The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (3 page)

In 1540, King John III of Portugal invited a new religious order, the Society of Jesus, to Lisbon. The Jesuits (Francis Xavier and Simon Rodriguez) began a mission at All-Saints Hospital and quickly won popular acclaim for their work with the city's poor and infirm.
²⁵
The young Polycarp apparently was among those impressed by the black robes, for Frois rather suddenly—at age sixteen—abandoned his career as a scribe and entered the Society of Jesus, taking as his new first name, Luis. Within a month, during the spring of 1548, Frois left home forever, sailing from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, around the horn of Africa, and then on to India.
²⁶

Frois undertook a two-year novitiate in Goa at the recently-founded Jesuit College of Saint Paul. Goa already had a reputation as a colonial paradise, seemingly celebrated by Camões in his 1572 epic poem
Os Luisadas
.
²⁷
Frois, however, was destined for the priesthood and followed his novitiate with a “tertiary” year, during which he essentially demonstrated he had internalized a Jesuit identity. The
heart and soul of this identity is the “Spiritual Exercises” of Ignatius of Loyola. The Exercises involve a stepwise progression of prayer and reflection, during which the Jesuit engages God in a “devout conversation”—a conversation that ideally endures with regular infusions of grace, helping the individual Jesuit realize and perfect his vocation.
²⁸
In 1551, the main vocation of the Jesuits was missionary work—attending to the corporal and spiritual needs of European Catholics and the innumerable gentiles lately “discovered” in Goa and other parts of Asia.
²⁹

Map 2
. Jesuits in Japan, 1585

Having completed his novitiate and tertiary year, Frois left Goa in 1554 and travelled to Malacca. Here he worked for three years before returning to Goa in 1557 to complete his studies as a scholastic.
³⁰
Because of his talents as a writer,
³¹
Frois was tapped to serve as assistant to the Jesuit Provincial of India, who entrusted Frois with the annual report for India and other correspondence with
the Church and the Society of Jesus in Portugal and Rome.
³²
During these early years—in 1553, to be precise—Frois had the opportunity to meet Francis Xavier, the Basque Jesuit who landed at Kagoshima in August, 1549, initiating the Jesuit mission to Japan. While the Jesuits took satisfaction in winning souls from among the poor, dark-skinned peoples of Goa, the Japanese and Chinese had white skin and were as civilized as Europeans!
³³
Or so Francis Xavier wrote in his stirring letters, which Frois undoubtedly read before they were bundled with other letters from Asia and shipped from Goa to Europe.

Frois was ordained a priest in 1561 and apparently petitioned to be sent to Japan,
³⁴
for late in 1562, at age thirty, he left Goa and sailed first to Macao and then on to the southern-most Japanese island of Kyûshû. Here during the previous decade, the Jesuits and Portuguese traders—with their access to guns and silk—had been embraced by the powerful
daimyo
of Bungo, Õtomo Yoshishige. With the
daimyo's
blessing, Fathers Torre and Vilela and several Jesuit brothers followed up on Francis Xavier's initial success and baptized perhaps a thousand or so Japanese, mostly in and around the town of Funai. Several hundred additional converts were made during brief visits to various parts of the island such as Satsuma, Yokoseura, Hakata, and Hirado.
³⁵
Jesuit success in Funai among Õtomo's subjects was enhanced in 1557 when a former merchant and surgeon turned Jesuit, Luis de Almeida, used his personal fortune to open a hospital and foundling home for needy Japanese.
³⁶

Frois spent his first two years in Kyûshû (1563–1564) in Takashima and the port town of Hirado, where he continued his study of Japanese and attended to a small Japanese-Christian community as well as Portuguese merchants and sailors who visited the port on a regular basis.
³⁷
Once his proficiency in Japanese was established, late in 1564 Frois was sent to the main island of Honshu and the capital city of Kyoto, to work with Father Gaspar Vilela. Earlier the Jesuits had
used their friendship with the
daimyo
of Bungo, Õtomo, to secure an audience with the shogun, who allowed Vilela in 1560 to begin missionary work in and around the capital city. By the time Frois arrived in Kyoto, Vilela and a remarkable Japanese assistant named Lourenço had won over a number of prominent
daimyo
and their samurai supporters. However, no sooner did Frois arrive in the capital, during the summer of 1565, when the shogun was assassinated and fighting raged between competing
daimyo
, which forced Frois and Vilela to flee Kyoto. Frois moved to Sakai where he worked for the next four years, devoting part of his time to preparing Japanese-language editions of the catechism, lives of the saints, sermons, and other texts for mission converts.

In 1568, the ever-changing political landscape of Japan witnessed the political maturation of Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582). Nobunaga was a minor warlord from Owari Province who spent a decade out-smarting and out-muscling fellow clansman and neighboring warlords. In the fall of 1568, Nobunaga triumphantly marched into Kyoto, where he installed a new shogun, who was in turn embraced by the emperor. Both the shogun and emperor were beholding to Nobunaga, but not so the Buddhist monks of the powerful Tendai sect who resided near Kyoto on Mt. Hiei. In part to counter the monks' influence,
³⁸
Nobunaga allowed the Jesuits to return to Kyoto. The following year (1569), Frois was the first Jesuit to take up residence in the city, which had a population of close to 100,000.
³⁹
Like Lisbon, Kyoto was home to the Imperial court. For centuries, it had been Japan's economic, political, and cultural center.

It had been seven years since Frois arrived in Japan and clearly he had mastered Japanese. Nobunaga was a difficult man to impress but apparently got on well with Frois,
⁴⁰
whom he granted permission to proselytize within his domain. Frois and a handful of fellow Jesuits, notably Organtino Gneechi-Soldo, enjoyed considerable success in the region about Kyoto over the next eight years or until 1577, when civil strife, coincident with a challenge to Nobunaga's rule, once again forced Frois and his Jesuit colleagues to flee central Japan and take refuge to the south, in the province of Bungo. It was while serving as the local superior of the Bungo mission that Frois received word that the Jesuit “father visitor,” Alessandro Valignano, had arrived in Japan to conduct an inspection of the mission. As visitor, Valignano enjoyed the authority of the Father General of the Society, meaning that he could make whatever changes he felt necessary, regardless of the views of the local Jesuit superior, Francisco Cabral.

Valignano knew or soon learned of Frois' impressive grasp of the Japanese language and culture and made Frois his assistant and translator. For the next three
years (1579–1582) Frois travelled to various parts of Japan, helping Valignano assess Jesuit operations. At the end of Valignano's inspection in 1583, at age fifty-one, Frois was entrusted by Jesuit superiors to write a history of the Jesuit mission enterprise. Much of Frois' subsequent career as a Jesuit (Frois died in 1597) was spent writing this multi-volume work, which covered the entire history of the Jesuit experience in Japan until 1593.
⁴¹
As noted, an extant prologue and table of contents for Frois'
Historia
is strikingly similar to the
Tratado
.
⁴²
The title page of the
Tratado
bears a date of June, 1585, indicating that it was written at roughly the same time as Part I of Frois'
Historia
.

The cultural-historical context of the
Tratado
: A Jesuit mission in peril

While it seems certain that Frois wrote the
Tratado
, apparently basing it on Part I of his history (or
vice versa
), nowhere does he make explicit why he drafted the text and for whom it was intended. Because most distichs in the
Tratado
reference Europe in terms of “we,” “us,” and “ours,” the text obviously was written for a European, rather than a Japanese audience. Because the
Tratado
contains Japanese terms that are not translated, it would further seem that the text was intended for European Jesuits, presumably those recently arrived in Japan who were expected to learn Japanese. Along these lines, the title page of the
Tratado
indicates that it was drafted in Canzusa (Kazusa), which was in the province of Arima on the southern end of the Shimabara peninsula. Kazusa was home to a Jesuit college for novices and scholastics and was also where Frois resided while serving as
socius
or assistant to the Jesuit vice-provincial Gaspar Coelho.
⁴³

The
Tratado's
central focus—Japanese customs, particularly among elites, and how they differed from European behaviors and beliefs—was a major preoccupation of Frois' immediate superior and the highest ranking Jesuit in Asia, the father visitor Alessandro Valignano.
⁴⁴
When Valignano arrived in Japan in 1579,
having spent the previous five years in India and Macao, he quickly realized that the reports he had been receiving from Japan exaggerated Jesuit success.
⁴⁵
Although the Jesuits could boast upwards of 150,000 Japanese baptisms, a good number of
daimyo
had embraced Christianity to gain access to Chinese as well as European trade goods, including guns. Prior to the 1540s and the arrival of the Portuguese, Japanese pirates
⁴⁶
had plundered settlements along the coast of China, prompting the Chinese to forbid all trade with Japan—this despite Chinese interest in Japanese silver and the latter's desire for Chinese silk.
⁴⁷
Portuguese merchants, who traveled in state-of-the-art ships (see
chapter 12
) and essentially were required by the Portuguese Crown to facilitate the work of the Jesuits, seized the opportunity to act as middle-men in a reinvigorated trade between Japan and China and all of Asia and beyond.
⁴⁸
Japanese elites quickly realized that befriending a Jesuit could open doors to Chinese silk and weap ons. Indeed, to fund their mission enterprise in Japan, the Jesuits invested large sums of their own money in Chinese silk, which was delivered to Japanese ports by Portuguese merchants.
⁴⁹

Valignano became rightly suspicious of the motives of not only the
daimyo
, but of Japanese commoners, who were in the habit of following the example of their rulers. Arguably, neither
daimyo
nor commoners had sufficient knowledge of Christianity, which had been explained by fellow Japanese trained in the basics by the Jesuits.
⁵⁰
Both segments of Japanese society were likely to abandon Christianity (and the Jesuits) at the first sign of significant opposition. And there was ample trouble in the form of Buddhist monks who at first tolerated, but subsequently opposed the Jesuits.
⁵¹
Unlike the New World, where the Jesuits
followed in the wake of introduced diseases that undermined native religions,
⁵²
Japan suffered no demographic and cultural collapse coincident with the arrival of Europeans.
⁵³
Buddhism and Shinto remained alive and well in Japan, even if the abbots of some Buddhist temples alienated their followers by embroiling themselves in power struggles with Japanese nobles.
⁵⁴
In this regard, powerful
daimyo
such as Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, both of whom embraced or tolerated the Jesuits, never rejected or opposed Buddhism
per se
. Their problem was with particular Buddhists (i.e. Tendai of Mount Hiei, Shingon of Negoro, monks of Osaka) who fielded armies and otherwise opposed Nobunaga's and Hideyoshi's hegemony.
⁵⁵

Valignano worried about not only the Japanese, but his fellow Jesuits, many of whom looked down on the Japanese, who everyone acknowledged, beginning with Francis Xavier, were an incredibly proud people.
⁵⁶
Contrary to Valignano's own orders, which had been conveyed over the years from India and Macao, Jesuit superiors, particularly Francisco Cabral, the resident superior of the Japan mission, had made little effort to train European Jesuits in the Japanese language. Still more disturbing, Valignano discovered that Cabral and his assistants had systematically discriminated against those Japanese who had aspired to the priesthood or who had sought admission to the Jesuit order; the Japanese were relegated to a class of assistants or
dojuku
, rather than receiving training as scholastics.
⁵⁷

In point of fact, the Jesuit mission enterprise in Japan was a proverbial “house of cards” that might collapse at any moment. Valignano astutely realized
⁵⁸
that if the Jesuits and Christianity were to have a future in Japan, it was imperative that the Jesuits embrace Japanese customs as well as the Japanese language, and in the process learn to compete with Buddhist monks, who often were masters of both old and new traditions such as calligraphy, poetry, and
chanoyu
or the “way of tea.”
⁵⁹
Importantly, Valignano realized that his fellow Jesuits would have to embrace not only Japanese language and culture, but his soon-to-be-revealed plan to train Japanese converts for the priesthood. No European power, including Habsburg
Spain, had the men and resources to invade Japan and introduce European juridical authority and institutions (e.g.
audiencia
, inquisition, universities, cathedrals), which would greatly facilitate the conversion of the Japanese to Christianity. This was of course what happened in colonial Mexico and Peru. It was further apparent, particularly given the challenge of the Reformation back in Europe, that there would never be enough European priests to convert, never mind staff a Catholic Church in Japan. Confronted with these realities, Valignano concluded that the only hope for Japan was a Church staffed by the Japanese themselves. In one of his characteristically blunt letters to superiors, Valignano wrote: