Francis Xavier Arrives in Japan

In 1549 the Spanish Jesuit Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima, on the southern island of Kyushu, and began the first sustained Christian mission in Japan. His arrival opened a century of contact between Japan and Catholic Europe, one that brought new trade, new technologies and new ideas, but also political suspicion that eventually ended in persecution.

Xavier was a Navarrese nobleman who had studied in Paris, where he became one of the original companions of Ignatius of Loyola and a founding member of the Society of Jesus. He sailed to Portuguese Goa in 1542 and worked in India and Southeast Asia over the following years. In Malacca he met a Japanese man named Anjiro, who had fled Japan and was baptized there. Anjiro's accounts of his homeland persuaded Xavier that Japan might be receptive to the Gospel. Portuguese traders had in fact reached Japan only a few years earlier, around 1543, making his journey possible.

Japan at the time was fractured. The Ashikaga shogunate was weak, and regional warlords known as daimyo held real power in a period often called the Sengoku, or "warring states," era. This meant there was no central authority to grant or deny permission for missionaries. Xavier was received in Kagoshima by the local daimyo, Shimazu Takahisa, who was interested in the commerce Europeans could bring. Xavier relied on Anjiro and other helpers as interpreters, though his early grasp of Japanese religious vocabulary was imperfect, and some terms he used were later criticized and changed.

Xavier stayed in Japan for about two years. He traveled to Hirado and Yamaguchi and made an attempt to reach Kyoto, finding the capital in disorder and no emperor or shogun able to give him an audience. He learned that Japanese elites held China in high cultural esteem, which led him to think that converting China might be the key to converting Japan. He left in 1551 and died in 1552 off the Chinese coast while trying to enter the mainland.

The mission he began grew considerably. Jesuits who followed him won converts among ordinary people and some daimyo, especially in Kyushu, and Nagasaki became a major Christian center. Estimates of Japanese Christians by about 1600 run to several hundred thousand, though figures are uncertain. Over time, however, the ruling Toyotomi and Tokugawa regimes came to see Christianity as a threat to political order and a possible vehicle for European intervention. Bans, executions and the eventual closure of the country in the 1630s drove the faith underground, where small communities of "hidden Christians" survived for generations.