The Jesuit Mission in Japan: Cultural Synthesis and Inter-Cultural Conflict

The years between 1549 and 1638 proved momentous for Japan as first Jesuits and later other Catholic missionaries moved among Japanese commoners and daimyo alike. Their evangelism brought an unprecedented degree of contact between Japanese and Western people and likewise an unprecedented potential for synthesis of the religious and wider cultural aspects of both societies. However, Jesuit policies beyond the religious sphere (in the economic and political realm) endangered a precarious acquiescence by the Japanese elite, and ultimately foretold their banishment and the persecution of Christians in Japan for over 200 years.

The initial years of the mission brought hostility from the Japanese by the entirely insensitive nature of the entering Portuguese Jesuits. The Jesuits were and are a Catholic religious order concerned chiefly with missionary work; in 1549, the priest Francis Xavier arrived on the Japanese island of Kagoshima with his "translator", the Catholic convert Yajiro/Pedro. Xavier's attitude, which was the prevailing attitude of Jesuit missionaries in Japan for many years, was to begin operations without even a cursory examination of the society in which they operated, provoking an air of unacceptance.

The nature of both parties in the 1500's should be considered: while the Portuguese were unapologetically racist, considering only the Chinese worthy of respect among non-white peoples (though later the Japanese gained similar prestige in their view), the Japanese were in some ways more sophisticated than the contemporary Portuguese and Europeans. A Japanese account relates the perception of the foreigners ("Nanban trade period"): "They eat with their fingers instead of with chopsticks such as we use. They show their feelings without any self-control. They cannot understand the meaning of written characters". On the other hand these remarks were made upon the visitation of a samurai to Saint-Tropez, France in 1615 ("Nanban trade period"):