Kirishitan-ban: The Jesuit Mission Press in Japan, 1590 to 1614

The missionaries had always needed books. Before 1590, texts of the faith went from hand to hand as manuscripts and were copied by hand, even though Japan had its own tradition of woodblock printing.⁵As early as July 1551 Francis Xavier wrote to Goa that a life of Christ up to the Ascension, with an account of the Last Judgement, had been translated into Japanese and written out in Latin letters.⁵By the time of the Visitor Alessandro Valignano there were far too few priests for the work, and, as Michael Cooper puts it, a European press was brought in "so that the written word could help to spread the Christian cause."⁴

Valignano asked the Tenshō embassy, the four boys from the Arima seminary who went to Rome in 1582, to bring back a European printing press with movable type.³¹He did not wait for Japan to use it. With the press came a trained printer, the Italian Brother Giovanni Battista Pesce, and at Macao, where Valignano and the boys were held up by Hideyoshi's edict of 1587, he set the press up and printed two books there before sailing.²⁹One was the Latin dialogue on the embassy, De Missione Legatorum Iaponensium, written for Japanese students.²⁹

With Valignano also came a Japanese who had learned to print. James Harry Morris, following Peter Kornicki and others, names him as Constantino Dourado, born in 1567, who travelled with the embassy and was trained in Lisbon and Goa. He served the mission as a dōjuku, a lay catechist of the Society, and was ordained priest in exile after 1614.⁵Valignano reached Nagasaki on 21 July 1590.²

The first book printed in Japan on a European press came out in 1591 at the Jesuit college at Kazusa, on the Shimabara peninsula in Arima's lands. It was a romanised selection from the lives of the saints, known in Japanese as 『サントスの御作業のうち抜書』 (Santosu no gosagyō no uchi nukigaki, "Extracts from the Acts of the Saints").¹The Japanese reference works agree that this was the beginning of the "Kirishitan-ban," the name now given to the books of the Japanese Jesuit press.¹The principal catechism, the Doctrina Christan, was first printed at Kazusa in 1591, then at Amakusa in 1592 and at Nagasaki in 1600, in both Roman letters and Japanese script.⁵⁷Four editions survive, two in Roman letters (1592 and 1600) and two in Japanese characters (about 1591 and 1600).⁷

The Jesuits had good reason to put the catechism first. Xavier and his successors had worked, with the help of Japanese Christians, to gather the teaching into a proper book of doctrine, and it was the book the mission most needed.⁷Morris notes that Valignano intended the Doctrina for use in the seminaries, and that it and the Myōtei mondō of the Japanese Jesuit Fabian seem to have been the most widely spread Christian texts of the period.⁵

War and persecution kept the press moving.¹Soon after the first printing it was moved to the Jesuit college on Amakusa.⁶The books printed there between 1592 and 1596 are known as the Amakusa editions. Most are in Roman letters.⁶The earliest, of 1592, are the Doctrina, the Fides no dōshi (ヒデスの導師, the "Guide of Faith") and a colloquial version of the Tale of the Heike.⁶The Heike was prepared by the Japanese brother Fabian Fukan, on the missionaries' orders, as a textbook of Japanese language and history, in the form of a dialogue in which an old blind reciter tells the story in the spoken language of the day. The only surviving copy is bound with the Japanese Aesop's Fables of 1593 and is in the British Library.⁸

Amakusa also printed a Latin grammar by Manuel Álvares (1594), a Latin, Portuguese and Japanese dictionary, the Contemptus Mundi (the Japanese Imitation of Christ, probably printed at Amakusa), and the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola.⁶¹Valignano had other textbooks prepared for the colleges. Three books on philosophy and theology by Father Pedro Gómez, a former colleague of the Coimbra philosopher Pedro da Fonseca, came off the press between 1592 and 1595, and Valignano chose for Latin the Christiani Pueri Institutio of the Jesuit Juan Bonifacio.²

About 1598 the press moved again, to the Jesuit college at Nagasaki.⁶The first books had been printed with wooden type. By 1598 or 1599 a metal type for the Japanese cursive script had been made, the first recorded movable type used in Japan to print texts in Japanese characters.⁵Romanised books were useful to the missionaries but little use to ordinary believers or to Japanese helpers who could not read Roman letters, so after some trial and error Valignano changed his view and books were printed in Japanese script as well.⁵The choice of words was as careful as the choice of script. For the essential points of doctrine the books kept Latin and Portuguese terms in transliteration, and used Buddhist words elsewhere where they could. The missionaries had learned that when they used Buddhist terms for the heart of the faith, they were taken to be preaching a new kind of Buddhism. The transliterated words, in turn, were strange to Japanese readers and listeners and had to be explained.⁵Morris adds, after the scholar Orii Yoshimi, that the Jesuit books tended to leave out doctrines that were controversial or easily misunderstood, and added explanations to their translations.⁵With this press the Jesuits also introduced into Japanese printing the small reading marks beside the characters (furigana) and the mark for the "p" sounds.⁵

Nagasaki produced some of the finest books of the press. In 1598 came the Rakuyōshū, a dictionary of Chinese characters in three parts, arranged by sound, by Japanese reading and by radical.⁸In 1599 came the Guia do Pecador, a Japanese abridgement of the Dominican Luis de Granada's Guide for Sinners, printed in metal type in Japanese script.⁸Heibonsha's historian Ide Katsumi calls it the masterpiece of Kirishitan literature.¹In 1600 the press printed a Japanese anthology, the Wakan rōeishū.¹Cooper notes that the press printed lives of the saints, a liturgical handbook (the only book of the press printed in two colours), and the writings of Thomas à Kempis and Luis de Granada in translation.⁴

Cooper counts the works on the Japanese language as the most lasting products of the press.⁴In 1603 and 1604 it published the Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam, a Japanese and Portuguese dictionary of 32,798 entries, compiled by a committee of Portuguese and Japanese Jesuits for newly arrived missionaries.⁴⁸It marks words as poetic, literary, vulgar, or used by women or children, distinguishes the speech of Kyoto from that of Kyushu, gives 362 proverbs, and defines Buddhist and Shinto terms, in Cooper's words, "objectively without adverse comment."⁴Only four copies are known today.⁴Because it records the spoken language, Cooper notes, it preserves words found nowhere else and shows how Japanese was pronounced four centuries ago.⁴The press also published João Rodrigues's Arte da Lingoa de Iapam, a grammar of Japanese, at Nagasaki between 1604 and 1608.⁴

There were plans to do more. Two more presses sent to Japan in 1595 were lost in a shipwreck.⁵In 1610 a Contemptus Mundi was printed at Kyoto with wooden movable type of Japanese style.¹The printing came to an end in Japan between 1611 and 1614.¹After the general ban of 1614, the press was handed over to Manila.¹

How much did it print? Nikkoku counts twenty-nine works. Heibonsha and Nipponica count thirty-one works, and Cooper also gives thirty-one titles. Britannica counts thirty-two.¹⁴The surviving copies number some seventy-three to seventy-five, scattered one or a few at a time through the world.¹Most are in the British Library, Oxford, the Vatican Library, the Tenri Library, the Tōyō Bunko and the old Beitang library in Beijing.¹Two more were found at Venice as late as 1980.¹

For the Church the press was a tool of mission. Morris suggests that the spread of printed books, with as many as a hundred titles, must have deepened the theological knowledge of Japanese brothers, dōjuku and lay assistants, and that this knowledge reached the converts.⁵For Japanese scholars the books are a treasure for another reason. Written in Roman letters, kana and kanji, in Japanese and in European languages, they are now prized as "Kirishitan materials," because they show how Japanese was spoken and pronounced at the end of the sixteenth century.¹Nipponica concludes that the press brought something new and unique to the history of the Japanese book: a meeting of Japanese and Western forms.¹Japanese experts have now published facsimiles of every surviving title.¹

The embassy that brought the press home had been Valignano's hope that Japan and Europe would come to know each other.⁹¹⁰In the books of Kazusa, Amakusa and Nagasaki that hope took a lasting form.