Topic
The missionaries, warlords, interpreters, samurai, and renegades whose lives shaped the Portuguese-Japanese encounter.
A Córdoban silk merchant who walked into the Society of Jesus in 1547 and walked out as the man who would put the Christian God into the Japanese language. For 18 years the most delicate theology Europeans ever spoke to Asians came out of the mouth of a lay brother who had refused to be ordained.
How a Portuguese physician with a cut-off tongue talked his way into a patriarchate
They smelled terrible, ate with their fingers, had grotesquely long noses, and could not read a single Chinese character. They also carried miraculous weapons and sailed ships the size of small castles, and the Japanese spent a century deciding what to make of them.
A stick and a strip of sand, a convert who handed the missionaries the name of a Buddha, a Zen monk drafting the shogun's letters in literary Chinese, and an English captain questioned in Portuguese at Nagasaki in 1673, decades after the ban. The channel between Europe and Japan was never one language, and the people holding it open were rarely European.
From rapture to revulsion, six key observers spent a century trying to make sense of a civilization that seemed to do everything in reverse. What they saw tells us as much about Portugal as it does about Japan.
Arriving in Kagoshima in 1549, the Navarrese co-founder of the Society of Jesus launched one of the most ambitious evangelization campaigns in history. His two years in Japan set the course for decades of religious and cultural transformation.
He was half-blind, unlettered, six-fingered, and described by men who admired him as having a face painful to look at. He was also the greatest preacher the Jesuit mission in Japan ever produced, and without him there would have been no Christian Century.
Successor to Francis Xavier and Superior of the Japan mission for 19 years, the Valencian priest Cosme de Torres ran the entire Jesuit operation through the chaos of the Sengoku period. Less famous than his predecessors and successors, he laid the foundations on which Japanese Christianity's apogee would be built.
A royal surgical license, 2,000 cruzados sunk into silk for the Society of Jesus, and a hospital in Bungo built to look like a Portuguese achievement. It was Japanese physicians, converts and a freed Javanese surgeon who actually kept it running whenever its founder was away, which was most of the time.
A posthumous orphan, a boy-king obsessed with crusade, and a catastrophic death in Morocco, how one man's medieval fantasies in Lisbon reshaped the future of Christianity in Japan
A half-blind lute player, a shaved-headed Portuguese priest, and the most audacious gamble in the history of the Jesuit mission in Japan, the story of how one man planted Christianity in the imperial capital and changed the course of Japanese history.
A Lisbon courtier's son became the most observant European in 16th-century Asia, wrote the definitive history of Christian Japan, and watched his own superiors bury the manuscript for 400 years.
A drug shop in Sakai, a printing press hidden in the Amakusa islands, and a forged letter of surrender that fooled the Ming court for three years. Konishi Yukinaga rose from merchant's son to Toyotomi commander, and died in 1600 refusing the one death his class expected of him.
A guarded woman slipping out of an Osaka compound in disguise, a baptism performed by her own maid, and a Latin opera staged for the Habsburg emperor 98 years later. The most thoroughly educated woman of Japan's Christian Century became the least accurately remembered.
He threw incense at his father’s funeral, dressed like a vagrant, and befriended a Jesuit. From provincial fool to the man who nearly unified Japan, the life of the warlord who embraced Portuguese firearms, patronized the Jesuits, and, by their account, declared himself a living god.
A Jesuit's letter of 1 June 1569 listing a flask of confeitos and some wax candles, a clock the warlord admired and declined, 3,000 kin of sugar sent to Nobunaga in 1580, and a Nagasaki townsman who worked out the method and sold it cheap. The most famous sweet of the Nanban century has one documented moment and a much longer history.
A Portuguese soldier turned Jesuit priest was given command of the most culturally complex mission in Christendom. He responded by trying to make Japan more like Portugal. The results were catastrophic.
One of the finest generals of the Sengoku age, a master of the tea ceremony, and Japan’s most powerful Christian lord, Takayama Ukon chose faith over everything, and lost everything.
A peasant boy from rural Portugal mastered Japanese so completely that two successive rulers made him their confidant, and spent 33 years as the indispensable man between two civilizations.
A Neapolitan aristocrat jailed for slashing a woman’s face in his twenties became the most consequential European in 16th-century Asia, reshaping the Jesuit enterprise across three decades, three continents, and three visits to a country he could barely comprehend.
A warlord who ordered a man scrubbed to see whether his skin came off, a stipend recorded twice, and a rumor in a castle town. Five documents are all that survive of the African who served Oda Nobunaga, and almost everything ever written about him is an interpolation between them.
Four Japanese teenagers went to Rome to be shown to the Pope and came home with a printing press, which spent the next 24 years printing a language its European designers could not read, in an alphabet that did not fit it. Roughly 100 books were made and about 30 survive, and inside them is the only recording anyone has of how Japanese was actually spoken in the 1590s.
Alessandro Valignano chose him because he seemed docile. For nine years, as Vice-Provincial of Japan, Gaspar Coelho proved he was nothing of the kind, a would-be daimyō who stockpiled weapons, paraded his private warship, and helped bring the 1587 expulsion edict down upon the Church he was meant to shepherd.
In 1582, four young Japanese nobles embarked on an extraordinary journey to Europe, meeting Philip II of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII. Their voyage is one of the most remarkable episodes of early modern global diplomacy.
Born a nameless peasant, he talked, fought, and schemed his way to the summit of Japanese power, the most improbable biography in pre-modern Japan and one of the most extraordinary tales of social mobility in the early modern world.
A Dutch clerk in Portuguese Goa spent five years copying classified sailing charts and cataloging colonial rot. The book he published when he got home broke the Iberian monopoly on the East and launched the fleets that would eventually replace Portugal in Japan.
A Spanish ex-soldier who fought in the tercios, a Dominican Sinologue killed by headhunters in Formosa, and a Castilian lay brother who jumped ship in the middle of the Pacific, the story of how the Spanish mendicant orders crashed into a Japanese mission that the Portuguese Jesuits had built and the Pope had reserved for them alone.
A Spanish galleon broke apart on a sandbank in Tosa in October 1596, and four months later 26 men and boys stood in a line of crosses on a hill above Nagasaki harbor. Between those two facts lie an empty treasury, a careless remark about missionaries and armies, and a police commissioner who quietly cut a death list of 170 names down to 15.
A parish register in Lisbon, a collar-presser's shop in Lima, a Japanese painter decorating a Macanese altarpiece: the Nanban century scattered Japanese people across every Iberian port on earth. Within 100 years they had ceased to exist as a distinct people anywhere.
Two Japanese Jesuits ordained at Nagasaki in September 1601, a seminary run inside the bishop's own house, a sacrament manual printed in red and black with the music written out, and a short book telling Christians what to do when no priest could reach them. Japan's second resident bishop spent 16 years building a church that would not need Europeans.
Born a hostage and forged into the most patient political mind in Japanese history, the man who ended a century of civil war, shut the door on the Christian mission, and built a state that lasted 250 years.
In 1600, a dying English pilot washed ashore in Japan and quietly destroyed a 60-year Catholic monopoly. William Adams became a samurai, an advisor to the shōgun, and the man who proved that European trade could be separated from European God.
How the most boring man in Japan built the most effective authoritarian state in the early modern world, and drove Christianity underground in the process, one bureaucratic edict at a time.
A 1,000-ton Spanish galleon broke up on a Kazusa beach in September 1609 and put the former governor of the Philippines on the wrong side of a law that gave every wreck to the shogun. Tokugawa Ieyasu waived the law, sent William Adams to fetch him, and spent the winter trying to buy the secret of Mexican silver.
On a June afternoon in 1613, a ship called the Clove anchored in a small Kyushu harbor and a captain named John Saris stepped ashore carrying a letter from King James I, a cargo of unsold broadcloth, and a grudge against the only Englishman in Japan. 10 years later, the English would sail away in debt, in disgrace, and in tears.
In 1613, a one-eyed northern warlord sent his retainer across three oceans to negotiate with Philip III of Spain and Pope Paul V. The mission spanned seven years, three continents, and ended in failure, martyrdom, and a galleon sold off as a Spanish warship.
Christianity rose to perhaps 300,000 active believers in 70 years and was driven underground in 25. A guided tour of the demographic curve, the contested numbers behind it, and the men who pushed it up and down.
She taught Pure Land doctrine to Hideyoshi's wife and spat in a Buddhist priest's face from inside a rice sack on a frozen riverbank. He brought 2,000 men under the cross into Kyoto and carried a peace embassy to Beijing. In 1614 the Tokugawa put brother and sister on the same ship to Manila.
A shogun who listened for three days and nights, a servant who crossed the world and came back with an answer, and a single quoted paragraph in an English history book of 1903 that is the only evidence any of it happened. Ibi Masayoshi was sent by Tokugawa Hidetada to inspect Christianity in Europe, and the archives of two continents have never produced his name.
A Japanese priest carried a Latin-dedicated book from Nagasaki to Rome, then apostatized at Ōmura in 1619 and spent a quarter century helping the magistracy that hunted down the missionaries who had trained him. He signed that Roman dedication presbyter, priest, and that single Latin word is nearly the only thing about his life that historians agree on.
A samurai came home to a country that had decided his journey was treason, and a godson of the King of Spain was branded and sold as a slave. In an Andalusian river town, 800 people carry the surname Japón and until 1989 believed they were descended from fishermen.
A gift of sharkskin and gunpowder that left two Tokugawa councillors asking who had sent it, a votive ship lost to a shrine fire, and a governorship that was a promotion and a dismissal in the same document. A Japanese merchant became one of Siam's most powerful men, and a 1942 schoolbook turned his career into a national glory it never actually claimed.
The third Tokugawa shōgun never won a battle, yet turned his grandfather’s conquest into an airtight bureaucracy , the sankin kōtai, Nikkō’s gilded shrine, the sakoku edicts, and a persecution so morbid it drove the faith underground for over two centuries.
In 1626 a Macao merchant sailed into Nagasaki with six galliots and a fortune in Chinese silk, and left having signed away the priests who had made him rich. 14 years later the same man knelt on Martyrs' Mount with his neck against a Tokugawa sword.
A six-day municipal ceremony held every New Year in Nagasaki, 20 brass plaques cast in 1669 from confiscated metal, and a Sicilian Jesuit who sailed in 1643 to rescue the most famous apostate in Asia. This is the documentary spine of the most famous novel ever written about Christian Japan, and the exact places where the novel walks away from it.
The highest-ranking Jesuit in Japan broke under torture in 1633, renounced his faith, and spent the rest of his life helping the shogunate destroy the Church he had served for three decades. His apostasy is the darkest chapter of the Christian Century.
A red wistaria blooming on a dead cherry tree in the garden of one of the five men who most needed a prophecy fulfilled, and within weeks a farmer's son in his teens was supreme commander of 37,000 rebels. Almost everything the world remembers about Amakusa Shirō was assembled by other people, some of it before he died and most of it a century after.
A dyer's son from Suruga spent six years assembling a nationwide coup against the Tokugawa regime, to begin on a windy night in Edo with the arsenal detonated and the Elders cut down in the streets. Six days before the match was struck, the secret got out.
In the autumn of 1657 a farmer mentioned a remarkable boy to his brother-in-law over tea, and almost certainly did not realize what he had just done. What the arrests uncovered was not a fragile remnant but a functioning church that had outwitted the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus the early modern world had ever built.