Story
On 20 February 1582 the annual Portuguese ship sailed out of harbour. Among its passengers were four Japanese teenagers who, in Michael Cooper's words, "would set the whole of Europe talking about Japan".When they came back eight and a half years later, their own relatives did not recognise them.
The plan. The idea was 's, the Jesuit Visitor, who was about to leave Japan after his first visit.Japanese reference works give two purposes. The boys would see the greatness of Christian Europe and tell their own people about it; and Europe, seeing them, would come to know the young Church of Japan and help it with men and money.Cieslik adds a third that came from Valignano's heart: he wanted the Japanese to see the universality of the Catholic Church for themselves.
The boys were chosen in haste from the .Itō Mancio, a kinsman of , went as the envoy of the lord of Bungo. Chijiwa Miguel, nephew of and cousin of , went for Ōmura and Arima. Hara Martinho and Nakaura Julião went with them as companions.Europe soon called all four "the ambassadors".Why boys? Valignano reasoned that the young would best stand the hardships of a voyage that might take years, and Cooper suspects he also thought young envoys would be easier to guide.They were thirteen or fourteen years old.Mancio had been born about 1569 at Tonokōri in Hyūga, of a branch of the Itō house, and was baptised at Usuki in 1580; that year Valignano sent him to the Arima seminary, where he learned Latin, music and Japanese literature.Miguel, whose Japanese name was Seizaemon, had been baptised the same year.With them, as teacher and interpreter, went the Portuguese Jesuit Diogo de Mesquita, who kept up their lessons on the ships and in every port.In Europe the boys were said to speak Portuguese quite well, with some Latin and Spanish, though on formal occasions they let Mesquita interpret.
The long road. The voyage was hard. The boys were seasick on the short run to , where they had to wait until the end of 1582 for a ship. They reached Malacca on 27 January 1583 after a voyage on which part of the cargo was thrown overboard, made an unplanned stop at Mozambique and, by a pilot's error, landed in southern India.At Valignano learned that he had been made Provincial of India and could go no further.The boys went on round the Cape of Good Hope and landed at Lisbon on 11 August 1584, two and a half years after leaving Nagasaki.
In Lisbon they visited Belém and the city's landmarks and met the archbishop and the Dominican spiritual writer Luis de Granada. At Toledo they were shown the cathedral. In Madrid Philip II, King of Spain and of Portugal, received them warmly and asked about their clothes; Martinho took off a sandal so that the king could look at it closely.Philip gave them letters to his ambassador in Rome and to the governors of the cities on their road, and from then on, Cooper writes, the journey "took on the semblance of a triumphal progress".Embarking at Alicante and resting three or four days on Majorca, they landed in Italy at Livorno on 1 March 1585, were feasted by the Grand Duke of Tuscany at Pisa and spent five days in Florence.Messages came from Rome begging them to hurry: was old and ill and wished to see them before he died.
Rome, 1585. They reached Rome on 22 March 1585. The next day the Pope received them in a public consistory with twenty-five cardinals. Dressed in kimono and wearing their swords, the boys rode through the streets in procession while the bells of Rome rang and the cannon of Castel Sant'Angelo fired a salute. The old Pope wept as he embraced them.Julião, sick with fever, could not come, and Gregory sent his own doctors to him.Mancio spoke in Japanese, Mesquita translated into Latin and Italian, and the letters of the three lords were read.Japanese encyclopedias record that the envoys were received in the Sala Regia with the highest honours.
At a private audience on 3 April they gave the Pope a famous folding screen of 's castle town of Azuchi, which Nobunaga had given to Valignano. No trace of it has ever been found.A week later, on 10 April, Gregory XIII died. On 1 May, at the coronation Mass of his successor, Sixtus V, three of the boys helped carry the canopy over the new Pope into St Peter's, and Mancio brought him the water to wash his hands.Sixtus made them knights, gave them money for their journey and gifts for the seminaries of Japan, and Rome made them its citizens.The Holy See also promised help for the seminaries, which Britannica counts among the embassy's real gains.They left Rome on 3 June.Where they stayed and prayed in the city is on the Rome page (Rome of the Japanese Embassies, 1585 and 1615).
The way home. The welcome grew warmer on the road north. Venice put off the feast of St Mark for three days so that they could attend it, and Tintoretto was asked to paint them, though no such portrait survives.In Milan Urbano Monte sketched them; his drawings are the only likenesses of the boys that have come down to us.In all they saw some seventy cities in three countries, and between 1585 and 1593 at least seventy-eight books and pamphlets about them were printed in Europe, some as far away as Lithuania and England.
They carried home paintings and maps that Japanese painters would later copy, and above all a European printing press with movable type, which Valignano had told them to bring.They sailed from Lisbon on 8 April 1586, spent seven months at Mozambique, and at Goa met Valignano again. He was to go back with them as ambassador of the Viceroy of India to .
A changed Japan. At Macao the news reached them that in 1587 Hideyoshi had of Japan.Only as the Viceroy's embassy could Valignano and the boys come in at all.The waiting was not wasted. Valignano set up the press at Macao and printed on it a Latin dialogue, De Missione Legatorum Iaponensium, put into classical Latin by Duarte de Sande, in which the young envoys tell their kinsmen at home what they had seen in Europe; it was meant as a schoolbook for the Japanese seminaries.After nearly two years at Macao they landed at Nagasaki on 21 July 1590, eight and a half years after they had left.On 3 March 1591 Hideyoshi received them in his Jurakudai palace in . After the formal speeches he came back in everyday clothes, asked them about Europe and invited Mancio to enter his service, which Mancio politely declined. Then the four played for him on harp, clavichord, violin and lute, and Hideyoshi asked for two encores.
Afterwards. The same year all four entered the Society of Jesus.Their lives then parted. Mancio entered the novitiate at Kawachinoura in Amakusa, studied theology for three years at Macao, and was ordained subdeacon in 1606, deacon in 1607 and priest in 1608. He worked from Kokura and preached as far as Hagi, and Obi, and died at Nagasaki on 13 November 1612.Martinho, who after the return worked as an interpreter and on the mission's printed books, became a noted preacher.Exiled in 1614, he taught at the Jesuit college in Macao, cared for the Japanese Christians there and died on 23 October 1629.Miguel left the Society and is said to have given up the faith about 1606, entering the service of the Ōmura; why, and how his life ended, are still not clear.Julião stayed in Japan through the persecution, was taken at Kokura at the end of 1632, and died in the pit at Nagasaki on 21 July 1633. In his agony he is said to have whispered, "I am , who went to Rome."He was beatified with the in 2008 (see Blessed Julian Nakaura, the Envoy Who Came Home and The Beatification of the 188 Martyrs, Nagasaki, 2008).
How do we know? Europe printed the story as it happened, in at least seventy-eight books and pamphlets.The Jesuit wrote an account of the embassy, and the Latin dialogue of 1590 told it again for Japanese students; both are now in Japanese translation, and the University of Tokyo's Historiographical Institute published the documents of the embassy in 1959.
Were they the first Japanese in Europe? Not quite. Kishino Hisashi, in the Heibonsha encyclopedia, calls their eight years abroad the first journey to Europe by Japanese.But had sent a young convert, Bernardo, ahead of them. Bernardo reached Lisbon in 1553, entered the Society of Jesus, arrived in Rome early in 1555 and, according to Kadota Akira, was received by Pope Paul IV, before he died at Coimbra in 1557.The four boys were the first Japanese embassy, sent in the name of Japanese lords.
Cooper sums up what the embassy did for Europe: it "put Japan on the map".For Japan, Valignano had hoped for more. The Nipponica entry notes that the four could not work as he had expected, because of the ban.Yet the press they brought printed the books of the Japanese mission, and one of the four boys from Arima gave his life for the faith he had seen honoured in Rome.