Story
In December 1560 a young Jesuit in apologised to a friend in Coimbra for the shortness of his letter. "I could write much more to you, but for the moment I still have to get off the letters for seven ships, four of which are sailing for Portugal, one for Kafferland, one for Malacca, one for Maluko, and one for Japan."His name was Luís Fróis. For the rest of his life he would be the man who told Europe what was happening in Japan, and he would write the last of his reports about the deaths of twenty six martyrs on a hill above .
From the Royal Secretariat to Goa
Fróis was born about 1532, most probably in Lisbon. Some sources give Beja in the archdiocese of Évora instead.While still in his early teens he worked in the Royal Secretariat, which Cieslik takes as an early sign of his gift for writing.He joined the Society of Jesus in Lisbon in 1548, at about sixteen, and a month later he sailed for India. He landed at Goa on 9 October 1548.
At St Paul's College in Goa he studied beside young men from Africa, Abyssinia, Malaya, China and India. Among them was the first Japanese ever baptized, the man from whom had sent to the college.Kotobank's encyclopedias name him as , or Yajirō, and say that Fróis met both him and Xavier at Goa.Xavier left for Japan the next year. When he came back to India in 1551 he spoke often to the young Jesuits of the possibilities there.
Fróis set out for Japan in 1554 with the Provincial, Melchior Nunes Barreto, but was left behind at Malacca and went back to India to finish his studies.He was ordained priest at Goa in 1561.The Jesuit catalogue of 1559 already described him as "skillful in writing and endowed with very good judgment."He was made secretary to the Rector and the Provincial, and at least thirty two of the letters he wrote in that office still survive.
Yokoseura, Takushima and the first dictionaries
He reached Japan at last on 6 July 1563, landing at Yokoseura in Kyushu with the Italian priest Giovanni Battista de Monte.Fróis tells the story in his History. At that time there were only two priests in Japan, at Yokoseura and in . Torres, old and sick, wept for joy and said that he could die in peace now that God had sent new workers.The lord of the district, , had just been baptized. Nine days after his arrival Torres let Fróis baptize sixty converts.
Within months war broke out and Yokoseura was lost. Fróis and Brother went to the island of Takushima near , whose 350 inhabitants were all Catholics under Antonio Koteda.Fróis fell ill with fever. Then the house and church burned, and with them the books, vestments and gifts he had brought from India, and Fernández's sermons of many years.They started again. In eight months the two of them composed a short Japanese grammar and two dictionaries, Japanese to Portuguese and Portuguese to Japanese.
Kyoto
At the end of 1564 Torres sent him to the capital.The winter journey nearly killed him. At Osaka a great fire burned the castle, the main temple and nine hundred houses on the night he arrived, and the city was searched for strangers. A friendly Buddhist host got him out disguised as a merchant.His boat ran aground in the dark and he spent the night in the snow. He reached Kyoto on the morning of 1 February 1565, which was New Year's Day in the Japanese calendar.
Fróis loved what he found. His descriptions of the temples of Kyoto are, in Cieslik's judgement, better than a standard guidebook, and his later letters describe the art of Nara and the splendour of Azuchi and of Osaka castle.Some of these passages were so full of admiration that editors in Rome cut them as "not very edifying" for Christian readers.
He did not admire only buildings. At the Chion-in he sat through a Pure Land sermon and described the preacher with care: his robes, his gilded fan, his "pleasing countenance and graceful bearing", the way he tapped the table with the fan to drive a point home.He came to think that the missionaries must know Buddhism from its own books. For about a year he and paid a former monk to read them the eight books of the Lotus Sutra, two hours a day, with commentary, while they copied it all down in Roman letters.
This was the method the Kyoto mission had inherited from Xavier, and Fróis set it down. First came the natural truths, that the world has a Creator and the soul lives forever. Then they discussed each hearer's own sect and answered objections. Only then did they teach the Trinity, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Cross and the Last Things, and then the Commandments, before baptism.With Vilela and later Organtino he followed a policy of adapting to Japanese ceremonies and customs, which later approved.
Exile and return
In June 1565 the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru was murdered, and the missionaries were driven from Kyoto.Yamakawa's dictionary adds that the expulsion came by an edict of the Emperor Ōgimachi.Fróis spent almost four years at Sakai, sheltered by the Christian merchant Diogo Hibiya. In that time he translated the Sunday Gospels into Japanese, wrote an explanation of the Commandments, put the first catechism in order, and baptized some three hundred people in a poor house.
When entered Kyoto in 1568, the way back opened. Fróis returned in March 1569, met Nobunaga through the governor Wada Koremasa, and won letters patent for the mission. The same year he and faced the monk Asayama Nichijō in debate before Nobunaga.(The story is told on our Oda Nobunaga page.)Fróis came to know Nobunaga well. Cooper writes that he talked with him for hours in Japanese and was shown round his castles by Nobunaga himself.It was Fróis who wrote that of all the houses he had seen in Portugal, India and Japan, none matched Gifu "as regards luxury, wealth and cleanliness."
Bungo, and the annual letters
In 1576 Fróis was recalled to Kyushu after more than ten years in the capital, and he spent the next years mostly at Usuki in Bungo, the seat of .He was there when Sōrin was baptized in 1578.In 1581 he went back up to Kyoto as interpreter for the Visitor, Alessandro Valignano, and was with him when Nobunaga received them.
Valignano wanted the reports to Europe written by an experienced hand and checked by superiors, and from this came the official Annual Letters.Cieslik thought no one was better fitted to write them. Fróis knew all the missions at first hand, had studied Buddhism and Japanese culture more deeply than anyone, and had "a striking talent as a writer." All the annual letters from Japan down to 1596 were his.Cooper quotes the Jesuit instruction of 1553 behind such letters: describe "the weather, the degrees of longitude, the dress, the food, the housing, number and customs of the inhabitants."Fróis's letters do this and more. Cooper notes that, unlike the terse Japanese sources, they let us see Nobunaga and other lords "as human beings."
In 1585 he also wrote a short treatise contrasting the customs of Europe and Japan.
The History
In 1583 Rome asked him for a systematic history of the Japan mission, and he was set free for it.He travelled with the Vice-Provincial on a visitation of the missions from March 1586 to gather material. By 30 December 1586 he had finished the introduction on the geography, people, culture and religion of Japan.He was with Coelho when received them at Osaka castle.
Then came Hideyoshi's edict of 24 July 1587 against the missionaries. Fróis went with the others to Hirado, then into hiding with Coelho at Kazusa in Arima, and in 1590 settled at Nagasaki.He went on writing quietly. The finished History runs from Xavier's arrival in 1549 to 1593, and Cieslik calls it "the first monumental work ever written about Japan."It never reached print in his lifetime. The manuscript lay for a long time in a Jesuit storehouse at , copies wandered the world, and the first complete printed edition was a Japanese translation of 1977 to 1980.Today it is among the most important sources for the age of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi.
Nishizaka
On 5 February 1597 Fróis stood at in Nagasaki and watched the die on their crosses.He wrote a detailed account for the Jesuit General, dated 15 March 1597. It was the last work he wrote, and it was printed in Rome two years later as the Relatione della gloriosa morte di 26 posti in croce.The book that ends his life's work is the story of a victory.
He died at Nagasaki on 8 July 1597, at sixty five.Matsuda Kiichi writes that he died worrying about what would become of his enormous manuscript.It survived. More than four centuries later, through his letters and his History, readers still meet the Japan of his time through his eyes.