At the bedside of the Taikō
In the late summer of 1598 the most powerful man in Japan lay dying at Fushimi. had unified the country and had ordered the Jesuits out of it. Yet one Jesuit was still welcome at his side.The priest who came to see him for the last time was João Rodrigues, a Portuguese whom everyone in the capital simply called Tçuzu, "the Interpreter."
Rodrigues spoke to the old ruler about eternal life and baptism. Hideyoshi did not convert. He gave the priest silk robes, and on 18 September 1598 (Keichō 3.8.18, as converted on our Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537? to 1598) page from the national observatory's calendar tables; some accounts give 16 September) he died.
How did a boy from a village in the Portuguese hills end up at that bedside? And what becomes of a go-between when the people on both sides stop wanting to talk?
A boy who left at twelve
João Rodrigues was born in 1561 or 1562 at Sernancelhe, a small town in the Beira Alta of northern Portugal.The story goes that his family descended from Dona Flâmula Rodrigues, the tenth-century lady of the town castle.He left Portugal at about twelve or thirteen and never saw it again, though more than fifty years later he still wrote of it with affection.
Nobody knows why he went. Sernancelhe's own council thinks he probably went to Lisbon to work the ships; others point to the old Jesuit shrine of Lapa near the town.His biographer Michael Cooper suggested he may have been one of the orphan boys shipped out to the Indies.He reached on 4 July 1577, probably on the ship of Domingos Monteiro, by way of the Ryukyu islands.
The next years were hard. He fled from battles, nearly starved, and froze in Japanese winters.He was in Bungo when its Christian lord's army was destroyed at the Mimigawa in December 1578.In 1580, about nineteen, he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Usuki with a group of twelve young Japanese and eight Portuguese, and began to study the language seriously.
The Interpreter
In 1590 the Visitor came back to Japan as an envoy of the Viceroy of India and needed an interpreter for his audience with Hideyoshi. He chose Rodrigues.Hideyoshi was so pleased with the young man that he took him on as his own interpreter. The nickname Tçuzu (from tsūji, interpreter) dates from about then.
Cooper says he became "something of a celebrity in ."By October 1592, with the missionaries officially banished, Rodrigues was the only Jesuit with official permission to stay anywhere in Japan.
Three months later the Taikō's favour showed its limits. On 5 February 1597 were crucified at in Nagasaki, among them the Jesuit . A contemporary account says the martyrs on their crosses were encouraged by "Father Pasio and Father Rodrigues." Marino identifies him as our Rodrigues.He chose to stay near the condemned to console them.
The man in the middle
After Hideyoshi's death Rodrigues stayed close to power. The new ruler, , kept him as interpreter.In 1598 he became procurator of the Japan mission, the man who handled its money and trade (: some sources date this from 1591).He took his solemn vows at Nagasaki on 10 June 1601.
That year Ieyasu also made him his personal commercial agent in Nagasaki and told the Portuguese merchants to deal through him.It was a great honour and a great danger. The Jesuits lived partly on the silk trade between Macao and Nagasaki. Now one Jesuit had a say in the price of every bale.
In the same years he wrote his masterpiece. The Arte da Lingoa de Iapam, "Art of the Japanese Language," was printed by the Jesuit press at Nagasaki between 1604 and 1608.Its three books covered the forms of nouns and verbs, the parts of speech, and syntax, with digressions on poetry and on the religions of China and Japan. His romanization of Japanese foreshadowed the modern Hepburn system.It is credited as the oldest fully surviving grammar of Japanese.
Then the trade that made him useful broke him. In January 1610 the Macao carrack Madre de Deus, under André Pessoa, was attacked off Nagasaki and blown up by its own captain.Rodrigues, the most exposed Westerner in Japan, was sent away.A fellow Jesuit later wrote that he had been unjustly persecuted, especially by the Nagasaki official Murayama Tōan, a man Rodrigues himself had recommended to Ieyasu.His place as interpreter went to the Englishman William Adams.
China, and an argument about God's name
He was forty-nine. He never went back to Japan.In Macao he taught, preached, wrote the yearly report for Rome, and turned his mind to China.Between 1613 and 1615 he travelled across China, to Beijing, Nanjing and Hangzhou, to study Chinese religion.
He did not like everything he saw. He thought the Chinese words Matteo Ricci's followers used for God and the soul were dangerously ambiguous, and he said so. He lost the argument, but it fed what became the long Chinese Rites Controversy.
In 1620 he published in Macao a shorter grammar, the Arte Breve.Two centuries later, in 1825, the Société Asiatique in Paris had its manuscript translated into French. The editors grumbled about his "barbarous and often unintelligible" style, then printed him anyway: there was nothing better.
He also began, at his superiors' request, a History of the Church of Japan. It grew into a portrait of Japan itself: its geography, customs, arts and the tea ceremony.It was never finished.
The leap at Dengzhou
He had one more adventure. In 1630, aged about sixty-eight, he went north as interpreter with a Portuguese artillery company sent from Macao to help the Ming against the Manchus.They were posted to Dengzhou, on the Shandong coast, where in 1631 he met the Korean envoy Jeong Duwon and gave him a telescope.
In February 1632 mutinous Ming troops besieged the city. When it fell, the Portuguese captain and eleven of his men were killed. Rodrigues, past seventy, jumped from the high city wall and survived.He made his way to Beijing, where the emperor honoured him with an inscribed plaque.
Back in Macao, he went back to his History. He died there on 1 August 1633. His superior wrote that he had "neglected to attend to a hernia in time." Cooper thought the leap and the long trek home had probably caused it.He was buried in the church of São Paulo, in front of the altar of St Michael. The church burned in 1835; its façade still stands.
The story goes that some Portuguese of his day believed he was up to 250 years old, and that James Clavell based the Jesuit interpreter in Shōgun on him.The first is a joke about a man who seemed to have lived several lives. The second is plausible but is a novelist's business.
