Chapter Fourteen:
Here Come the Christians
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Christianity came to Japan starting in middle of the fifteenth century, spread initially by Europeans. Along with it came exposure to many forms of European culture. Although it was never a major religion in Japan in terms of numbers (perhaps 5% of the population in some areas at its peak; less than 1% or the total population in modern times), Christianity helped shape Japanese culture directly and indirectly. The cultural power of Christianity in Japan never even approached that of Buddhism, and there has been a tendency among western writers to exaggerate Christian influence. Still, Christianity was a significant cultural force in its heyday, and this chapter examines it briefly.
The first recorded Japanese contact with Europeans took place in 1543, when Japanese in the small, southern island of Tanegashima traded with two or three Portuguese merchants. The most important item received from the Portuguese traders was firearms. Just a few years later, Japanese craftsmen were producing an improved version of these guns. Firearms were soon in great demand, because the 1540s was a decade of warfare throughout the Japanese islands, which had been without a strong central authority for nearly a century at that point.
Also by this point in time, Jesuit missionaries had become well established in China, where they exerted moderate influence at the Chinese court in certain academic and technical realms such as astronomy, mathematics, and geography. It was logical, therefore, that they would eventually seek to extend their activities to Japan. The general Jesuit strategy was to convert rulers and social elites to Catholicism in the hope that those in power would then force the rest of the population to convert.
In 1549, a future saint, the Basque priest Francis Xavier, led a group of two other Jesuits and some interpreters ashore at Kagoshima, in the southern part of Kyushu. Xavier had high hopes for a bountiful harvest of souls, hopes based almost entirely on a single Japanese Xavier met in China in 1547. This Japanese, named Yajirō, struck Xavier as remarkably bright and possessed of a fierce intellectual curiosity, and Xavier extrapolated from this single person to assume that all Japanese were of like character. Yajirō was a pirate, though Xavier apparently was unaware of it. Also, Yajirō was from Kagoshima, an area of Japan with a particularly distinctive language. The languages spoken in and around Kagoshima would not have been understandable even in other parts of Kyushu, much less the rest of the Japanese islands. Unaware of this point, Xavier tried to learn "Japanese" from Yajirō. Whatever words and phrases Xavier learned from his informant would have been of little use outside of the area around Kagoshima.
Perhaps the most vexing language-related problem for Xavier has how to say "God" (Deus) in Japanese. There simply was no Japanese word that matched the meaning of Xavier's God. Shingon Buddhism was especially common in Kagoshima, and so you could probably guess the word Yajirō supplied for God: Dainichi (Vairocana), the solar Buddha. As Xavier set out in southern Kyushu preaching the religion of "Dainichi," everyone thought that he was talking about a new form of Buddhism. And even after Xavier and the other Jesuits discovered what Dainichi meant and began to employ other terms, most Japanese listeners still thought that he was a Buddhist preacher of some kind. For one thing, his strange external appearance identified him to many Japanese as having come from India [Tenjiku], the birthplace of Buddhism. Jurgis Elisonas, a leading scholar of Japanese Christianity points out:
In Satsuma, for instance, Xavier was received amicably by the daimyo Shimazu Takahisa and also conversed on friendly terms with the eminent prelate Ninshitsu (d. 1556), the superior of Kagoshima's most important Buddhist temple, the Zen monastery Fukushōji. The teacher who had come from India [Xavier] drew the curiosity of crowds of people as he sat on the steps of Fukushōji's entrance and read aloud from a summary of Christian doctrine that had been put into Japanese with Yajirō's assistance and painstakingly written out in Roman letters by Xavier. According to Xavier's great successor in the apostolate of Asia, Visitator Alexandro Valignano SJ, the translation was such a bungled piece of work that it aroused "jeers and laughter; for neither was the truth of what the Padre was saying expressed well, nor was it written in such a way that it could be read before their men of letters without laughter." For all that, in Kagoshima and in the castle of Ichiku, another key place of Shimazu Takahisa's domains, Xavier and his helpmates were able to convert more than one hundred people, who were drawn to the foreign priest by the force of his personality if not by the power of his message. What the specific character of these converts' new religion was, however, cannot be said with certainty." <in John Whitney Hall, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 4 Early Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 308-309.>
Recall that honji-suijaku was the most characteristic component of medieval Japanese religion, and in honji-suijaku, all religious figures are, directly or indirectly, Buddhist. As you might imagine, the mode of religious thought characterized by honji-suijaku tended to give Jesuit missionaries fits. Their first intellectual task, therefore, was to distinguish Christianity from Buddhism, though they never fully succeeded. <temporary end>