The Tenshō Embassy: Japanese Princes in Renaissance Europe

Chapter One

The Impresario

Alessandro Valignano had a problem that only spectacle could solve.

It was late 1581, and the Italian Jesuit Visitor-General, aristocratic, imposing, possessed of an organisational mind that would have served him well running a Renaissance city-state, was nearing the end of his first tour of Japan. What he had found there was simultaneously the most promising and the most precarious mission in the entire Society of Jesus. A hundred and fifty thousand converts. Seventy-five Jesuits stretched impossibly thin across an archipelago of feudal domains. A financial operation balanced on the knife-edge of the annual Macao silk trade. And, back in Rome and Lisbon and Madrid, almost total ignorance of what was actually happening.

European awareness of Japan in the early 1580s was confined to the letters that missionaries sent home, dispatches that were printed, circulated among the Jesuit colleges, and read by a vanishingly small audience of clergy and educated laypeople. The courts of Europe knew that Japan existed. They knew, vaguely, that conversions were occurring. What they did not know, what they could not know, from ink on paper, was that the Japanese were anything other than another variety of exotic heathen, interchangeable with the peoples of India or Brazil or the Moluccas.

Valignano needed Europe to understand that Japan was different. That its people were refined, educated, governed by codes of honour and etiquette at least as elaborate as anything in Castile or Tuscany. That the mission there was not a charity case among savages but a sophisticated enterprise among equals. And he needed money. The annual papal subvention of four thousand ducats was laughably inadequate for an operation of this scale.

He could write more letters. He could send reports. Or he could send the Japanese themselves.

By December 1581, the plan was finalised. Four boys from the Christian noble families of Kyushu, young enough to be impressionable, old enough to be presentable, wellborn enough to be credible as ambassadors, would travel to Europe as official envoys of the three most powerful Christian daimyō on the island. They would meet the King of Spain. They would meet the Pope. They would demonstrate, in their persons, that Japan was a civilisation worthy of investment.

It was a publicity campaign dressed in diplomatic robes. Valignano was, among his many other talents, a showman.

Chapter Two

The Four Boys

The ambassadors were selected with the same care a casting director might bring to a prestige production. Each needed noble blood, a connection to one of the sponsoring daimyō, and the poise to survive years of public scrutiny in foreign courts. They were all approximately fifteen or sixteen years old, old enough to have absorbed the manners of their class, young enough to be shaped by what they saw.

Mancio Itō, the principal legate, carried the most distinguished lineage. He was a cousin of the dispossessed daimyō of Hyūga and a kinsman of Ōtomo Yoshishige, known by his Buddhist name Sōrin, the formidable lord of Bungo who had been one of the Jesuits' most powerful protectors for three decades. Mancio had been educated at the Jesuit seminary in Arima, and he possessed the quiet, dignified bearing that Valignano considered essential. He was the face of the enterprise.

Miguel Chijiwa served as co-legate, representing both the house of Arima and the house of Ōmura. He was a cousin of Arima Harunobu and a nephew of Ōmura Sumitada, the same Sumitada who, in 1563, had become the first Japanese daimyō to accept baptism and who, in 1580, had ceded the port of Nagasaki to the Society of Jesus. Miguel's dual family connections gave the embassy a broader political base, linking it to two of the three sponsoring domains through a single envoy.

Julião Nakaura and Martinho Hara travelled as companions and attachés, lower in protocol rank but integral to the delegation. Both were of noble birth, both were seminary-educated, and both would prove themselves more than capable of holding their own in the palaces and cathedrals of Europe.

Accompanying the boys was a small retinue that included Father Diogo de Mesquita as tutor and interpreter, Brother Jorge de Loyola, a Japanese Jesuit whose assignment was to ensure the boys did not forget their native language during years abroad, and several Japanese servants, among them Constantino Dourado and Augustino. Valignano himself led the party as far as Goa, where ecclesiastical politics would tear him away from his own creation.

Chapter Three

Eastward to the West

The embassy departed Nagasaki on February 20, 1582, aboard a Portuguese vessel sailing the established trade route that linked Japan to the vast maritime network of the Estado da Índia. The journey to Europe would take two years, five months, and twenty days. Every mile of it followed the path of monsoons, currents, and the fortified chain of Portuguese trading posts that stretched from Nagasaki to Lisbon like a string of pearls scattered across half the circumference of the earth.

They reached Macao in March, where the local bishop and the Jesuit community received them warmly. From Macao they sailed south through the South China Sea, past the coasts of Cochinchina, Cambodia, Champa, and Siam, names that to their young ears must have sounded like entries in a catalogue of the unknowable, navigating the Straits of Singapore and crossing to Malacca. From Malacca, they turned west across the open Indian Ocean, rounded Ceylon, and reached Cochin on the Malabar Coast of India in April 1583, where they wintered while waiting for the monsoon to shift.

In late 1583, they arrived in Goa, the jewel of Portuguese Asia, a city of baroque churches and tropical heat on the western coast of India, from which the Viceroy administered an empire of trade routes, fortresses, and ambitions that spanned from Mozambique to Macau. It was here that Valignano received orders that changed the expedition's leadership. He had been appointed Jesuit Provincial of India and was strictly required to remain in Goa. The man who had conceived the embassy, recruited the boys, designed every detail of their presentation, would not be there when they met the Pope.

Valignano handled this with characteristic thoroughness. He appointed Father Nuno Rodrigues to lead the delegation through Europe and compiled a document of fifty-five detailed instructions governing every aspect of the boys' conduct: how they should dress, what they should be shown, what they should eat, when they should sleep. The instructions were also explicit about what the boys should not see. Europe, Valignano knew, was not uniformly edifying. The ambassadors were to be presented with the grandeur of Christian civilisation. They were to be shielded from its scandals.

From Goa, the embassy sailed across the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, stopped at the island of St. Helena to resupply, and turned north through the Atlantic. On August 10, 1584, they sighted Lisbon.

They had been at sea for nearly two and a half years. They were about to become the most famous teenagers in Europe.

Chapter Four

Lisbon: The Script Goes Out the Window

Valignano's plan for the embassy's European reception had been precise. The boys were to be housed quietly in Jesuit residences, presented to heads of state in controlled settings, and kept away from the kind of public attention that might overwhelm them or expose them to unwelcome scrutiny. It was, in its way, a deeply Jesuitical plan, everything managed, everything calibrated. Lisbon ignored it entirely.

The moment the Japanese ambassadors stepped ashore, the city erupted. Cardinal Albert of Austria, the royal governor of Portugal, received them with the full pomp normally reserved for the highest dignitaries of church and state. There were formal processions. There were banquets. There were crowds who turned out to see these extraordinary visitors from the other side of the world, these young men whose very existence was proof that the Portuguese maritime enterprise, the Estado da Índia, that sprawling chain of forts and trading posts and churches and warehouses, actually worked.

The boys, for their part, were overwhelmed. They had grown up in the wooden castles and thatched temples of Kyushu, in a country where the largest structures were Buddhist pagodas and fortress towers. Lisbon's harbour, crowded with ships of every size and origin, caravels, carracks, galleons, the vessels that connected Portugal to Africa, India, China, Japan, and Brazil, was unlike anything they had ever seen. The stone churches, the city walls, the sheer vertical mass of European architecture pressed upon them with the force of revelation. Everything was stone. Everything was enormous. Everything was permanent in a way that Japanese wooden architecture, rebuilt after every fire and earthquake, deliberately was not.

Chapter Five

The Embrace of Kings

On September 5, 1584, the delegation departed for Madrid. Philip II of Spain, who also ruled Portugal through the Iberian Union that had joined the two crowns in 1580, was at the peak of his power. He commanded the largest empire the world had ever seen, spanning from the Philippines (named for his father) to Peru, from the Netherlands to Naples. His court was the gravitational centre of Catholic Europe, and the Japanese embassy was exactly the kind of exotic diplomatic triumph he relished.

Philip received the boys with extraordinary warmth. When Mancio Itō approached to kiss the king's hand, following the standard protocol for foreign ambassadors, Philip pulled him into an embrace instead, and repeated the gesture with each of the other three. This was not standard protocol. This was a king making a point: these were not tributaries or curiosities. These were ambassadors from a civilisation that mattered.

The delegation spent time marvelling at the Escorial, Philip's monumental palace-monastery north of Madrid, at once a royal residence, a library, a mausoleum, and a statement of ambition so overwhelming that it still exhausts visitors today. Its vast library alone, with its painted ceilings and thousands of volumes, must have presented the seminarians from Arima with a vision of accumulated knowledge on a scale they had never contemplated. They were received by the Archbishop of Toledo and a procession of Spanish grandees, each audience reinforcing the message that Valignano had engineered.

Chapter Six

Rome: Tears and Trumpets

From Spain, the embassy sailed to Italy, landing at Livorno on March 1, 1585. The Grand Duke of Tuscany hosted them in Pisa and Florence with the kind of lavish hospitality that Italian city-states had been perfecting for centuries. But the real destination was Rome, and they arrived there on March 22.

The papal audience the following day was the climax of the entire enterprise, the scene that Valignano had designed the embassy to produce, even though he was six thousand miles away and could only imagine it.

The boys entered Rome from the Porta del Popolo in a procession that transformed the streets into theatre. They rode horses draped in black and gold velvet. They wore their ceremonial Japanese robes, garments of a cut and fabric that no Roman had ever seen, and carried their katana at their sides. The Pope's Swiss Guard flanked them. Light cavalry escorted them. Cardinals and ambassadors from across Europe rode in their train. The citizens of Rome lined the route to stare at these astonishing visitors from the edge of the known world.

In the Aula Regia, before the assembled consistory of cardinals, ambassadors, and prelates, three of the four boys — Julião Nakaura was ill with a fever and had been dispatched for a private audience earlier — approached the papal throne. They knelt. They kissed the feet of Pope Gregory XIII.

Gregory wept. He embraced each of the boys, his face streaming with tears, overcome by the sight of these young noblemen from an island thirty thousand miles away, kneeling before the Vicar of Christ. For a Pope who had spent his pontificate strengthening the global reach of the Catholic Church, reforming the calendar, funding missions, building seminaries, the Tenshō Embassy was living proof that the work was bearing fruit.

Letters from the three Christian daimyō of Kyushu were read aloud in Japanese and then translated into Italian. A Portuguese Jesuit named Gonçalves delivered a thirty-minute oration in Latin, praising the Japanese conversions. And in a gesture of extraordinary honour, a privilege normally reserved for the ambassadors of emperors, Gregory permitted Mancio and Miguel to carry the train of his robes as the papal party withdrew from the chamber.

Days later, Gregory XIII was dead. The boys stayed on to witness the coronation of his successor, Sixtus V, who proved equally charmed. Before leaving Rome, the four ambassadors were granted the titles of Knights of the Golden Spur and admitted as patricians, citizens, of the Eternal City. Japanese teenagers, holding Roman citizenship, knighted by the Pope, carrying European titles back to a feudal archipelago in the Pacific. The sixteenth century was not a time that worried much about cognitive dissonance.

Chapter Seven

The Grand Tour

From Rome, the embassy continued through Italy in a procession of civic receptions that would exhaust a modern diplomat, let alone four boys still shy of twenty. Venice overwhelmed them with the splendour of its canals, its basilica, and its arsenal, the largest industrial complex in Europe, where galleys were assembled on something approaching an assembly line. The Venetians, long accustomed to exotic visitors from their trading empire in the eastern Mediterranean, received the Japanese with characteristic poise, but even they were impressed.

In Milan, the embassy met the governor of Spanish Lombardy and toured the cathedral, still unfinished, as it had been for two centuries and would be for two more, a building so encrusted with spires and statuary that it must have seemed to the boys like an entire mountain range carved from marble. In Genoa, they were fêted by the republic's mercantile aristocracy before boarding a galley back to Spain on August 8, 1585.

Throughout the Italian tour, European observers noted the same qualities with something approaching astonishment: the boys' refined manners, their composure, their courtesy, their complete absence of what Europeans expected from non-Europeans and called “barbarism.” This was precisely the reaction Valignano had engineered. These boys were not specimens. They were arguments, living proof that Japanese civilisation was sophisticated, that its people were capable of learning and grace, and that the investment in the Japanese mission was an investment in a society that could, in time, become fully Christian without ceasing to be fully Japanese.

The European public devoured every detail. Within two years of the embassy's arrival, at least eighty pamphlets, booklets, and printed gazettes describing the Japanese visitors had been published across the continent. These publications catalogued the boys' clothing, their customs, their table manners, their responses to European marvels. Japan, previously a geographical abstraction mentioned in a handful of Jesuit letters, was suddenly a real place, populated by real people who wore silk and carried swords and knelt before the Pope with a dignity that put half the European nobility to shame.

Chapter Eight

The Long Way Home

The return journey began from Lisbon on April 13, 1586, and it was gruelling. The delegation, now swollen to include seventeen Jesuits heading for the Asian missions, sailed south through the Atlantic, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and became stranded in Madagascar for months, waiting for monsoon winds that refused to cooperate. They reached Goa in May 1587, where the boys were reunited with Valignano after a separation of nearly four years.

From Goa, they departed in April 1588 and arrived in Macao in July. And there, the embassy stalled.

The delay in Macao stretched to nearly two years, and the reasons were not logistical. Alarming news had been filtering eastward along the Portuguese trade network, each report worse than the last. In July 1587, Toyotomi Hideyoshi had issued his edict of expulsion against the Christian missionaries. Nagasaki had been confiscated from the Jesuits. The political climate that had made the embassy possible, the alliance of Christian daimyō, the toleration of the mission, the open practice of the faith, was disintegrating.

The boys had left a Japan where Christianity was ascendant. They were returning to a Japan where it was under siege.

During the long wait in Macao, however, the embassy produced one of its most enduring legacies. The movable-type printing press that the delegation had acquired in Europe, and whose operation had been taught to Brother Jorge de Loyola and the catechist Constantino Dourado during the stopover in Goa, was assembled and put to use. The boys themselves assisted Valignano in the printing work, producing texts that would soon travel with them to Japan and inaugurate a revolution in Japanese publishing.

The embassy finally departed Macao on June 23, 1590, and arrived in Nagasaki on July 21. They had been gone for eight years and five months. They had left as boys. They returned as men, carrying a printing press, European musical instruments, a harpsichord, a harp, a violin, a lute, maps, books, and memories of a world their countrymen could barely imagine.

Chapter Nine

A Changed Country

Three facts defined the homeland they re-entered.

First, the political landscape had been transformed. Oda Nobunaga, the warlord who had favoured the Jesuits, tolerated Christianity, and provided the military muscle that kept the mission's enemies at bay, had been assassinated in June 1582, just four months after the embassy's departure. In his place, his former general Toyotomi Hideyoshi had completed the military unification of Japan with a ruthlessness and strategic brilliance that compressed decades of work into a few violent years.

Second, the sponsors were gone. Of the three Christian daimyō who had lent the embassy its legitimacy, two, Ōmura Sumitada and Ōtomo Sōrin, had died in 1587. The remaining sponsor, Arima Harunobu, was politically diminished and operating under growing pressure.

Third, and most consequentially, Christianity was now officially proscribed. Hideyoshi's 1587 edict had branded it a pernicious doctrine, ordered the expulsion of all foreign priests, and confiscated the Jesuit-controlled port of Nagasaki. The edict was not being rigorously enforced, Hideyoshi still wanted Portuguese trade, and the Jesuits were still useful as commercial intermediaries, but the ambiguity was itself a kind of torment. The missionaries remained, but they remained at the pleasure of a man who had declared their religion illegal.

Valignano, who had been thwarted in Goa and forced to watch his embassy's European triumph from afar, now executed one final masterstroke of diplomatic creativity. He could not return to Japan as a Jesuit inspector, the edict forbade it. So he returned as the official ambassador of the Portuguese Viceroy of India, carrying a letter and extravagant gifts for Hideyoshi: a silver-harnessed Arabian stallion, gold-ornamented Milanese armour, a military tent, and a mechanical clock. The diplomatic cover was transparent, but it gave Hideyoshi the pretext he needed to receive the delegation without appearing to reverse his own policy.

Chapter Ten

Playing for the Warlord

On March 3, 1591, the embassy was formally received at Hideyoshi's magnificent Jurakutei palace in Kyoto. The four ambassadors appeared dressed in European fashion, a deliberate choice, presenting themselves as cosmopolitan travellers rather than mere Japanese converts. Hideyoshi was delighted by the gifts, particularly the armour and the clock, and the formal audience passed with diplomatic success.

What followed was more revealing. After the official meal, Hideyoshi dropped the formality, dressed casually, and spent time chatting with the returning travellers. He was genuinely curious about what they had seen. The courts of Europe. The cities. The ships. The churches. He questioned them with the sharp attention of a man who understood that knowledge of the outside world was strategic power.

Hideyoshi recognised Mancio Itō specifically, noting that he had recently restored Mancio's relatives to their lands in Hyūga. He invited the young man to remain at court in his personal service, an offer of considerable prestige and a potential route to political influence. Mancio, who had already resolved to enter the Jesuit novitiate, declined with exquisite tact: to leave Valignano, who had raised him like a father, would be an act of unfilial disloyalty. Hideyoshi, who understood filial loyalty better than most concepts, accepted the refusal without pressing.

The embassy had secured Valignano's return to Japan, Hideyoshi's continued unofficial toleration of the missionaries, and a personal connection between the returning ambassadors and the most powerful man in the country. What it had not secured was a reversal of the 1587 edict. Christianity remained officially banned. The Jesuits remained officially expelled. The space in which the mission operated was shrinking, and everyone in the room at Jurakutei knew it.

The boys played their European instruments for Hideyoshi, the harpsichord, the harp, the violin, the lute. He was so enchanted that he made them play three times.

Chapter Eleven

Four Fates

All four ambassadors entered the Society of Jesus around 1592, honouring the commitment they had expressed to Hideyoshi. From that point, their lives diverged along trajectories that map, with almost allegorical precision, the possible fates available to Japanese Christians in the decades of persecution that followed.

Mancio Itō, the principal legate, was ordained a priest. He used his diplomatic skills and his personal connection to the Ōtomo house to mediate between the Church and the daimyō of Bungo, achieving a temporary reconciliation that was one of the last diplomatic successes of the mission. He died of illness in 1612, at roughly forty-five, two years before the definitive expulsion edict that would have forced him to choose between exile and martyrdom. Of the four, his was the gentlest exit: death by natural causes, in his own country, with his faith intact.

Miguel Chijiwa, the co-legate who had represented both Arima and Ōmura, took a different path. He entered the Jesuit order but left it soon after. By 1603, he had formally renounced Christianity, the only one of the four to apostatise. The sources are silent on his reasons, and later Jesuit accounts treat his defection with a brevity that suggests embarrassment rather than understanding. He disappears from the historical record after 1603, his fate unknown.

Martinho Hara was ordained and worked in Nagasaki until the 1614 expulsion edict forced him into exile in Macao. He spent his final fifteen years in the Jesuit community there, preaching and hearing confessions among the Portuguese and the diaspora of Japanese Christians who had washed up on the China coast. He was assigned to assist the great linguist Father João Rodrigues in compiling a history of Christianity in Japan, but his declining health prevented him from contributing substantially to the project. He died in Macao in 1629.

Julião Nakaura, the boy who had missed the great papal audience because of a fever, chose the most dangerous path. He was ordained a priest and, when the persecution intensified, refused to leave Japan. For years he operated underground, ministering to the hidden Christian communities in conditions of constant danger, moving between safe houses, celebrating secret masses, baptising and burying in the shadows. He was finally captured by the Tokugawa authorities in the early 1630s. On October 18, 1633, in Nagasaki, the city from which he had sailed as a boy of fifteen, Julião Nakaura was executed by ana-tsurushi, the torture of the pit. The victim was suspended upside-down over a hole in the ground, small incisions made behind the ears to allow the blood to drain slowly, prolonging consciousness and agony for hours or even days. It was a method designed not merely to kill but to break, to force apostasy through unbearable suffering. Nakaura did not break. He was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2008.

Chapter Twelve

What They Carried Home

The most tangible legacy of the Tenshō Embassy arrived in Japan in a set of wooden crates. The movable-type printing press that the delegation brought from Europe, refined during the long stopover in Macao, inaugurated a twenty-four-year revolution in Japanese publishing.

The Jesuit Mission Press, operating first in Katsusa, then Amakusa, and finally Nagasaki, produced an extraordinary body of work. To train European missionaries in Japanese, it printed João Rodrigues's Arte da Lingoa de Iapam, a comprehensive grammar of the Japanese language, and the Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam, a pioneering Japanese-Portuguese dictionary that remains an invaluable linguistic resource to this day. To provide reading material for Japanese converts, it published colloquial adaptations of secular Japanese classics: the Heike Monogatari, the Taiheiki, and Aesop's Fables rendered in Japanese, alongside Thomas à Kempis's Imitatio Christi. The press introduced copperplate engraving to Japan, popularised furigana, the small phonetic characters printed alongside difficult kanji to aid reading, and pioneered the use of diacritical marks for voiced consonants.

The press operated until the definitive expulsion of 1614, after which it was dismantled and shipped to Macao. Its surviving publications are among the rarest and most prized artefacts of the Nanban period.

The embassy also carried home Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas, a work that presented the entire known world in a systematic collection of maps. Its arrival in Japan influenced Japanese cartography and introduced a European conception of global geography that challenged existing Chinese-derived models. In the other direction, the boys' visit directly inspired the Milanese cartographer Urbano Monte to produce a new map of Japan in 1589, correcting European misconceptions and adding detail drawn from conversations with the ambassadors themselves.

Chapter Thirteen

The Tragedy of Timing

Valignano conceived the embassy at the high-water mark of Japanese Christianity: a hundred and fifty thousand converts, powerful daimyō sponsors, a Jesuit-controlled port, an expanding network of churches and seminaries. By the time the boys returned, the tide had turned. Within three decades of their homecoming, the mission would be destroyed, the converts driven underground, the printing press dismantled, the instruments silenced, and the very memory of what the embassy had accomplished systematically erased by a regime that regarded foreign contact as an existential threat.

In Europe, the embassy's impact endured. Japan was permanently inscribed on the Western mental map, not as a vague rumour from Jesuit letters but as a real civilisation, attested to by living witnesses, populated by people who could ride European horses, play European instruments, kneel before the Pope with a composure that impressed hardened diplomats, and debate theology in Latin. The eighty pamphlets became hundreds of references.

In Japan, the legacy was buried. The printing press was gone. The books were burned or hidden. The faith that had sent four boys around the world was driven into cellars and mountain villages, where it survived in garbled prayers and concealed icons for two hundred and fifty years.