam. Edited by José Wicki. 5 vols. Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 1976–1984. Fróis's contemporary history and his 1596 Annual Letter are the foundational sources for Julia's Buddhist formation, conversion, and early years as a catechumen. Originals held at the Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon.

Girón, Bernardino de Avila. Relación del Reino de Nippon. Manuscript copies at the Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid), the Escorial, and Pastrana. The Spanish lay merchant's eyewitness account of the 1614 persecution in Kyoto preserves the unvarnished record of the sexual threats made against the Miyako no bikuni during the tawarazume.

Ishikawa Prefectural Library. Naitō Joan (内藤如安), Furusato Collection. Undated online entry, consulted September 2026. Supplies the alternative birth year of 1550, the succession of patrons, and death in Manila in 1626; its references identify relevant regional histories, which were not themselves consulted for this draft.

Kataoka, Yakichi. Nihon Kirishitan Junkyōshi. Tokyo: Jiji Tsūshinsha, 1979. The leading Japanese-language survey of Kirishitan martyrology; includes extensive treatment of Julia and the Miyako no bikuni.

Laures, Johannes. Were the Takayamas and Naitos involved in Hideyori’s Plot? Monumenta Nipponica 6, nos. 1/2 (1943): 233–244. Consulted in an online reproduction of the article. Its quotations and comparison of missionary records underpin the discussion of Thomas’s exile, the Osaka invitation and contemporary speculation about the expulsion. The original archival manuscripts were not consulted.

López-Gay, Jesús, S.J. El Catecumenado en la Misión del Japón del s. XVI. Rome: Libreria dell'Università Gregoriana, 1966. Establishes the early scholarly case that Japanese women converted autonomously rather than following male family members; foundational for the subsequent rehabilitation of Julia as an independent religious actor.

Matos, Gabriel de, S.J. Annua de Japão, 1614. Contemporary Jesuit annual letter. Articulates the Jesuits' own explicit rationale for supporting the Miyako no bikuni — that God had used Julia as the "necessary instrument" to reach the secluded women's quarters of the Japanese aristocracy.

Morejón, Pedro, S.J. Relación de la persecución que huvo en la Yglesia de Iapón. Mexico City, 1616; English translation, A Briefe Relation of the Persecution Lately Made Against the Catholike Christians in the Kingdome of Iaponia, St. Omer, 1619. The definitive eyewitness account of the 1614 persecution in Kyoto by the Jesuit who served as the Miyako no bikuni's confessor and accompanied them into exile.

Nantan City. Nantan Sengoku Meguri (なんたん戦国巡り), especially “Naitō Joan,” p. 4. Municipal historical brochure, undated. Its account supports the 1573 military display and supplies a more cautious chronology of Joan’s changing relationship with Nobunaga and the loss of Yagi. Local tradition is distinguished from dated evidence in the relevant section.

Ruiz-de-Medina, Juan, S.J. El martirologio del Japón, 1558–1873. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1999. Comprehensive reference work on Japanese Catholic martyrology; includes extensive biographical detail on Julia's companions.

Ward, Haruko Nawata. Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, 1549–1650. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. The premier modern English-language study of Kirishitan women, and the principal rehabilitation of Julia as a "woman apostle" whose career requires a substantial rewriting of the standard history of post-Tridentine female religious life. Essential reading for anyone pursuing this subject.

Ward, Haruko Nawata. "Jesuits, Too: Jesuits, Women Catechists, and Jezebels in Christian-Century Japan." In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John W. O'Malley et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. A focused essay on the collaboration between female Japanese catechists and the Society of Jesus, with significant discussion of Julia.

Wicki, José, S.J., ed. Documenta Indica. 18 vols. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1948–1988. The standard published collection of Jesuit correspondence from the Asian missions; includes relevant annual letters and consultas concerning the Miyako no bikuni.