Goa: the road to Japan

Almost every story of the early Church in Japan passes through a city on the west coast of India. The missionaries sailed to it from Lisbon, studied and were ordained there, and left from it for Malacca, Macao and Nagasaki; Japanese came to it to be baptised, to study, and on their way to Rome. Goa was the capital of the Portuguese Indies, and the seat of the Church for all Portugal's missions in the East.¹²UNESCO, which inscribed its churches and convents on the World Heritage List in 1986, calls them an illustration of "the evangelization of Asia", and quotes the old name for the city: the "Rome of the Orient".¹

Goa had been the second capital of the Muslim kingdom of Bijapur when the Portuguese governor Afonso de Albuquerque took it in 1510.²He built a new city modelled on Lisbon, the Heibonsha encyclopedia says, and made it Portugal's base for trade and for Christian mission in Asia.²At its height, at the end of the sixteenth century, it had perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 people and was called "Golden Goa".²The religious orders came one after another: Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Jesuits, Carmelites and Theatines.¹UNESCO lists the surviving monuments: the Chapel of St Catherine (1510), the church and convent of St Francis of Assisi (1517), Our Lady of the Rosary (1549), the Sé Cathedral (1652), the ruined Church of St Augustine (1602), the Basilica of Bom Jesus (1605) and the Chapel of St Cajetan (1661).¹These buildings, UNESCO says, spread Manueline, Mannerist and Baroque forms "throughout the countries of Asia where Catholic missions were established", built with local materials into what became a distinct Indo-Portuguese style.¹

Francis Xavier, one of the first companions of St Ignatius, sailed from Lisbon in 1541 at the request of King João III and reached Goa in 1542 as papal envoy and head of the Jesuits in the East.³⁴From Goa he worked along the coasts of southern India and as far as Malacca and the Moluccas.³⁴At Malacca, at the end of 1547, he met a Japanese from Kagoshima named Anjirō, and his heart turned to Japan.³⁵

Xavier sent Anjirō and the two Japanese with him to the College of St Paul at Goa to learn Portuguese and the faith.⁵There, at Pentecost 1548, which Kadota dates to 20 May, the bishop baptised them. Anjirō took the name Paulo de Santa Fé, Paul of the Holy Faith; the French Jesuit Charlevoix says the name recalled the house that had sheltered him, known both as the College of St Paul and the Seminary of the Holy Faith.⁵His companions became João and António. Kadota calls him the first Japanese Christian.⁵

At Goa the three lived with the Jesuit brothers, wore their black robes and ate in their refectory. Asked what they liked best in Christianity, they answered: confession and Communion.⁵Heibonsha notes that the façade of the church of St Paul's College, where Anjirō and his companions were baptised, still stands among the ruins of Old Goa.²

Among the young men at St Paul's in those years was a Portuguese novice who had landed at Goa on 9 October 1548, Luís Fróis. He studied beside students from Africa, Abyssinia, Malaya, China and India, and Kotobank's encyclopedias say he met both Xavier and Anjirō there.⁶In December 1560, as a young secretary at Goa, he apologised to a friend in Coimbra for a short letter: he still had to get off the letters for seven ships, "one for Japan".⁶He was ordained priest at Goa in 1561, and on 6 July 1563 he landed at last at Yokoseura in Kyushu; he spent most of the rest of his life in Japan and became the mission's great historian.⁶

Cosme de Torres, a Spanish priest who had met Xavier at Amboina in 1546, had sailed on to India, taken a parish in Goa and entered the Society of Jesus there in 1548.⁷Xavier set him to teach the three Japanese catechumens again, so that he might learn their language and ways; in January 1549 Paul of the Holy Faith made the Spiritual Exercises under him.⁵⁷

On Palm Sunday 1549 the party left Goa: Xavier, Father Cosme de Torres and Brother Juan Fernández, the three Japanese, and two servants, Manuel, a Chinese, and Amador, from Malabar.⁵On 15 August 1549, the feast of the Assumption, they landed at Kagoshima.⁵⁷When Xavier came to Ōuchi Yoshitaka at Yamaguchi in 1551, he carried official letters from Goa, among them one from the Bishop of Goa.³He went back to India that year, and in 1552 left Goa again for China; he died on the island of Shangchuan on 3 December 1552 (Schurhammer; Matsuda in Nipponica gives 2 December).³⁴

For the rest of the century Goa was the place from which Japan was staffed. Organtino Gnecchi-Soldo, who had begged to be sent east on foot, reached Goa in 1567 as head of St Paul's College, and in 1570 sailed on to Japan with the new superior, Francisco Cabral.⁸Gaspar Vilela, one of the early Jesuits in Japan, wrote from Goa on 4 February 1571 a letter that later appeared in the Évora Cartas, one of the sources for the founding of Nagasaki.⁹

In 1582 the Visitor Alessandro Valignano sent four boys from the seminary at Arima to Rome, the Tenshō embassy.¹⁰After a hard voyage they landed, by a pilot's error, in southern India, and at Goa Valignano learned that he had been made Provincial of India and could go no further.¹⁰¹¹The boys went on round the Cape of Good Hope and landed at Lisbon on 11 August 1584; Pope Gregory XIII received them in 1585.¹⁰

On the way home they spent seven months at Mozambique and at Goa met Valignano again; Heibonsha dates the Goa visits to 1583 and 1587.¹⁰²He was to go back with them to Japan as ambassador of the Viceroy of India, Duarte de Meneses, to Toyotomi Hideyoshi.¹⁰¹¹With them went a European printing press with movable type, and a young Japanese, Constantino Dourado, who had been trained in printing at Lisbon and Goa and who would one day be ordained a priest in exile.¹²Hideyoshi received the embassy in Kyoto on 3 March 1591, pleased with the gifts, but he would not withdraw his edict against the padres.¹³

After 1614 Goa became a stage on a different road. Petro Kasui Kibe, refused ordination at Macao, left there with Miguel Minoes and Konishi Mansho in the autumn of 1616 and sailed by way of Malacca to Goa, where the Oita diocese puts his arrival about May 1617.¹⁴From Goa Minoes and Mansho went on to Europe by sea; Kibe went alone, overland through Persia, and was in Jerusalem by April 1618 and ordained in Rome in 1620.¹⁴Mansho, who had been about sixteen when he left Macao, entered the Jesuit novitiate of Sant'Andrea in Rome in 1623, and came home a priest in 1632.¹⁵

On the way home Kibe sailed from Lisbon on 25 March 1623 with the India fleet that carried Patriarch Afonso Mendes, bound for Ethiopia. He reached Goa on 28 May 1624, the day the Patriarch entered the city.¹⁴The ships for Malacca and Macao had already left, and in about April 1625 he sailed from Goa for Manila, the first of many attempts to reach Japan.¹⁴

Xavier's body was brought from Shangchuan to Goa, and it rests today in the Basilica of Bom Jesus; his right arm was taken to the Gesù in Rome.⁴He was canonised in 1622.⁴UNESCO singles out the tomb, commissioned in 1665 by Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Tuscany and made in Florence with bronze work by Giovanni Battista Foggini: "the tomb of the apostle of India and Japan," it says, "symbolizes an event of universal significance of the influence of the Catholic religion in the Asian world in the modern period."¹The feast of St Francis Xavier and the exposition of his relics are still kept there.¹

Goa's glory faded in the seventeenth century, Heibonsha says, with cholera, malaria and typhus, and the government moved to Panjim around 1760.²Portuguese rule lasted until 1961.¹²But the churches remained.

For Japanese Catholics the city is part of the family history. The first Japanese Christian was baptised there; the men who first preached in Kagoshima, Yamaguchi and Kyoto left from there; the envoys of the Kirishitan lords passed through it twice; and one of Japan's great martyr priests used it as a stepping stone both ways. And the saint who began it all lies there still, in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, among the people of the "Rome of the Orient".