Francis Xavier and the Jesuit Mission in Japan

Chapter One

The Fugitive and the Saint

The whole improbable enterprise began with a murderer.

Sometime around 1546, a samurai from the port of Kagoshima named Anjiro found himself in the kind of trouble that does not resolve itself. He had killed a man, the sources are vague on the circumstances, which probably means the circumstances were ugly, and the local authorities were closing in. Fleeing overland was difficult. Fleeing by sea, on a Portuguese merchant vessel bound for the Malay Peninsula, was less so. Anjiro ran.

He ended up in Malacca, one of the great entrepôts of maritime Asia, where the Portuguese maintained a fortified trading post that served as a staging point for their entire commercial network east of India. It was there, in December 1547, that he was introduced to a gaunt, intense, forty-one-year-old Navarrese priest named Francis Xavier.

Xavier was one of the original seven members of the Society of Jesus, a co-founder alongside Ignatius of Loyola, and he had spent the previous six years criss-crossing South and Southeast Asia on a missionary campaign of extraordinary ambition and mixed results. India had proved resistant. The Paravas of the Fishery Coast had accepted baptism en masse but showed a disconcerting tendency to continue worshipping their old gods alongside the new one. The Moluccas were a spiritual slog. Xavier needed something different: a civilisation that would respond to reason, to argument, to the sheer intellectual force of Christianity's claims.

Anjiro told him Japan was exactly that kind of place. The fugitive samurai described his homeland in terms setting Xavier's pulse racing. The Japanese, Anjiro explained, were intensely curious people who valued learning and honoured those who could demonstrate superior knowledge. They debated philosophical questions. They respected moral authority. They governed themselves by codes of honour so strict that a man might disembowel himself rather than endure dishonour. Xavier cross-referenced Anjiro's accounts with a written report from the Portuguese merchant Jorge Álvares, who had visited Japan and compiled his own observations, and arrived at a conclusion. Japan was the most promising mission field in Asia.

Xavier was going to Japan. And he was taking the murderer with him.

Chapter Two

Passage on a Pirate Junk

There was, in the spring of 1549, a logistical problem. No Portuguese ship was sailing directly to Japan. The route was still new, still dangerous, and still largely the domain of freelance merchants who sailed when profit beckoned rather than when missionaries needed a lift. Xavier would have to improvise.

He departed Goa around mid-April with his small entourage: two fellow Jesuits, Father Cosme de Torres, a Spanish priest, and Brother Juan Fernandez, a Spanish lay brother, plus Anjiro (now baptised as Paulo de Santa Fé) and two other Japanese converts named Joane and Antonio, along with two servants, a Malabar Indian named Amador and a Chinese man named Manuel. They reached Malacca by the end of May, where the Portuguese captain, Dom Pedro da Silva, supplied Xavier with provisions, diplomatic gifts for the Japanese rulers, and a quantity of high-quality pepper to fund the mission.

The gifts were important. Xavier had learned from years of operating within the Portuguese maritime network that access to power required tokens of power. The pepper was arguably more important still, convertible currency in every port from the Malabar Coast to the South China Sea.

Still, there was no Portuguese vessel heading east. The only available transport was a Chinese pirate junk commanded by a man the Portuguese called simply ‘The Pirate’, a captain named Avan whose relationship to legality was, at best, situational. Xavier booked passage.

The junk departed Malacca on June 24, 1549, and the voyage immediately went wrong. A storm struck. Xavier's Chinese servant Manuel fell into the ship's bilge pump and was severely injured. Captain Avan's young daughter was swept overboard and drowned. Avan, understandably shaken, attempted to abandon the voyage and winter on islands off the coast of Canton. Xavier protested with a vehemence that suggests he was not a man accustomed to having his itineraries disrupted by drownings.

On July 27, 1549, they sighted Japan. But they were not permitted to disembark for nearly three weeks. When Xavier and his party of seven finally stepped ashore at Kagoshima on August 15, it was the Feast of the Assumption.

Chapter Three

God, Translated Badly

Xavier's first challenge in Japan was not hostility. It was language.

He could not speak Japanese. He could not read it. He was, by his own rueful admission, like a ‘dumb statue’ among the people, a man with an enormous amount to say and absolutely no means of saying it. His entire communicative capacity rested on Anjiro, who could manage conversational Portuguese but had no formal training in either Buddhist theology or Christian doctrine. The translation arrangement was, from a theological standpoint, catastrophic.

The central problem was the word for God. Christian theology requires a concept of a singular, transcendent, creator deity, a concept for which Japanese Buddhism had no precise equivalent. Anjiro, reaching for the nearest approximation he could find, landed on Dainichi: the Cosmic Buddha of the esoteric Shingon sect, an emanation of universal truth that suffused all existence.

This was not a small mistake. This was the kind of mistake that makes theologians wake up in cold sweats centuries later. For nearly two years, Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Society of Jesus, one of the most formidable intellects in the Catholic missionary world, went about the streets and courts of southern Japan enthusiastically preaching the worship of a Buddhist deity.

The local Buddhist monks, naturally, were delighted. Here was this strange, intense foreigner who had come all the way from India, from Tenjiku, the legendary western land from which the Buddha's teachings had originally flowed, and he was promoting Shingon Buddhism. He dressed oddly, certainly, and some of his theological elaborations were a bit idiosyncratic, but his heart appeared to be in the right place. They welcomed him warmly.

It was not until 1551 that Xavier, likely through conversations with more educated Japanese interlocutors, finally grasped the scale of the error. His response was characteristically dramatic. He abandoned Dainichi entirely, adopted the Latin-Portuguese word Deus (rendered in Japanese as Deusu), and sent his companions into the streets to loudly denounce Dainichi as an invention of the devil.

The monks were no longer delighted. They were furious. The warm welcome evaporated overnight, replaced by a hostility that would shadow the Jesuit mission for decades. In one of history's more elegant pieces of linguistic revenge, the Japanese clergy began mocking the new Christian God by pointing out that Deusu sounded remarkably like dai uso, ‘the great lie.’

Chapter Four

The Education of Francis Xavier

Xavier was a fast learner, and Japan educated him relentlessly.

His first approach had been to replicate what had worked, or at least what had been attempted, in India: present himself as a poor, humble servant of God, dressed in ragged robes, barefoot, embodying the Franciscan ideal of apostolic poverty. In India, poverty signalled holiness. In Japan, poverty signalled poverty. The Japanese despised it. A man who could not maintain a dignified appearance was a man who did not deserve a dignified audience. Xavier's shabby clothing cost him access to power everywhere he went, culminating in a humiliating failed attempt to gain an audience with the Emperor in Kyoto. He arrived in the imperial capital in the winter of 1550–51 to find a city devastated by decades of civil war, an Emperor whose authority was purely ceremonial, and a court that had no interest whatsoever in receiving a ragged foreigner who could not even speak the language.

When Xavier returned from Kyoto in the spring of 1551, he was a different man, or rather, he had decided to present a different version of the same man. He dressed in fine silk robes. He styled himself as the official ambassador of the Portuguese Viceroy of India. He presented the daimyō of Yamaguchi, Ouchi Yoshitaka, with thirteen exotic gifts originally assembled for the Emperor: a striking clock that chimed the hours (an object of profound fascination in a country that had never seen a mechanical timepiece), a musical box, a three-barrelled musket of extraordinary craftsmanship, fine crystal glassware, a mirror, Portuguese wine, spectacles, and bales of brocade, accompanied by official letters on parchment from the Viceroy of India and the Bishop of Goa.

The transformation worked spectacularly. Yoshitaka was so overwhelmed by the gifts that he offered Xavier a massive sum of gold and silver in return. Xavier declined the money, requesting only permission to preach. Yoshitaka, probably surprised by a refusal of gold, issued public decrees granting the missionaries full freedom to evangelise and provided them with an abandoned Buddhist monastery, the Daidō-ji, to serve as their residence and church.

Yamaguchi became Xavier's greatest success. Approximately five hundred people accepted baptism. His method from this point forward was clear: in Japan, you did not win souls from the bottom up. You won them from the top down, through the courts of the daimyō, by demonstrating that Christianity was not a religion of beggars but of kings.

Chapter Five

The Daimyō Calculation

The four daimyō who dealt directly with Xavier during his time in Japan reveal, with almost schematic clarity, the calculation that every feudal lord in Kyushu was running simultaneously. It was a calculation in which God and gunpowder were weighted on the same scale.

Shimazu Takahisa of Kagoshima

Shimazu Takahisa of Kagoshima invited Xavier to his fortress in September 1549, listened to his preaching with apparent interest, accepted gifts including a Bible and a painting of the Madonna and Child that moved him to kneel, and granted permission for his vassals to convert. About a hundred baptisms followed. Then the Portuguese trading ships bypassed Kagoshima the following year and sailed to Hirado instead. Takahisa realised that tolerating the missionaries would not, in fact, guarantee Portuguese commerce. Under pressure from Buddhist monks, he forbade further conversions under penalty of death. The transaction had failed to close.

Matsuura Takanobu of Hirado

Matsuura Takanobu of Hirado watched the Portuguese merchants welcome Xavier with artillery salutes, trumpets, and flags, observed the profound respect these wealthy traders showed the impoverished priest, and drew the obvious conclusion: wherever this man goes, money follows. He granted immediate permission to preach. A hundred converts in twenty days.

Ouchi Yoshitaka of Yamaguchi

Ouchi Yoshitaka of Yamaguchi required two visits. The first, in which Xavier appeared in rags and had his companion read a translated doctrine that explicitly condemned sodomy, resulted in dismissal. Yoshitaka was a man of refined and varied appetites, and a frontal assault on his personal life was not the way to his patronage. The second visit, silk robes, ambassador credentials, spectacular gifts, produced the mission's most successful campaign.

Otomo Yoshishige of Bungo

Otomo Yoshishige of Bungo, twenty-two years old and hungry for foreign weapons and trade, invited Xavier to his capital of Funai after hearing that a Portuguese ship had arrived in his harbour. Xavier arrived in a gaily beflagged procession accompanied by an entourage of fully armed Portuguese merchants. Yoshishige was deeply impressed. He would not formally convert to Christianity for another twenty-seven years, eventually taking the baptismal name Dom Francisco, but from this first meeting he became one of the mission's most powerful and enduring protectors.

The pattern was consistent: daimyō tolerated Christianity to the exact degree that Christianity delivered Portuguese trade. The faith was the price of silk and guns.

Chapter Six

The Grand Strategy, the Grudge, and the Beach

Xavier departed Japan in November 1551, sailing with the Portuguese merchant captain Duarte da Gama. He had been in the country for just over two years. He had baptised roughly a thousand converts, not a transformative number, but enough to establish small congregations in Kagoshima, Hirado, Yamaguchi, and Bungo. More importantly, he had cracked the strategic code: the mission in Japan required cultural adaptation, diplomatic sophistication, mastery of the language, and the visible backing of European prestige. Apostolic poverty was worse than useless. Everything he had learned would be encoded in his letters and passed to the missionaries who followed.

But Xavier had also encountered a theological objection that haunted him. In his disputations with Japanese scholars and monks, one question recurred with devastating persistence: if Christianity was the one true faith, why had the Chinese never heard of it? The Japanese saw China as the origin of civilisation, philosophy, and culture. A religion unknown to China was, by definition, suspect. Xavier concluded that converting the Chinese would remove this objection and trigger mass conversions across Japan. It was a grand strategy of breathtaking ambition: use China to unlock Japan.

He planned to enter China on an official Portuguese diplomatic embassy to the imperial court, travelling with his friend the wealthy merchant Diogo Pereira, who would serve as ambassador while Xavier used the diplomatic cover to preach. It was a brilliant plan. It was destroyed in Malacca by a single man.

Dom Alvaro de Ataíde, the newly appointed captain of the Malacca fortress, harboured a personal grudge against Xavier, the sources differ on its precise nature, but it appears to have involved a combination of jurisdictional jealousy, spite, and Ataíde generally being an unpleasant person. Ataíde confiscated the ship's rudder, confined Pereira, and refused to allow the embassy to proceed. Xavier excommunicated him, which accomplished nothing practical, and continued toward China alone.

Stripped of his diplomatic protection, Xavier reached Shangchuan Island off the coast of Guangdong in September 1552, a desolate sandbar used by Portuguese merchants as a seasonal, clandestine trading station. The Chinese authorities did not permit foreign traders on the mainland, so commerce happened on this grim outpost, after which the Portuguese departed before winter to avoid arrest. Xavier needed a smuggler willing to ferry him across to the mainland. He found a Chinese merchant who agreed in exchange for a colossal sum of pepper worth two hundred cruzados. The merchant took the pepper and never returned.

As November arrived and the trading season ended, the Portuguese ships left. Xavier was stranded in a crude bamboo hut on a windswept beach, attended only by a Chinese student named Antonio and an Indian servant named Christovão. He contracted a violent fever, probably pleurisy, and died in the early hours of December 3, 1552. He was forty-six years old.

When his body was exhumed months later for transfer to Malacca and eventually to Goa, it was said to be uncorrupted, still flexible, still apparently fresh. The miracle sealed his legend. Francis Xavier was canonised in 1622, and his body remains on display in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa to this day, though a rather macabre episode in 1614 saw his right forearm detached and sent to Rome, where it rests in the Church of the Gesù, its hand still raised in the gesture of baptism.

Epilogue

What Remained

Xavier left behind two Jesuits, a handful of converts, and a strategic blueprint. Cosme de Torres, the Spanish priest who had sailed with Xavier from Malacca, took charge of the fledgling mission and ran it for nearly twenty years until his death in 1570. Torres was not a man built for drama. He was methodical, patient, endlessly persistent, and his work was conducted against a backdrop of almost unimaginable chaos: the Sengoku period, Japan's century of civil war, in which alliances shifted, daimyō rose and fell, and entire cities could be sacked between one monsoon season and the next. Torres expanded carefully, establishing small Christian communities across Kyushu, feeding starving populations in war zones, and refining the crucial insight that Xavier had only begun to exploit, that Portuguese trade ships could be directed preferentially to daimyō ports where missionaries were welcomed. By the time Torres died, Japan had approximately thirty thousand Christians.

Francis Xavier spent two years and three months in Japan. He baptised roughly a thousand people. By the conventional metrics of missionary work, it was a modest achievement. By any other measure, it was foundational. The strategic insights Xavier bequeathed to his successors, adapt to the culture, master the language, court the powerful, present Christianity as a faith of authority rather than poverty, became the operating manual for the most ambitious evangelisation campaign in early modern Asia. At its peak, that campaign counted over three hundred thousand converts, controlled a major trading port, operated schools and seminaries, and sent Japanese ambassadors to the courts of Europe. The mission's entanglement with Portuguese commerce was both its greatest asset and its fatal weakness: when the trade could be had without the faith, the faith was expendable.