The pirate's junk
On the evening of 24 June 1549, the feast of St John the Baptist, said goodbye to his brethren in Malacca and went aboard a Chinese junk.The captain was a Chinese trader the Portuguese called "the pirate"; Bishop Itonaga of , writing in 2008, gives his name as Avan.
The ship carried a strange cargo for a mission: 120 hundredweight of pepper as a gift, presents for "the king of Japan", and a cask of Mass wine.It also carried a small household. With Xavier were the Jesuit priest and the brother ; a Chinese servant, Manuel; an Indian servant from Malabar, Amador; and three Japanese Christians, Pablo de Santa Fé (), whom Xavier had met in Malacca, and his two companions, João and António.
The captain soon seemed to regret his promise. At a little shrine by the rudder the crew burned candles and incense, threw down marked sticks and asked the idol whether the winds would carry them to Japan. Xavier could do nothing about it.Off the coast of Patani the oracle said they would reach Japan but not come back, and the captain decided to winter in China instead.
Off Cochin-China a storm struck. Manuel fell headfirst into the bilge and was pulled out unconscious; while the crew were tending him, the captain's daughter was washed overboard and lost. The sailors sacrificed to the idol, and the oracle answered that if Manuel had died, the girl would have lived.Xavier, Schurhammer writes, felt the presence of the evil one that night.
At the islands near Canton the captain cast anchor to wait out the season; only Xavier's threat of the Portuguese authorities moved him on. At a harbour further up the coast he tried again to stop, but a passing junk warned of pirates, and with the wind in the southwest he had no choice but to run north for Japan.Xavier later wrote:
"The wind was blowing towards Japan. So, against the will of the captain and crew, we had no choice but to take the course to Japan. Neither the devil nor his servants could stop our voyage. And so God brought us to this land we had longed for, arriving in August 1549, on the feast of Our Lady (the 15th). We could not put in at any other port of Japan, and came to Kagoshima, the home town of Paulo of the Holy Faith. Here we were warmly welcomed by his relatives and by all who were not his relatives."(Our translation of the Japanese text quoted by Kadota Akira.)
The feast of the Assumption
They came ashore on 15 August 1549. It was the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, and the fifteenth anniversary of the vow of Montmartre.Bishop Itonaga counts the voyage at 52 days.
Where exactly they landed is not known. Many historians place it at the old harbour of Tobashira at the mouth of the Inari River, which has since been filled in.The Kagoshima of 1549, as Kōno Yoshinori describes it, was a small castle town within about a kilometre of that harbour.
Pablo brought them home. Schurhammer, writing from the Jesuit letters, says his mother, wife and daughter welcomed the strangers, and that his house was soon full from morning to evening of people who wanted to see the foreigners and their dark-skinned servant and to hear about India.Nobody, it seems, held Pablo's new religion against him; he talked about it to anyone who came, and before long his mother, wife and daughter and many relatives were baptised.
On 29 September, the feast of St Michael, whom Xavier had chosen as patron of Japan, Xavier was received by the lord of Satsuma, . Takahisa gave him leave to preach, put a house at the missionaries' disposal, and let his people know they were free to accept the new religion.
Where the meeting took place is . Schurhammer puts Takahisa's castle "five miles south of Kagoshima."In Hioki, west of the city, local tradition places it at Ichiuji castle in Ijūin, Takahisa's residence until 1550; the Hioki city education board calls this "one theory", and a monument marking it was set up in Ijūin in 1949.
Ten months in Kagoshima
Xavier was delighted with what he found. "They are the best people thus far discovered," he wrote, "and, it appears to me, among infidels none will ever be found to excel the Japanese."
He made a friend of Ninshitsu (Schurhammer: "Nenjitsu"), the aged abbot of the Shimazu family's Zen monastery. The abbot was troubled most by the teaching that the soul does not die.Schurhammer records an exchange between them. Xavier asked which time of life he would choose, youth or old age. "Youth," said Ninshitsu, "for then one can still do what one pleases." And which does the sailor prefer, Xavier asked, the storm at sea or the hour he comes into port? "I understand you," the abbot answered, "but that does not apply to me; for I know not whither I go."
Through the winter Xavier, Torres and Fernández studied Japanese, and with Pablo's help Xavier put together an account of the faith, written in Japanese in Latin letters, which he read aloud twice a day at home and from the terrace of a temple.By the following year about a hundred people had been baptised in Kagoshima, and fifteen more, including the lady of the castle, at Ichiku, about seven hours' journey to the northwest.The lord of Ichiku himself showed interest in the religion of "Dainichi, the Creator of all things": Dainichi, the name of a Buddha, was the word Xavier was then using for God.
The welcome did not last. The Buddhist clergy saw that converts stopped giving alms, and pressed the lord until he forbade further conversions on pain of death.Towards the end of September 1550 Xavier and his companions left for . Pablo stayed behind to lead the Christians. At Ichiku, Schurhammer writes, Xavier left the steward Miguel a picture of the Virgin, telling him it was "medicine for your soul."The captain Avan, according to Bishop Itonaga, had died in Kagoshima during the stay.
Remembering the landing
Kagoshima has marked the landing several times.
- In 1908 Father Émile Raguet, a Belgian of the Paris Foreign Missions and compiler of an early French-Japanese dictionary, built a stone church in the city in Xavier's honour. Two years later he was sent to , where he finished the cathedral.It burned in the air raids of 1945; a stone wall from it stands today in Xavier Park, with a bust of Xavier.
- In 1949, for the four-hundredth anniversary, a second, wooden church was dedicated, built with a gift from the Pope; in 1999, for the 450th, it was replaced by the present cathedral, Kagoshima Cathedral Xavier Memorial Church, whose shape recalls a sailing ship.Statues of Xavier, Bernardo and Yajirō were set up in Xavier Park in 1999.
- On 23 April 1978 the diocese unveiled the Xavier Landing Memorial, with a ceramic relief by an artist the city records as "LouisFransen" and bronze sculpture by Yoshino Tsuyoshi, and gave it to the city.Bishop Itonaga, who built it, says plainly that it does not stand on the landing place: it was put on reclaimed land at New Gion-no-su near the river mouth because the old Gion-no-su park was a war cemetery.
The thread
The landing at Kagoshima was not planned. A reluctant captain, an idol's oracle and a wind from the southwest put Xavier ashore not at the capital he was aiming for but at the home town of the Japanese man who had brought him. That is the start of everything else on this site: the Christian century, the ban, the and the discovery of 1865.