Story
A straw bed and a paper cross
In the winter of 1559 a Portuguese priest lay on straw in a borrowed hut in . The Diocese of Kyoto, which has traced every place he lived, describes it: for the first days he slept on straw, until he found a single tatami mat; he ate rice and turnip soup, with a little salted sardine, almost every day; and stones were thrown at the house without end.When he moved, it was to another shack, half its floor bare earth and its walls only reeds tied together. To make it a little more fitting, he hung his bedding on the wall and pinned to it a cross cut out of paper.
The priest was Gaspar Vilela, and that paper cross was the beginning of the Church in Kyoto. This page tells how he got there, and what he left behind.
From India to Bungo
The dictionaries give his birth as about 1525.He was Portuguese, and had entered the Society of Jesus not long before he sailed.In June 1556 he left Lampacau, near Canton, on the Portuguese ship with Father Melchior Nunes Barreto, and landed in the lands of the Ōtomo in Bungo, where and Baltasar Gago received them.Britannica's dictionary dates his arrival at Bungo to the seventh month of Kōji 2 (1556).Nunes Barreto, ill, soon left Japan again; Vilela stayed, and in Bungo he learned Japanese.
was then the heart of the mission. In the Lent of 1557, Brother wrote, Christians filled the church before the morning bell, the Passion was preached every Friday night, and the Miserere was sung while the faithful did penance with so many tears that Torres more than once told Father Gaspar Vilela to hurry the psalm.
The islands of Hirado
In September 1557 Vilela went to , where two Portuguese ships were in port, with Brother Guilherme, to take over the mission from Gago. was there too, and his parents were baptised at Hirado that year.The great Christian of Hirado was Koteda Yasutsune, a senior retainer of the Matsura, baptised Dom Antonio. In 1558 Vilela began the conversion of Koteda's lands: the south of , the island of Takushima and the west coast of Hirado.He reported that 1,300 people became Christians in two months and that three temples were turned into churches; Gago reported that monks there became Christians too.The parish history of Ikitsuki dates the first preaching on the island to 1558, by Vilela.Among those he baptised was a two-year-old boy, Gaspar Nishi Genka, who would die a martyr in 1609.
That zeal also had a hard edge, and the record should be told plainly. 's History says that as the people were baptised, the priest gathered images from the temples and shrines and burned them in a great fire.The Ikitsuki museum's historian, Nakazono Shigeo, calls it a destructive deed born of ardour.The mountain monks of Yasumandake and Shishikiyama demanded that Vilela be punished, and warned that rebellion might follow. Matsura Takanobu reluctantly expelled him, probably about the seventh month of 1558.But Takanobu did not force Koteda or his people to give up the faith.Nakazono suggests that because whole villages were converted together, the of Ikitsuki later organised their faith through the existing village groups, the tsumoto and kakiuchi, a pattern that survives today.
Up to the capital
Vilela went back by Hakata to Bungo.In Funai a letter had come from an old monk of Mount Hiei asking to be taught the new religion; Torres sent him a summary of the doctrine, and in 1559 sent Vilela with Lourenço to the capital.Lourenço, the nearly blind former street singer from Hirado, was by then the mission's best preacher; Vilela wrote that he took him "to be my interpreter in disputes and conversations."A young catechist, Damião, and a guide from Sakamoto went with them.The old monk had died before they arrived, but his successor told them he had died believing all that Torres had sent him.
They reached Kyoto at the end of 1559, carrying on the purpose had not been able to fulfil.After two weeks in an attic, Vilela rented the hut of a widow named Yamada in what was then Kawatana-chō, near today's Shijō-Shinmachi.That was the hut of straw and turnip soup. Lourenço and Damião, the diocese notes, helped the priest in every way they could through that bitter cold.
The shogun's licence
After about a month, Vilela remembered that he carried a letter of introduction to the abbot of Eigen-an, a sub-temple of Kennin-ji. The abbot readily agreed to present him to the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru, then staying at the temple of Myōkaku-ji, and went with him.Vilela took the one gift he had to give: an hourglass. The shogun was pleased and received them kindly, and soon granted a notice of three articles protecting the priest.The stones and abuse that had never stopped, the diocese writes, all but disappeared.The Yamakawa dictionary dates the audience to 1560 and calls the licence a seisatsu, a posted notice permitting preaching.Japanese Wikipedia adds that Ōtomo Yoshishige and Ise Sadataka helped.
Hardship did not end at once. Through the winter he moved from hut to hut; at one, the house of a sake seller, the roof barely kept out the sun, moon, stars, rain or snow, and he lived on greens until he fell ill; the landlord, kind at first, asked him to leave when neighbours boycotted his sake.At last, about June 1560, he bought land with an old house at Ubayanagi-chō, near Takoyakushi and Muromachi.For about fifteen years it was the centre of the mission in the capital, until in 1575 began the three-storey church of the Assumption, the "Nanbanji", on the same plot.
The lords who listened
Vilela's mission in the capital was patient work among people who argued. In 1563 the court astronomer Yūki Tadamasa and the scholar Kiyohara Edakata, asked to investigate the Christians, invited Lourenço to Nara; Vilela feared a trap and sent Lourenço instead.Lourenço's preaching turned the investigators into converts. Yūki, Kiyohara and Takayama Tomoteru, lord of Sawa castle, were baptised, and the next year Tomoteru's son, the future , followed.The dictionaries credit Vilela with opening the way to the conversion of the Yūki and the Takayama, father and son, and with laying the foundations of the mission in the Kinai.(Takayama Ukon has his own page.)
He also wrote. His letters were printed in the collections of Jesuit letters from Japan.One, from Sakai on 17 August 1561, described Sakai as a very large city of many rich merchants, governed, in a Japanese translation of the letter, "by magistrates like the city of Venice."Through such letters Europe came to know the city as a free merchant port.
Exile from the capital
In 1565 Yoshiteru was killed by the forces of Matsunaga Hisahide and the Miyoshi, and Vilela was driven out of Kyoto and took refuge in Sakai.Fróis, who had come to the capital to join him, carried on there.In 1566 Vilela went back to Kyushu.
All Saints in Nagasaki
His last years were spent in the west: Mypedia lists Iki, and Fukuyama.In 1567 Almeida had baptised about two hundred of the leading men of Nagasaki village, whose lord, Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage, was already a Christian; in 1568 Vilela came to preach.Jinzaemon gave him a Buddhist temple. Vilela lived in it quietly until there were Christians to fill it, and in 1569 pulled it down and built from its timbers a plain new church dedicated to All Saints, Todos os Santos, the first church of Nagasaki.At his first sermon, he wrote, the people listened with very bad grace; at the second they began to change.Two years later the port of Nagasaki was founded on the cape below.
The end
Worn out, he left Japan in 1570 (Yamakawa, Kōdansha) or 1571 (Britannica, Ōbunsha).On 4 February 1571 he wrote from a letter later printed in the Évora Cartas, one of the sources for the .He died in 1572; most dictionaries say at Goa, Nipponica says at Malacca.
Vilela came to a country where the faith had a foothold in only a few places, and left Churches in Hirado's islands, in the capital and in Nagasaki. Families he baptised kept the faith for generations. Gaspar Nishi Genka, the child he baptised on Ikitsuki in 1558, stayed on the island as its catechist when the Christian lords left in 1599; he was beheaded on 14 November 1609 at Kurose no Tsuji and beatified in 2008, and the islanders went on tending his family's graves through the centuries of hiding.In Kyoto, the father of Jean Hashimoto, burned with his wife and children in Kyoto in 1619, had been baptised by him.