Story
A vow on the feast of Mary
The Society of Jesus was born on a hill in Paris. On 15 August 1534, at Montmartre, Ignatius of Loyola and six companions, among them, made their first vows together; in 1540 Pope Paul III approved the new order.Fifteen years to the day after Montmartre, on the feast of the Assumption 1549, Xavier came ashore at with the Jesuit priest , the brother and three Japanese Christians, and the mission to Japan began.
Xavier stayed little more than two years, but he left behind the conviction that would shape everything after him. Japanese Catholics remember that he hoped one day to see Japanese bishops leading the Church of their own country.The story of the Jesuit mission is, in a sense, the story of that hope: how close it came, and how it was cut down.
The first generation
When Xavier left, Torres stayed. For nineteen years he led the young Church from , Bungo and the ports of Ōmura and Arima, until he died at his post at Shiki in Amakusa in 1570.Around him gathered a small band of extraordinary men. , a Lisbon-trained surgeon and merchant, gave his fortune to the mission, founded the orphanage and hospital of with Fr Baltasar Gago, and became a Jesuit brother and later a priest.Luís Frois, who spent thirty-four years in Japan, befriended , wrote the mission's annual letters and its first great History of Japan.In , the Italian built the church of the Assumption and opened the , and was so loved that people called him "Urugan Bateren," Father Organtino.
The Jesuits could not have worked without the Japanese who worked with them. , a half-blind travelling singer from , became the mission's great preacher.The dōjuku, lay catechists who lived and travelled with the missionaries, taught and translated; later gave them a recognised place in the ranks of the mission.
Valignano's plan
The man who gave the mission its lasting shape was the Italian Alessandro Valignano, who visited Japan three times between 1579 and 1603.At the end of his first visit he wrote in his Sumario that "of all the peoples of the Orient, we see that only the Japanese are motivated to become Christians of their own free will, convinced by reason, and with the desire for salvation."From that judgement he drew practical conclusions. The missionaries were to learn the language and the manners of the country; at 's suggestion Valignano studied the etiquette of the Zen monasteries and wrote a ceremonial of Japanese courtesy for his men.Japanese reference works call his approach adaptation (tekiō), and Yamakawa's dictionary says it aimed at the independence of the Japanese Church through the training of Japanese priests.
What convinced him was what he saw. At Easter 1581 he was at Takatsuki, the castle town of the Christian lord , where fifteen thousand Catholics walked in the procession; there, Cieslik writes, he met Christians who had chosen the faith "not for any material advantage or because of orders from a feudal lord, but from genuinely religious conviction."Oda Nobunaga received him in Kyoto and several times at Azuchi, and back at Takatsuki for Corpus Christi Valignano baptised two groups, of five hundred and fifteen hundred people.He returned to Kyushu an optimist.
He answered "yes" when his consultation asked whether seminaries should be founded for Japanese boys and Japanese received into the Society.Seminaries opened at Arima and Azuchi, and a college at Funai; Japan became a vice-province in 1581.In 1580 gave to the Society, and the port became the mission's base.In 1582 Valignano sent four boys from the to Rome; Pope received them in 1585, and in 1590 they came home with a European printing press.At Kazusa, Amakusa, Nagasaki and Kyoto it printed some thirty catechisms, devotional books, dictionaries and grammars for the Japanese Church.The first, in 1591 at the college of Kazusa, was a romanised selection from the lives of the saints; at Amakusa followed the catechism Doctrina, a Japanese Imitation of Christ (Contemptus Mundi) and the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, and at Nagasaki, by 1598 or 1599, metal type for the Japanese cursive script, the first recorded movable type used in Japan to print Japanese characters.A Japanese printer trained in Lisbon and , Constantino Dourado, served the press as a dōjuku and was later ordained a priest in exile.The mission meant its books to be read by Japanese, in Japanese. The Heibonsha encyclopedia counts about 200,000 Christians in Japan by the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Under the shadow of the ban
The plan was overtaken by politics. At Hakozaki on 24 July 1587 declared Japan "the land of the gods" and gave the missionaries twenty days to leave; the order could not be obeyed as written, and the missionaries stayed, hidden and patient, while it hung over the Church for ten years.Ten years later, on 5 February 1597, the Jesuit preacher and two Japanese Jesuit companions died on crosses at with the Franciscans and their flock, and Frois, near the end of his life, wrote down what he saw.Yamakawa's dictionary notes that the Jesuits' involvement in trade and defence to support the Church, and friction with other orders, made both Hideyoshi's government and the Tokugawa wary of them.Catholics need not hide that; the missionaries worked inside the world of the Portuguese ship because there was no other way to keep the mission alive, and the price of that world was suspicion.
And still the hope advanced. On 22 September 1601, in the church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Nagasaki, , the grandson of the man who had taken Xavier into his house at Hirado, and Luis Niabara were ordained priests, the first Japanese ever.Twenty years of seminary training had borne its fruit.
Exile, martyrdom and the last priests
At the turn of 1613 to 1614 the Tokugawa outlawed Christianity itself, and that November the missionaries were shipped out of Nagasaki to and .Dozens of Jesuits stayed behind or came back in secret. Kimura spent years hiding in disguise; on 10 September 1622 he was the last to die in the fires of the , beside the Italian Jesuit and fifty-three others.
The hardest blow came in 1633. Under the new torture of the pit, the acting head of the Society in Japan, , gave way after five hours, while beside him the Japanese Jesuit , who as a boy had gone to Rome with the , held firm to death.Japanese Catholics remember both: Nakaura as a martyr, Ferreira as a brother whose fall the Church grieved.
Others refused to give up the hope of a Japanese priesthood even when their own superiors hesitated. was told in 1616 that he could join the Society but would not be ordained; our Kibe page traces the refusal to prejudice against the Japanese students at Macau and to a shortage of funds. He did not give up. He sailed to Goa and from there travelled overland, by way of Persia and Jerusalem, all the way to Rome, was ordained there in 1620, and came home to work in hiding until he died in Edo in July 1639.His young companion Konishi Mansho, who had set out from Macau with him in the autumn of 1616, came home a priest in 1632 after five months adrift in a Chinese junk with two other Japanese priests, the Jesuit Paulo Saitō and the Dominican Jacobo Tomonaga, both of whom were martyred in Nagasaki the next year.Konishi worked in secret around Kyoto and Osaka, at first with Fr Diogo Yūki, who was martyred in 1636; after Kibe's death he was the last priest left, bringing the sacraments to Christians who had no one else;a Jesuit wrote from Tonkin in 1647 that "about three years ago the Japanese priest Mancio Konishi was martyred in the capital."Yamakawa's dictionary dates his martyrdom to 1644 and calls him the last Jesuit; with him the mission came to an end.
The hope fulfilled
The Society was suppressed in 1773 and restored in 1814, and in 1908 Jesuits came back to Japan, where they founded in Tokyo.The hope that Xavier had carried and Valignano had organised was fulfilled in another way. On 30 October 1927 Pius XI consecrated Januarius in St Peter's as the first Japanese bishop, 378 years, the Junshin history notes, after Xavier's landing.When Japanese Catholics today read the names on the Monument, or of the 188 beatified in 2008, many of them are Jesuits: Paul Miki, Sebastião Kimura, Julian Nakaura, Petro Kibe, and the men who died with them.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Christian numbers. About 200,000 in the early seventeenth century is the Heibonsha figure; other estimates differ (Unverified as a precise number).
- Kimura's ordination day. 22 September 1601 (most sources) or 21 September (French Wikipedia). Disputed.
- Kibe's death date. July 1639; the day 4 July is often given but is Unverified.
- Mansho's death. 1644, place Disputed; "last priest" as the sources phrase it.