Story
"The longer I am in Japan the less confident I am in writing about this country and judging its problems." The man who wrote this had more power over the Japanese mission than anyone since , and he used it to make the Church learn from Japan.
Alessandro Valignano was born in February 1539 at Chieti, in the Abruzzi, then part of the Spanish kingdom of Naples, into a noble family.He took a doctorate in civil law at Padua.His youth was not saintly. In Padua he was accused of slashing the face of a young woman in a quarrel; he pleaded innocent, but he spent more than a year and a half in prison before powerful friends, among them Carlo Borromeo, won his release.He went to Rome and asked to join the Society of Jesus. Francis Borgia, the General, accepted him, and he entered the novitiate of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale in May 1566.He studied at the Roman College, and Üçerler gives his ordination as 25 March 1571 at the Lateran.At thirty-three he was made rector of the Jesuit college at Macerata.
In August 1573 the General, Everard Mercurian, called him to Rome and named him Visitor of all the Jesuit missions from Africa to Japan, a delegate carrying the General's own authority.He sailed from Lisbon in March 1574 with forty-one other Jesuits.Cieslik, a Jesuit historian who admired him, notes one flaw: a fiery temper. He adds that Valignano did not bear grudges, and after a quarrel would treat his opponent with more than ordinary kindness.
The first visit, 1579 to 1582. After three years in India and a stay in , Valignano landed at Kuchinotsu in western Kyushu on 25 July 1579.What he found disappointed him. The reports read in Europe had been bright, but many missionaries had not learned Japanese, and many Japanese Christians felt the foreign priests looked down on them.Valignano disagreed in principle with the mission superior, Francisco Cabral. Cieslik insists there was "malice on neither side": both men were zealous, but Cabral, a former soldier, thought Japanese could hardly be learned and was slow to train Japanese for the priesthood, while Valignano believed in the people.
He set to work on the language. In a report of 1595 he remembered asking Cabral to give the new missionaries two hours of class a day, and how Cabral "just laughed", saying Japanese could not be learned from a grammar. Valignano's first order in Japan was that Europeans must study the language with great care, and that a grammar and a dictionary be made. By 1595, he wrote, "even men with less than average ability know enough in one year to hear confessions".
At the end of this first visit, in 1583, he set down his judgement of the country in the Sumario de las cosas de Japón, which Üçerler calls perhaps the most important work he ever wrote. "Of all the peoples of the Orient," he wrote, "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 he drew a practical conclusion. The mission consultation he called asked plainly whether seminaries should be founded for Japanese boys and whether Japanese should be received into the Society of Jesus, and he answered yes to both.Cabral never accepted it: as late as 1596 he was writing bitterly against the admission of so many Japanese into the order.
Then he turned to manners. At the suggestion of he studied the etiquette of the Zen monasteries, the most respected religious houses of Japan, and before he left in 1582 he wrote a ceremonial of Japanese courtesy for the missionaries.He ranked the Jesuits on the model of the Zen hierarchy, from the vice-provincial, compared with the abbot of Nanzenji, down to the dōjuku, the lay catechists.Japanese reference works call his approach adaptation (tekiō), and the Heibonsha encyclopedia calls it epoch-making in the mission history of the age of discovery.
The structure he built lasted. He divided Japan into three mission districts, Shimo (western Kyushu), Bungo and , and had Japan raised to a vice-province in 1581 with as vice-provincial.He ordered one official annual letter from Japan, so that Europe would no longer read only the enthusiasm of young missionaries.In 1580 he accepted the gift of and Mogi from , after putting it to the mission's first consultation; the Pope and the General approved.For Japanese clergy he founded schools: a , opened in 1580 in buildings of a former Buddhist temple, a second at Azuchi on land gave to Fr , a college at in October 1580, and a novitiate at Usuki opened on Christmas Eve 1580 with six Japanese and six Portuguese novices.By 1582 each seminary had about twenty-six boys, for whom Valignano himself wrote the course of studies and the rule of life.
The visit that changed him came in 1581. He reached Sakai on 28 March and spent Holy Week and Easter at Takatsuki, the castle town of , where fifteen thousand Catholics walked in the Easter procession.Here, 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 then several times at Azuchi, invited him to court festivities, and gave him a celebrated folding screen.Back at Takatsuki for Corpus Christi, Valignano baptised two groups, of five hundred and fifteen hundred people.He returned to Kyushu an optimist.
The boys he took to Rome. Valignano wanted Europe to see the first fruits of the Church in Japan, and he wanted Japanese to see the Church's universality for themselves.He chose four young nobles, all under sixteen, and sailed with them from Nagasaki in February 1582.At he was named Provincial of India and could not go on, so he sent the boys ahead with another Jesuit; Pope received them on 23 March 1585.The full story is on the page (The Tenshō Embassy).
Ambassador to Hideyoshi, 1590 to 1592. When the boys came back to Goa, Valignano went with them to Japan as ambassador of the Viceroy of India, Duarte de Meneses, to .In Macao in 1588 he learned that Hideyoshi had expelled the missionaries in 1587. He went on anyway, hoping to have the edict withdrawn.While he waited two years for a ship he prepared textbooks for the Japanese seminaries. One of them, De Missione Legatorum Iaponensium, put into classical Latin by Duarte de Sande, told the embassy as a dialogue in which the young envoys describe Europe to their kinsmen at home.He had also asked for a printing press with movable type, which came from Europe with an Italian printer, Brother Giovanni Battista Pesce; Valignano printed both books on it at Macao and then brought it to Japan, where the mission's books, the , began to appear in 1591.
He landed at Nagasaki on 21 July 1590.Through Kuroda Yoshitaka he was received by Hideyoshi in Kyoto early in 1591, on condition that he speak only as the Viceroy's envoy; he could only touch on the edict indirectly, through the Viceroy's letter of thanks.Hideyoshi was gracious, asked the four young envoys about Europe, and talked until midnight with the young interpreter .At Kazusa, after a solemn Mass, Valignano gave the Pope's gifts, among them a relic of the True Cross; some who watched were moved to tears.On 25 July 1591 the four envoys entered the Society of Jesus.The edict stayed, but Hideyoshi let ten priests remain at Nagasaki, and Valignano left on 9 October 1592.
The third visit, 1598 to 1603. He came back with the new bishop, Luís Cerqueira, landing at Nagasaki on 5 August 1598, a year and a half after the died at .Hideyoshi died that September. Under 's early tolerance the mission grew fast: Valignano reported 40,000 adult baptisms in Kyushu between February and October 1599, 30,000 of them in 's domain.The greatest consolation came in 1601, when Bishop Cerqueira ordained the first two Japanese Jesuit priests, and Luís Niabara.
He left Japan on 15 January 1603 and died at Macao on 20 January 1606.When he became Visitor, Japan had about twenty priests. At his death the mission had sixty priests, two of them Japanese, fifty-nine brothers and scholastics, forty-eight of them Japanese, sixteen novices and some 800 lay helpers, with a college, a novitiate, seminaries, a press and a school of art and music.Japanese reference works call him a central figure of history, heir to the spirit of Xavier.
So the man who distrusted easy judgements about Japan built a Church meant to be at home there: missionaries who spoke Japanese and kept Japanese courtesy, and schools that would make the Japanese its priests. The persecution that followed did not let that Church grow up in the open. But the Japanese clergy and catechists he trained carried it into the years of hiding.