Story
"My heart goes down to the shore"
In 1561 the lord of Satsuma wrote a letter to the head of the Jesuits in India. The historian Tokunaga Kazuki, of the Reimeikan museum in , quotes three of its phrases: "I rejoice that they come to my country"; "it is a thing to rejoice in, that they come to my country to trade"; and "my heart has gone out to the shore to wait for them."
The writer was Shimazu Takahisa, and "they" were the Portuguese and their priests. Twelve years earlier, Takahisa had been the first great lord in Japan to receive a Christian missionary. His story is the story of the Church's first welcome in Japan, and of how a welcome can be sincere and still not be faith.
The lord who reunited his house
Takahisa was born in 1514 at Tabuse in Satsuma, the heir of the Isaku branch of the Shimazu; his father was Shimazu Tadayoshi, remembered as Nisshinsai.In 1526 the head of the main line, Shimazu Katsuhisa, adopted him as his heir, and the boy went from Isaku to Kagoshima to succeed as governor of the three provinces of Satsuma, Ōsumi and Hyūga.But his kinsman Shimazu Sanehisa attacked, and Takahisa fell back to Tabuse; for years he and his father fought Sanehisa's faction.Yamakawa's dictionary says he drove out Katsuhisa in 1535 and defeated Sanehisa at the battle of Shiohara in 1539.By about 1545 his position was secure in fact as well as name.
Nipponica notes that when Portuguese ships brought firearms to Tanegashima in 1543, he took a deep interest.Trade with the outside world mattered to him from the start; Tokunaga calls it a consistent political stance of the Isaku Shimazu.
Anjirō goes ahead
On 15 August 1549, the feast of the Assumption, with , and three Japanese Christians, among them , baptised Paulo de Santa Fé, a man of Kagoshima.Before the priest met the lord, the layman did. Xavier wrote that the lord received Paulo with great joy and honour and asked him about the Portuguese, their way of life and their dignity, and that Paulo answered everything so that the lord was well satisfied.
The feast of St Michael
About a month after landing, on 29 September 1549, the feast of the Archangel Michael, whom Xavier had chosen as patron of Japan, Xavier himself was received.He wrote: "The lord received us with great courtesy, and told us to take good care of the book in which the Christian teaching was written. He said that if the teaching of Jesus Christ was true and good, the devil would be greatly troubled. A few days later he gave his vassals leave, that all who wished to become Christians might become Christians."
Schurhammer adds that Takahisa put a house at the missionaries' disposal and proclaimed to his subjects that they were free to embrace the religion of the strangers.Xavier had one more request. His goal was the capital and the "king of Japan", and he asked the lord to arrange a voyage there. Takahisa promised to do so later: in six months the winds would blow northward again.
Where this happened is not settled. Xavier's letter puts the lord five leagues, about 28 kilometres, from Kagoshima.One early witness, as cited by the Jesuit translator Kōno Yoshinori, placed him at Kokubu, north-east of the city; Kōno judged Ijūin more likely, given the state of the fighting.The ruins of Ichiuji castle at Ijūin, Takahisa's residence until 1550, are commemorated today with a monument set up in 1949, though Hioki City calls the identification "one theory".Takahisa moved from Ijūin to the Uchi castle in Kagoshima in 1550.
Nipponica summarises his motive plainly: he welcomed Xavier and gave him every facility, hoping that merchant ships would come.Britannica's dictionary says the same more briefly: he met Xavier and later asked the Viceroy of India for friendship.Both things can be true at once. The Catholic historian Kadota calls the visit a success beyond expectation.
A year of grace
The winter that followed was the first season of the Church in Japan. Xavier, Torres and Fernández studied Japanese, and with Paulo's help Xavier wrote out an account of the faith in Japanese in Latin letters, which he read aloud twice a day.He made a friend of Ninshitsu, the old abbot of the Shimazu family's Zen monastery.By the next year about a hundred people had been baptised in Kagoshima, and fifteen more, including the lady of the castle, at Ichiku, some seven hours to the north-west.Xavier liked the people at once: "They are the best people thus far discovered," he wrote.
The leave withdrawn
The welcome did not last. Spring came, Schurhammer writes, and the south wind began to blow, but the promised vessel for the capital never came: war was raging in the north, and no one could sail until there was peace.Summer passed and still there was no peace. Meanwhile the Buddhist clergy, seeing that converts no longer gave them alms, tried to stop their followers from converting, warned of the vengeance of the gods of Japan and urged the lord against the missionaries. In the end, Schurhammer says, the prince yielded to their pressure and forbade further conversions on pain of death.
For a ruler who had only just made himself master of a divided house, the monasteries were not a small matter; the abbot Xavier befriended headed the Shimazu family's own Zen house.Takahisa did not drive the missionaries out, and the sources consulted report no one put to death; but the door he had opened was closed. Then news came that a Portuguese trading ship had put in at , a hundred miles to the north-west, and Xavier resolved to go there and on to the capital, hoping that if the king of Japan were won, Kagoshima too would see better days.Towards the end of September 1550 Xavier and his companions left Kagoshima for Hirado. The Christians thanked them, gave them gifts for the road, and wept as they left. Paulo stayed behind as leader and teacher of the little community.At Ichiku, Xavier left the steward Miguel a picture of the Virgin, telling him it was "medicine for your soul."
Letters to India
Takahisa did not forget the Portuguese. In 1561 he wrote from Kagoshima to Father António de Quadros, head of the Jesuits in India, and to the Viceroy, Dom Francisco Coutinho; the University of Tokyo's Historiographical Institute has published both letters in its series of Jesuit letters concerning Japan, the first dated 5 November 1561.These are the letters Tokunaga quotes: "my heart has gone out to the shore to wait for them."
That year Cosme de Torres sent Brother to Kagoshima.A study of the early Jesuit visitors, drawing on Almeida's letter of 25 October 1562, says that the captain of a Portuguese ship at the port of Tomari, on the Bōnotsu coast, had brought Takahisa's letter asking for a priest; Almeida went with the ship's party, crossing Kyushu in the cold of December 1561, met the Christian lord of Ichiku castle, of the Niiro family, and then Takahisa at Kagoshima.He found, the study says, that the lord cared for the profits of trade more than for the faith, but stayed about five months caring for Christians who had had no priest since Xavier left; in April 1562 Torres called him back for the new mission at Yokoseura.(These details rest on that secondary study: until checked in Almeida's letter.)
The end
Takahisa went on, by politics and force, subduing rivals such as the Hishikari and extending his rule over the three provinces.In 1570 he handed the headship to his son Yoshihisa, and he died on 23 June 1571 (Genki 2), aged fifty-eight.His sons Yoshihisa, Yoshihiro and Toshihisa completed what he began.The dictionaries remember him as the restorer of the Shimazu house; the Ōbunsha dictionary adds that in 1549 he permitted Xavier to preach.
What he gave
It would be easy to say Takahisa only wanted ships. But it was under his leave that the first Japanese Christian community, a hundred souls in Kagoshima and fifteen at Ichiku, was born, and Paulo stayed to lead it.Xavier's first impressions of Japan, which shaped the mission for a century, were formed in his lands.Kagoshima has not forgotten. In Xavier Park statues of Xavier, Anjirō and Bernardo, the young man of Kagoshima who went on with Xavier and later reached Rome, have stood since 1999 near the walls of the church built in Xavier's honour.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Audience site: Ijūin (Ichiuji castle) vs Kokubu vs Schurhammer's "five miles south of Kagoshima". Disputed.
- The Virgin's picture: (Charlevoix; Kadota "seems").