The Words Between Them: How Portuguese and Japanese Communicated, 1543–1673

Nobody Held Both Ends

How Did Portuguese and Japanese Speakers Communicate Without a Shared Language in 1543?

In 1673 an English ship called the Return came into Nagasaki, and the officials who boarded her put their questions to her captain in Portuguese.

Simon Delboe answered in Portuguese, or in Spanish, and what he said was then turned into Dutch for somebody else’s benefit. Three European languages were working on that deck, and the one the Japanese authorities reached for first belonged to a nation whose traders they had expelled from the country thirty-four years earlier.

The language had outlasted the permission granted to the men who brought it.

That shape was set on the first day. When the Portuguese came ashore at Tanegashima in 1543, the conversation that followed was conducted with a stick and a strip of sand, in Chinese characters, between a Chinese man aboard their vessel, called Gohō in the Japanese narrative, and a literate Japanese official. That scene belongs to the article on the gun that came with them. What belongs here is the mechanism: the first exchange of the Portuguese century in Japan used no spoken language at all, and neither of the men conducting it was Portuguese.

The account is in the Teppōki, the record of the introduction of firearms compiled in 1606, more than six decades after the landing, celebrating the Tanegashima family’s part in acquiring and spreading the new weapon. Its beach conversation is a remembered episode inside a commissioned family history, not a transcript taken at the waterline. The mechanism it describes was ordinary in the maritime world the Portuguese had just entered.

Educated Japanese had been reading and composing literary Chinese for centuries. Two literate men could therefore hold a conversation across a spoken-language boundary by writing it out: hitsudan, 筆談, brush talk. Not every Japanese person could do it, and possession of Chinese characters did not make every sentence transparent. What it did was hand literate intermediaries a working channel at the moment when the newcomers and their hosts had no spoken language in common.

The Europeans had walked into an Asian commercial network rather than opened one, and their inability to speak Japanese did not leave them without resources. Chinese traders, maritime intermediaries, and Japanese people who had traveled abroad could each join a portion of a conversation. In a relay, every man needs to share a language with the next and with nobody else: Portuguese might pass through Chinese or Malay before it reached Japanese, and the chain depended on who was in the port that season.

Nobody held both ends.

A transaction could draw on several of these at once, and nobody regarded them as separate systems. Writing supplemented speech, a demonstration showed how an unfamiliar object worked, and commerce supplied things to check the words against: cloth could be unfolded, a quantity counted, a weapon fired.

That helped, and it did not make commerce safe. Quality, weight, credit and responsibility all still had to be agreed, and a merchant who understood a number could misunderstand what the number bought.

The mission that followed the traders had the same problem with none of the checks. Its central assertions concerned a creator, salvation and the fate of the soul. An interpreter could point at a gun. Explaining what the missionaries meant by God meant finding words for it inside a religious world that already had its own account of ultimate reality.

A Familiar Name for an Unfamiliar God

How Did Baltasar Gago's 1555 Reform Change the Mission's Japanese Vocabulary?

The first word the mission used for God in Japanese was the name of a Buddha.

Francis Xavier reached Kagoshima in 1549 with Anjirō, also known as Yajirō, a Japanese man he had met at Malacca and baptized Paulo de Santa Fé. Anjirō was the mission’s source of information about the country and its first linguistic intermediary, and Xavier’s capacity to explain his religion rested on a convert who had moved between the two worlds before the priest could speak inside either. Asked for an equivalent of Deus, Anjirō supplied Dainichi, the cosmic Buddha at the center of Shingon Buddhism.

It worked, in the sense that it made the preaching recognizable. Hearers could place the new teaching inside a Buddhist frame, which was easier still given that its foreign preachers had arrived by way of India, the land associated with Buddhism’s origins.

The episode is usually told as an incompetent interpreter making a disastrous substitution, a version that gives the European speaker remarkably little responsibility for the words spoken in his name. Anjirō was doing what any translator does, establishing a relationship between an unfamiliar teaching and the concepts available to him. Xavier initially accepted the result. The error, so far as it belonged to anyone, lay in a shared assumption that a Japanese religious term could carry the required meaning without also carrying everything it already meant.

By 1551 Xavier had rejected Dainichi and adopted Deus. Baltasar Gago’s subsequent reform, set out in his correspondence of 1555, went further, replacing troublesome indigenous equivalents with European Christian terms as a matter of policy. Xavier’s own mission, and the reversal carried through under Cosme de Torres, are told elsewhere on this site. What concerns the language is that the policy did not solve the teacher’s problem. It changed which problem he had.

Pronouncing Deus did not explain creation. Repeating a borrowed term for a sacrament established nothing about what happened during it. The mission had acquired a vocabulary over whose definitions it could claim authority, and had made instruction more dependent than before on explanation, example and repeated encounter. Transliteration moved the difficulty out of a single word and into the lesson built around it.

It also changed the argument with Buddhist interlocutors. An apparent point of agreement became a declared difference. Greater precision produced sharper disagreement, because it made the competing claims easier to identify. Successful communication is not the same thing as religious accommodation. Sometimes it is what allows a dispute to begin in earnest.

Meanwhile the Europeans had to learn enough Japanese to notice what their interpreters were doing on their behalf. Juan Fernández became the early mission’s most important preacher and linguistic intermediary at Yamaguchi, and has an article of his own. His progress did not produce a supply of fluent missionaries. For years European ability varied, Japanese assistance remained essential, and a sermon its author considered adequate could need substantial repair before its listeners understood it.

The People Who Supplied the Voice

What Did the Words Jurubaça, Tsūji and Dōjuku Mean in the Japan Mission?

The Portuguese word for an interpreter was not Portuguese. Jurubaça came from the Malay juru bahasa, an interpreter or language specialist, and it had been circulating through maritime Asia long before it reached Japan. The Japanese tsūji named the same function from the other side: a person whose value lay in making exchanges possible.

Neither word guaranteed anything. It certified no level of education and no employer’s confidence. An interpreter might know commercial practice intimately and theological vocabulary scarcely at all.

The Japan mission belonged to the Portuguese overseas system, and its personnel came from several countries. Xavier and Fernández were not Portuguese; Alessandro Valignano, the Visitor who reorganized the mission, was Italian; Japanese converts supplied much of the daily teaching. Calling any of this a Portuguese-Japanese conversation identifies a real connection and describes almost nobody who kept it going.

Inside the mission, the Japanese dōjuku, resident lay assistants and catechists, explained doctrine, taught prayers and made European priests intelligible, while Japanese members of the Society of Jesus did related work from a different institutional position. Irmão meant a brother of the order and did not describe every Japanese helper. The distinction governed vows, training and authority, and it held even where the practical labor was the same labor.

Lourenço Ryōsai shows how much a Japanese recruit could bring before any European began instructing him. A former biwa performer with impaired sight, he had spent his working life addressing Japanese audiences and carrying an oral repertoire in his head. He entered the Society as a brother in 1563 and became a prominent preacher and disputant. None of the capacities that made him effective could be acquired by a foreigner memorizing a list of equivalents.

Preaching meant recognizing an objection, choosing a response, and judging whether the audience had followed it. It meant deciding which familiar example clarified a Christian claim and which one quietly changed it. Japanese participants were shaping the teaching as they delivered it, and describing them as conduits conceals the decisions the work demanded.

Valignano’s arrival in 1579 brought renewed pressure toward systematic language study, Japanese education and adaptation to local conduct. Training cost the mission immediate pastoral work, and without it the mission stayed hostage to a handful of capable speakers. Schools could build competence across successive intakes instead of waiting for another unusually gifted interpreter to appear.

What training did not do was make the institution equal. Mission leaders disagreed about the authority and advancement Japanese members should receive, while relying on those same members to make Christianity intelligible in the first place. Linguistic dependence and reluctance to share power sat in the same organization without any apparent discomfort. A European could recognize that a Japanese colleague spoke more effectively than he did and still decline to let him govern the house they both worked in.

The resulting scholarship carried the marks of the arrangement. When João Rodrigues explained how he had composed his grammar, he acknowledged the notes of earlier missionaries and what he had learned from Japanese people knowledgeable in their own language and letters. The information had reached the page through several hundred conversations.

His name was on the title page.

The Rank Inside the Sentence

Why Did Japanese Honorific Grammar Make an Interpreter's Word Choice So Risky?

A Japanese sentence could be correct in every particular and still insult the person it was addressed to.

The language required a speaker to place people in relation to one another before he could say anything at all. Honorific and humble expressions raised the person discussed or lowered the speaker’s own side, and verbs, forms of address and suffixes all carried judgments about status and circumstance. The choice among them was not ornament. A speaker could deliver his proposition accurately and give offense through the relationship the wording implied.

That made respect a problem of grammar rather than of manners. A learner could not take one ordinary verb, apply it indiscriminately to everybody, and repair the damage by bowing afterward. The wording was the act of acknowledging rank, and there was nothing left for the bow to correct. In a meeting with a lord, an interpreter had to carry both the substance of a message and the standing of the man who had sent it.

João Rodrigues became known as Tçuzu, a European rendering of tsūji, a name that described an occupation with considerable access to power. His linguistic reputation had brought him into the service of Hideyoshi and of Ieyasu, and he treated these distinctions at length in the Arte da lingoa de Iapam, published at Nagasaki between 1604 and 1608. The Arte extended its instruction to written styles and to the language appropriate to particular settings, favoring the prestigious usage of Kyoto’s courtly society while recording forms its author regarded as provincial or inferior. The judgments were socially selective. They also preserved variation that a purely abstract grammar would have thrown away.

Rodrigues’s career at court is told in his own article, and it was a great deal more fragile than his scholarship. He left Japan for Macao in 1610 amid the disputes surrounding the destruction of the Portuguese ship Nossa Senhora da Graça, the Madre de Deus, and his shorter grammar, the Arte breve, appeared at Macao in 1620. The work of explaining Japanese continued after its author had lost the standing to speak for the mission inside Japan.

What Rodrigues had to describe any of it with was a Latin education. Parts of speech, cases, conjugations: the apparatus was what his European students had been drilled in since childhood, and it offered a ready-made set of shelves on which an unfamiliar language could be arranged.

Japanese did not fit the shelves.

Particles did work that a Latin learner expected endings to do, and verbs did not change for person, which removed the organizing principle of every conjugation table in European grammar. Rodrigues had to explain the differences while still exploiting the familiar categories, because those categories were the only vocabulary his readers had for talking about grammar at all. Where an inherited rule failed to describe what Japanese speakers actually did, practical teaching required a new distinction. What reached print joined borrowed terminology to observation gathered over years in the country.

The consequences fell hardest on whoever stood between two people. A merchant could make himself understood in a register unthinkable in an audience hall, and frequently did. An interpreter in front of a lord had no such latitude. He was not only rendering a message; he was placing his employer, and himself, somewhere in a hierarchy that the sentence would announce whether he had thought about it or not.

Japanese in Portuguese Letters

Why Did the Jesuit Mission Print Three Different Japanese Reference Works?

Three of the reference works the mission printed for the language began from three different ends of the problem.

The Latin-Portuguese-Japanese dictionary printed at Amakusa in 1595 ran from the language of European education into Japanese, which is the direction traveled by a man taught to think in Latin who needs to preach in something else. The Rakuyōshū of 1598 assisted with Japanese characters, a different task and a far longer one. The Vocabvlario da lingoa de Iapam, published at Nagasaki in 1603 with a supplement in 1604, began from Japanese words and explained them in Portuguese, which is the direction traveled by a man already listening to Japanese who needs to know what he has just heard.

A learner’s destination depended on which end of the dictionary supplied the headwords.

The Vocabvlario contained more than 32,000 entries, with labels telling a reader which contexts a word belonged to, because knowing an equivalent was only the beginning of the work. A user also had to know whether a word sounded learned, familiar, regional, or unsuitable for the man he was about to address, which is the honorific problem arriving in another form.

The books came off a press brought back to East Asia with the returning Tenshō embassy, which operated at successive locations in Japan before its removal to Macao in 1614. Its type, its paper, the hundred-odd books it printed and the record of sixteenth-century pronunciation its spellings preserved are told at length elsewhere on this site. What matters to the conversation is a single decision. Roman letters removed an obstacle at the front of the process: a missionary trained to read Portuguese could begin working with Japanese sounds without first mastering a writing system that would take him years. This did not make literacy in Japanese unnecessary. It separated the initial task of speaking from the much longer task of reading, and let a man start the first while he was nowhere near the second.

The Amakusa edition of the Heike monogatari, printed in 1592 as Feiqe no monogatari, put that principle to work in the most useful form available: a famous Japanese war narrative turned into colloquial dialogue, credited to Fabian, the Japanese Christian later known for his own religious writings. A European learner could practice on Japanese narrative instead of meeting the language only as translated catechism.

Writing Japanese down for European learners also preserved distinctions that ordinary Japanese spelling did not expose. Feiqe is the name now romanized Heike; fito is the word now written hito, person. Both belong to the evidence that sounds in the modern h-series were then often pronounced with a bilabial fricative, made with the lips rather than exactly like either modern English f or h. The books were not sound recordings, and their letters reflect Portuguese spelling conventions, the analysis of the men who compiled them, and whichever varieties of Japanese those men happened to be hearing.

The missionaries were printing tools for their own successors, not monuments to historical phonology. Their practical need produced a record whose later value outlasted the destruction of the institutions that had required it. The dictionary stayed useful to a reader interested in Japanese long after its compilers’ hope of converting the country had stopped governing the reading.

The Meaning Around the Word

What Did the Japanese Word Taisetsu Mean in Christian Teaching?

Taisetsu was an ordinary Japanese word about valuing something, cherishing it, treating it as important. The mission used it for Christian love.

Rejecting Dainichi had not produced a Christian Japanese assembled entirely out of imported nouns, because no such language was available. Teachers still needed Japanese syntax, Japanese descriptive expression, and Japanese words for experiences their hearers recognized, and European terms and indigenous vocabulary went on existing together in different proportions in a catechism, a dictionary, a sermon and a course of advanced instruction.

The vocabulary of love shows why a single rule could not settle the matter. Go-taisetsu added an honorific element. The word’s usefulness lay in extending something familiar into a particular moral and religious setting, and the hearer still had to learn what it meant to cherish God, or a neighbor, within Christian teaching. But the explanation could begin from Japanese that a Japanese person already used.

Aldo Tollini’s comparison of the early dictionaries identifies four methods operating together: phonetic borrowing, indigenous equivalents, paraphrase, and shifts of meaning. His examples also show that Buddhist vocabulary was not simply eliminated everywhere, and that different kinds of text made different choices about it. The mission’s effort to avoid doctrinal confusion produced a continuing practice of selection, not a general withdrawal from the resources of Japanese.

Pedro Gómez’s compendium carried the problem into the colleges, where it got harder. Cosmology, the soul, theology: the material required sustained explanation of concepts that had come out of Aristotle and Christian scholastic thought, and a Japanese student had to follow the relations among propositions rather than learn a set of isolated labels. Translating an argument is not translating a vocabulary. It means deciding how to make each step available in a language whose own intellectual traditions supply different starting assumptions.

The same work turned up in moral instruction, where the stakes were immediate. Japanese Christians served non-Christian lords. They lived among relatives and neighbors whose observances they could not simply absent themselves from. Missionaries examined cases in which an act might be civil, or religious, or both, and in which what was permitted could depend on the participant’s intention and on the meaning others would reasonably give to what he had done. M. Antoni J. Üçerler’s study of the Jesuit enterprise traces how those cases were argued.

There was no rule that could be stated in advance and applied afterward. The boundaries had to be found one circumstance at a time.

That made Japanese experience part of the material the teaching was built from, rather than a field it was applied to. Accommodation meant learning what an action did inside a community before pronouncing on what a Christian could do with it.

Japanese authors could also take command of the arguments. Fabian’s Myōtei mondō of 1605 mounted a Christian critique of Japanese religious and intellectual traditions, in dialogue, in Japanese. In 1620, having left Christianity, he wrote Ha Daiusu against his former religion.

The competence was the same competence.

An ability to explain Christian claims had never carried a guarantee of continuing to hold them, and the mission had built precisely the kind of capacity that could be turned around and aimed back. Fabian’s reversal was an uncomfortable outcome for an institution that had invested decades in making its doctrine intelligible. It was also the evidence that the intelligibility was real. A writer who could dispute Christianity in Japanese had something more durable than phrases approved by a European superior.

What a Bow Could Say

How Did Missionaries Communicate With Japanese Audiences Without Words?

A missionary could get the sentence exactly right and still ruin the occasion he said it on.

Seating, dress, the presentation of gifts and the manner of receiving a visitor established who was speaking to whom before anybody had spoken. Valignano’s regulations concerning Japanese customs tried to make that conduct part of the mission’s routine, rather than an accomplishment left to whichever individuals happened to be observant.

A poorly judged reception made a European look ignorant of distinctions his Japanese host considered elementary, and the expected forms, performed properly, helped secure a hearing. The purpose was practical before it was courteous: the mission wanted its religious claims judged after it had obtained access to the people it hoped to persuade, not instead of.

Adapting to a custom did not mean accepting the beliefs attached to it, which is why the arguments about conduct became so intricate. A bow acknowledged a person’s rank. An outwardly identical movement in front of a sacred object raised a different question, and the rules had to account for the object, the setting, and what the people watching would take it to mean. A gesture does not carry one stable meaning wherever it travels.

Pictures opened another route. Giovanni Niccolò and the Japanese artists associated with the mission produced devotional images on European models and with European technique, and a painting supplied a face, an arrangement of figures, an event around which teaching could proceed, in places where a preacher could not remain.

An image of a woman holding a child did not explain the Incarnation.

A viewer could recognize the relationship between the two figures perfectly well and understand their religious identity quite differently from a Christian teacher. Names, stories and practices had to supply that. Pictures widened the possibilities of instruction without abolishing the need for it.

Objects traveled further than the people who made them. A Christian shrine now in the Tokyo National Museum combines Japanese lacquer decoration, its doors worked in gold, silver and shell, with an oil painting believed to have been added in Spain after export, for private Christian devotion in Europe. It records cooperation across separate stages of production. It records nothing about shared belief between the craftsmen who made the case and the man who prayed in front of it.

The nanban folding screens worked in the other direction, giving a Japanese account of the visitors through their clothes, their ships and their behavior, selecting and arranging what was worth showing. Their Portuguese merchants are figures inside Japanese pictorial convention, exactly as Japanese people in missionary prose are figures inside European habits of description.

Communication through objects was reciprocal and selective, which is the ordinary condition of contact rather than a failure of it. A buyer could appreciate a lacquer surface without knowing anything of its maker’s religious life. A painter could depict a foreign procession without understanding a word its participants said. Both had acquired something real. Neither had acquired the other’s account of the encounter.

The Person Between the Rulers

Why Did Japan's Shogunate Write Diplomatic Letters in Literary Chinese?

A ruler who cannot read the original is dependent on the man who tells him what it says.

That dependence made the interpreter’s position consequential the moment the words concerned privileges, allegiance, or the intentions of a foreign power. His usefulness rose with his access. So did the certainty that somebody would eventually ask whose side he was on.

Rodrigues is the illustration. His Japanese made him valuable to rulers and to merchants, and his membership of the Society tied him to an institution with interests of its own. Interpreting, advising and negotiating could bring the same man close to the same decision from several directions, and an accurate rendering of individual sentences settled nothing about whose concerns he had selected for the ruler’s attention.

The arrival of Dutch and English traders introduced alternative channels. William Adams acquired Japanese and access to Ieyasu, giving the court a route to European information that did not run through a Catholic missionary. He and his countrymen had commercial and religious interests too, and their willingness to supply information about Iberian ambitions did not make every allegation disinterested intelligence.

Japanese officials, meanwhile, were constructing the message from their own end. The Zen monk Ishin Sūden worked on foreign correspondence in literary Chinese, the formal written medium used for much of the government’s diplomacy. A spoken explanation, or an intermediate Japanese version, could be reformulated into the language and conventions proper to an official document. A ruler’s letter came out of a process with several contributors. It did not come out of one bilingual performance.

Which returns the story to where it began. Literary Chinese was still doing the work it had done at the waterline in 1543, seventy years later and several hundred miles away, in a chancery instead of a strip of sand. Its role was not the role of the Portuguese spoken among maritime intermediaries, or of the colloquial Japanese taught to missionaries. The channels coexisted because they did different jobs. A language useful in a trading port was not necessarily the language a government chose to keep its authority in on paper.

Messages could also be entirely comprehensible and still disputed. The allegations surrounding the wreck of the Spanish San Felipe in 1596, including the reported boast that missionaries prepared the way for conquest, entered a field of competing accounts and political interests. Treating the episode as proof that a dangerous message had been received with perfect clarity settles questions the evidence leaves open.

The prohibitions that followed cannot be reduced to mistranslation. Japanese rulers opposed activities they understood as challenges to their authority, while missionaries and traders tried to distinguish their own conduct from the accusations directed at them. Better Japanese could improve an explanation. It could not produce permission to preach, or make an unwanted foreign presence acceptable.

In 1614 the government ordered the expulsion of the missionaries and acted against prominent Japanese Christians. In 1639 it prohibited Portuguese trade.

The decisions removed institutions and people from the conversation. They did not remove the languages already learned by everybody who stayed, or the fact that foreign commerce still had to be conducted in something.

Portuguese Without the Portuguese

Why Was an English Captain Questioned in Portuguese at Nagasaki in 1673?

Nagasaki's official interpreters went on mediating European trade, now under government supervision. The Dutch, transferred from Hirado to Dejima in 1641, worked inside a system that depended heavily on Japanese officials to regulate contact. Interpretation had become one of the instruments by which the authorities made foreign activity legible and therefore manageable.

The office developed through interpreter families, with training and succession carrying it from one generation to the next. Hereditary organization did not make skill automatic. It created households in which acquiring languages was preparation for an occupation, which is slower and far more reliable than waiting for talent to present itself. Nor did official appointment make the interpreter's practical relationship with the foreign merchants unimportant. He needed their speech. They needed his access to the administration standing behind him. Keisuke Yao's comparison of Nagasaki with Canton turns on that distinction: the men at Nagasaki were the government's.

Portuguese remained useful inside these exchanges for the unremarkable reason that linguistic competence does not follow the nationality of the authorized trading company. Some Japanese interpreters had learned Portuguese before Dutch became central to their employment, and European personnel in Asian service could possess Portuguese, or resources close to it, acquired somewhere else entirely. Changing the merchants at a port does not retrain everybody who handles their business.

The shift toward Dutch was therefore an overlap rather than a replacement. Interpreters learned vocabulary and phrases, younger men were put through instruction, and particular encounters kept exposing what they still could not do. A man perfectly capable of arranging a sale could be defeated by a medical explanation or a long written argument. Knowing Dutch and knowing Portuguese each covered several different capacities, exactly as they had in the early mission.

None of which was the Jesuit educational system surviving intact. The colleges, the printed teaching materials and the supervision of language study had belonged to an institutional setting now largely gone from Japan. The interpreter houses carried useful knowledge forward under other employers and for other purposes. They did not inherit a structure merely because some of the words were still familiar.

The traffic left a less official residue as well: pan in Japanese, from Portuguese pão, and botan, from botão; biombo in Portuguese, from the Japanese byōbu, a folding screen. The full inventory of those borrowings is a story of its own. A borrowed word becomes ordinary enough that its speakers no longer need to know the encounter that brought it in. Such words record contact. They measure nothing about how fluently either population ever spoke the other's language.

The clearest surviving glimpse of the older maritime vocabulary comes from 1673, when the English vessel Return reached Nagasaki. Her captain, Simon Delboe, recorded the questions put to him in Portuguese, the answers given in Portuguese or Spanish, and a further rendering into Dutch. Willy Vande Walle's study of the language barrier in Japanese-European relations preserves the passage.

More than three decades after the prohibition of Portuguese trade, an English visitor at Nagasaki was still being processed in Portuguese.

The language had outlasted the permission granted to its original European traders, which was the least remarkable thing about it. It had also outlasted the mission that codified it, the press that printed it, the grammars and dictionaries and colleges, and every European institution that ever claimed to own the conversation. What was left at the waterline was a working vocabulary held by Japanese officials, applied to whichever foreigners the government had currently authorized to arrive.

At Nagasaki, in 1673, the officials asked their questions and the English captain answered in the words available between them.

Sources & Further Reading

British Library. Feiqe no monogatari, shelfmark Or.59.aa.1/1. Catalog record, London. Establishes the colloquial dialogue of the Amakusa Jesuit edition of 1592, its romanized text, and Fabian's credited contribution.

Dictionnaire historique du Japon. Teppō-ki. Vol. 19, 1993, p. 86. Fixes the 1606 compilation, the family commission and the retrospective character of the arrival narrative on which the beach episode depends.

Rodrigues, João. Arte da lingoa de Iapam. Nagasaki: College of the Society of Jesus, 1604–1608. The grammar itself, source for the treatment of honorific and humble registers, of written styles, and of the author's preference for Kyoto courtly usage over forms he judged provincial.

Society of Jesus. Vocabvlario da lingoa de Iapam, com a declaração em portugues. Nagasaki, 1603; supplement, 1604. The Japanese-to-Portuguese dictionary, whose entry count is given here as a round figure and whose authorship is treated as collective rather than assigned to any single compiler.

Tokyo National Museum. Christian Shrine with Flowers, Trees, Birds, and Beasts, H-4446. Collection record, Tokyo. Supplies the material description of the lacquer shrine and the museum's attribution of its oil painting to Spain after export.

Tollini, Aldo. “Translation During the Christian Century in Japan: Christian Keywords in Japanese.” In Nicoletta Pesaro, ed., Between Texts, Beyond Words: Intertextuality and Translation. Venice: Edizioni Ca' Foscari, 2018, pp. 93–106. The source for the Dainichi problem, Gago's terminology reform, and the coexistence of phonetic borrowing, indigenous equivalents, paraphrase and semantic shift in early Christian Japanese.

Üçerler, M. Antoni J. The Samurai and the Cross: The Jesuit Enterprise in Early Modern Japan. Oxford University Press, 2022. Supplies Pedro Gómez's compendium and the Japanese cases of conscience, in which the question was what a Christian serving a non-Christian lord could take part in.

Vande Walle, Willy F. “The Language Barrier in the History of Japanese-European Relations.” In Kyoto Conference on Japanese Studies 1994, vol. III. International Research Center for Japanese Studies and Japan Foundation, 1996, pp. 345–356. Preserves, at p. 353, the 1673 encounter aboard the Return that is this article's evidence for Portuguese still working at Nagasaki after 1639.

Yao, Keisuke. “The Fundamentally Different Roles of Interpreters in the Ports of Nagasaki and Canton.” Itinerario 37, no. 3, 2013, pp. 105–115. The comparison that isolates what was distinctive about the Nagasaki interpreters, who were appointed by the government rather than engaged by the foreign merchants they served; his material is drawn from the later, Dutch-language phase of the office.