Hildreth's "Japan as It Was and Is": A Handbook of Old Japan, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Richard Hildreth

CHAPTER VII

Preaching of Xavier—Pinto’s Third Visit to Japan—A. D. 1550-51.

It is not our purpose to trace minutely the progress and fluctuating fortunes of the Jesuit missionaries; nor, indeed, would it always be easy to extract the exact truth from relations into which the marvellous so largely enters. Xavier’s letters throw very little light on the subsequent history of his mission, which mainly depends upon accounts derived from an inquisition into the particulars of the apostle’s ministry and miracles in the East, ordered to be made shortly after his death by John III., of Portugal, and which resulted in a large collection of duly attested depositions, containing many marvellous statements, most of them purporting to come from eye-witnesses, from which source the Jesuit historians of the Eastern missions and the biographers of the saint have drawn most of their materials.

If we are to believe them, Xavier was not only always victorious in his disputes with bonzes; he went even so far, shortly after his arrival in Japan, as to raise the dead—a miracle which furnished Poussin with a subject for a celebrated picture. Xavier, we are told, had been charged in India with a similar interference with the laws of nature; it is true he attempted to explain it away, as, perhaps, he would have done this Japanese miracle; but that denial the historian Maffei thinks, instead of disproving the miracle, only proves the modest humility of Xavier.

Though at first well received, as we have seen, by the king of Satsuma, and though, in the course of near a year he remained there, the immediate family and many of the relations of Anjirō were persuaded to be baptized, yet the remonstrances of the bonzes, followed by the transfer of the Portuguese trade, for the sake of a better harbor, from Kagoshima to Hirado, caused the king of Satsuma to issue an edict forbidding his subjects, under pain of death, to renounce the worship of their national gods. In consequence of this edict, Xavier departed for Hirado, which island, off the west coast of Shimo, having separated from the kingdom of Hizen, had become independent under a prince of its own. Anjirō was left behind, but soon afterwards was obliged to fly to China, where, as Pinto informs us, he was killed by robbers.

At Hirado, in consequence of the representations of the Portuguese merchants, Xavier was well received; but, desirous to see the chief city of Japan, leaving Torres behind, he set out with Fernandez and two Japanese converts on a visit to Miyako.

Proceeding by water, he touched first at Hakata, a considerable town on the northwest coast of Shimo, and capital of the kingdom of Chikuzen, and then at Yamaguchi, at that time a large city, capital of Nagato, the most western kingdom or province of the great island of Nippon, separated at this point from Shimo by a narrow strait.

The populace of Yamaguchi, ridiculing Xavier’s mean appearance as contrasted with his pretensions, drove him out of the city with curses and stones. Winter had now set in, and the cold was severe. The coast was infested by pirates, and the interior by robbers, which obliged the saint to travel as servant to some merchants, who, themselves on horseback, required him, though on foot, and loaded with a heavy box of theirs, to keep up with them at full gallop. This, however, seems a little exaggerated, as Japanese travellers on horseback never exceed a walk; while the box which Xavier carried is represented by the earlier writers as containing the sacred vessels for the sacrifice of the mass.

Arriving thus at Miyako in rather sad plight, Xavier found that capital almost ruined by civil wars, and on the eve of becoming the field of a new battle. He could obtain no audience, as he had hoped, either of the Kubō-Sama or of the Shaku, nor any hearing except from the populace, so that he judged it best to return again to Hirado.

There are two means of working upon the imagination, both of which are employed by turns alike by the Romish and by the Buddhist clergy. One is by showing a contempt not merely for elegances, but even for common comforts and ordinary decencies: the other, by pomp, show, and display. Xavier, on his way to Miyako, entered the city of Yamaguchi barefoot and meanly clad, and had, as we have stated, been hooted and stoned by the populace. He now returned thither again from Hirado handsomely clothed, and taking with him certain presents and recommendatory letters from the Portuguese viceroy of the Indies and the governor of Malacca, addressed to the Japanese princes, but of which as yet he had made no use. Demanding an audience of the king, he was received with respect, and soon obtained leave to preach, and an unoccupied house of the bonzes to live in. Here, being soon surrounded by crowds, he renewed, say his biographers, the miracle of tongues, not only in preaching fluently in Japanese and in Chinese to the numerous merchants of that nation who traded there, but in being able by a single answer to satisfy a multitude of confused questions which the eager crowd simultaneously put to him. Such was his success that, in less than two months, five hundred persons, most of them of consideration, received baptism; and, though the king soon began to grow less favorable, the converts increased, during less than a year that he remained there, to three thousand.

The seed thus planted, Xavier resolved to return to the Indies for a fresh supply of laborers; and, having heard of the arrival of a Portuguese vessel at Fuchū, in the kingdom of Bungo, leaving De Torres and Fernandez at Yamaguchi, he proceeded to Fuchū for the purpose of embarking.

Among the merchants in this ship was Fernam Mendez Pinto, now in Japan for the third time, and who gives at some length the occurrences that took place after Xavier’s arrival at Fuchū, where he was received with great respect by the Portuguese, of whom more than thirty went out on horseback to meet him.

The young king, whose name was Kiuan,[39] had already obtained, through intercourse with Portuguese merchants, some knowledge of their religion. He invited Xavier to an audience, to which the Portuguese merchants accompanied him with so grand a display as somewhat to shock the modesty of the saint, but which strongly impressed in his favor the people of Bungo, to whom he had been represented by the bonzes as so miserable a vagabond as to disgust the very vermin with which he was covered. The young king received him very graciously; and he preached and disputed with such success as greatly to alarm the bonzes, who vainly attempted to excite a popular commotion against him as an enchanter, through whose mouth a demon spoke, and a cannibal, who fed on dead bodies which he dug up in the night.

Finally, after conquering, in a long dispute before the king of Bungo, the ablest and most celebrated champion of the bonzes,[40] and converting several of the order to the faith, Xavier embarked for Goa on the 20th of September, 1551, attended by two of his Japanese converts. Of those one died at Goa. The other, named Bernard, proceeded to Europe, and, after a visit to Rome, returned to Portugal, and, having entered the Society of Jesus, closed his life at the Jesuit college of Coimbra, a foundation endowed by John III for the support of a hundred pupils, to be prepared as missionaries to the East.

At Yamaguchi, after Xavier’s departure, the bonzes, enemies of Catholicity, were more successful. An insurrection which they raised so alarmed the king, that he shut himself up in his palace, set it on fire, and, having slain his only son with his own hand, ended by cutting himself open. The missionaries, however, were saved by an unconverted princess, who even induced certain bonzes to shelter them; and a brother of the king of Bungo having been elected king of Nagato, the Catholics, not one of whom, we are told, had been killed in the insurrection, were soon on a better footing than ever.[41]