A man with something to confess
Every account of Christianity in Japan begins with a foreign priest stepping ashore. But the priest came because of a Japanese layman, and that layman came looking for forgiveness.
His name has come down in two forms. wrote it Angero, and other missionaries wrote Anjiro or Anjiroo, so books in Japanese and English often call him Anjirō.Kadota Akira, who wrote a long series on and Christianity for the diocesan bulletin, points out that "Anjirō" is not a Japanese name anyone would give a child, while Yajirō (弥次郎) is an ordinary one. A European ear, he argues, turned Ya into A and added an n, just as Xavier wrote as "Amanguchi"; and "Tsuzu", the Jesuit interpreter, said plainly that "Yajiro" was the right form.Both names are used on this site: Anjirō, the form in the European sources, and Yajirō, the form used in Kagoshima today.
He was about thirty-five when Xavier met him, a man of Satsuma with some Portuguese.He had killed a man. The Jesuit historian Charlevoix, writing in the eighteenth century, says it happened "in a quarrel" (dans une rencontre), and that the fear of being hunted down drove him onto the first ship leaving for Malacca.Schurhammer, Xavier's great biographer, says he hid first in a Buddhist monastery and then on the ship of a Portuguese trader.Charlevoix adds an earlier layer: the memory of the sins of his youth had tormented him for years, a stay among Buddhist monks had not eased it, and Portuguese merchants at Kagoshima had told him of a holy priest in the Indies who could help.
The sources do not agree on the trader. Schurhammer names him as George Alvarez, captain of a ship and Xavier's friend; Charlevoix names him as Alvaro Vaz.Both agree on the advice he gave: go to Malacca and find Father Francis.
Two voyages to Malacca
The first try failed. Anjirō reached Malacca in 1546, but Xavier had just left for the Moluccas.Schurhammer says Anjirō asked the parish priest to baptise him and was refused, because he meant to go back to his non-Christian wife and his old life.He sailed for home. In sight of the mountains of Japan a storm drove his ship back to the China coast, and the narrow escape, Schurhammer writes, strengthened his wish to be baptised. Portuguese friends in China sent him back to Malacca.
This time Xavier was there. In December 1547 Xavier was officiating at a wedding in the church of Our Lady when Alvarez walked in with the stranger.Xavier later wrote that the man "came to Malacca wanting to make his confession to me."For Kadota, the remark shows that Xavier trusted him from their first meeting.
They had only eight days together before Xavier sailed for India, and Anjirō used them. He went to the instructions in the church every day and wrote down what he heard in Japanese script.Xavier wrote (our English from Kōno's Japanese): "If all the Japanese are as eager to learn as Anjirō, I think they will be the most eager to learn of any people in the lands newly discovered. This Anjirō wrote down the articles of faith when he attended the Christian instruction. He often went to the church to pray. He asked me many questions."
Then Xavier asked the question that changed his life. If he went to Japan, would the Japanese become Christians? Anjirō's answer, in Schurhammer's translation from the letters, was careful:
"Not at once. First they will question you about many things, and they will consider what you answer and what you know, and above all they will observe whether you live up to your teachings."
If they were satisfied on both counts, he went on, "the king and the queen and the prominent ones and all other reasonable persons" would become Christians within about half a year, "for the inhabitants of Japan follow reason as their guide."Kadota, who quotes the same passage from Kōno Yoshinori's Japanese translation, admits that every time he reads it he wonders whether it is really true of his people, and feels a little ashamed.
Paul of the Holy Faith
Xavier sent Anjirō and the two Japanese with him, a brother and a servant in Schurhammer's account, to the College of St Paul at , to learn Portuguese and the faith properly.There they were baptised by the bishop at Pentecost 1548, which Kadota dates to 20 May.Anjirō took the name Paulo de Santa Fé, Paul of the Holy Faith; Charlevoix says it was in memory of the house that had sheltered him, known both as the College of St Paul and the Seminary of the Holy Faith.His companions became João and António.Kadota calls him the first Japanese Christian.
At Goa the three lived with the Jesuit brothers, wore their black robes, and ate in their refectory. Asked what they liked best in Christianity, they answered: confession and Communion.In January 1549 Paul made the Spiritual Exercises under , and then led his two companions through them himself.
The road home
On Palm Sunday 1549 the party left Goa: Xavier, Father Cosme de Torres and Brother , the three Japanese, and two servants, Manuel, a Chinese, and Amador, from Malabar.They sailed from Malacca on 24 June, the feast of St John the Baptist, on a Chinese junk, and on 15 August 1549, the feast of the Assumption, they reached Kagoshima, "the homeland of Paul of the Holy Faith," as Xavier wrote.
Paul's mother, wife and daughter welcomed the missionaries into his house.Charlevoix says his family were overjoyed to see him after so long, when they had thought him lost.Within a short time he had brought his mother, his wife, his daughter and many of his relatives to the faith.
The picture of the Virgin
Before the priest could meet the lord of Satsuma, the layman did. Paul went to , the ruler of the domain, and was received warmly. Xavier wrote that the lord asked him about the Portuguese, their way of life and their dignity, and that Paul explained everything to his satisfaction.Charlevoix adds that Paul also had to ask pardon for the killing that had made him flee, and that he was easily granted it.
Then, according to Charlevoix, Paul took out a painting he had kept hidden under his robe: the Virgin with the Child Jesus in her arms. Takahisa knelt before it, and when it was carried to his mother, she and her ladies knelt too.Kadota tells the same story more cautiously: Yajirō "seems to have" brought a holy picture of the Virgin, and the lord and his mother were moved and bowed before it.After that, Xavier himself was received, on 29 September, the feast of St Michael, and Takahisa gave his subjects leave to become Christians.
Where the meeting took place is not settled. Kadota sets out the case: Xavier's letter puts the lord five leagues from Kagoshima; one early witness put him at Kokubu, north-east of the city; Kōno Yoshinori judged Ijūin more likely, and Ijūin's Ichiuji Castle is the place commemorated today.
It is worth pausing on that scene. One of the first Christian images shown in Japan, in these accounts, was carried by a Japanese layman, and it was a picture of Mary. Three centuries later, at , it would be a Japanese laywoman asking for Mary's statue who opened the story again.
Interpreter and translator
Through the winter Xavier, Torres and Fernández studied Japanese, and with Paul's help Xavier completed a long account of the faith, from the creation of the world to the judgment, written in Japanese in Latin letters, which he read aloud twice a day.Thanks to Paul's zeal, Schurhammer says, the number of converts reached a hundred.Hioki City's guide says it was through Yajirō's introduction that Xavier met Takahisa, and the roadside signboard quoted by a local blog remembers him as the interpreter at that audience.
Left behind
In 1550 Xavier left Kagoshima for and the capital. Paul stayed. Schurhammer: "Pablo remained behind as their leader and instructor."His companions João and António went with Xavier, along with a young convert, Bernardo, who would later reach Rome.In 1552, in a farewell letter written before he tried to enter China, Xavier asked John the Japanese to greet Paul in Kagoshima when he went home.
Charlevoix says Xavier charged Paul with the care of the little church, and that Paul gave himself to it entirely, until the Buddhist monks, unable to win back the converts, turned on him and made his life so hard that he went into voluntary exile.After that the European sources lose him.
What happened next belongs to tradition. A Kagoshima local history blog quotes a document it calls the Hiyoshi Ikehata komonjo, which names a man "Ikehata Yajirō Shigenao" and says he was killed by a fire arrow in 1560 while trying to settle a trading quarrel between a European and a Chinese ship, between the ports of Yamagawa and Nejime.The same post records a second grave tradition at Katanoura, on Shimo-Koshiki island.We have not seen the document, and the identification of this Yajirō with Paul is .
At Ijūin, by the side of a prefectural road at Kiyofuji, stands a small stone that Hioki City's walking guide calls "the grave of Yajirō (tradition)." The guide says simply that much of his life is unknown, but that this too is remembered as his grave.
In Xavier Park in Kagoshima, since 1999, he stands in bronze beside Xavier and Bernardo.
The thread
Anjirō went looking for a priest because he could not forgive himself. He found one, and asked to be taught; and the advice he gave Xavier in Malacca, that the Japanese would watch whether he lived as he preached, became the test the whole mission was measured by. He was the first Japanese Christian, the first interpreter, and the first lay leader of a Japanese church left without a priest. That last role is the one Japan's would take up for two hundred and fifty years.