History of the Catholic Church in Japan
[4] Beginning in 1587, with imperial regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi's ban on Jesuit missionaries, Christianity was repressed as a threat to national unity.
[7] Francisco Xavier,[8][9] Cosme de Torres (a Jesuit priest) and Juan Fernandez were the first who arrived in Kagoshima with hopes to bring Catholicism to Japan.
The fait accompli was approved in Pope Gregory XIII's papal bull of 1575, which decided that Japan belonged to the Portuguese diocese of Macau.
[citation needed] Religious rivalries between Catholics and Protestants reached Japan with the arrival of Dutch and English traders in the early 17th century.
Dutch traders frequently criticized the Catholic Church in Japan, which subsequently affected shogunate policies toward the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.
Then, due to displeasure at what he considered un-Christian life and manners on the part of the Portuguese which impeded missionary work, he left India and traveled to East Asia.
Xavier reached Japan on 27 July 1549, with Anjirō and three other Jesuits, but it was not until 15 August that he went ashore at Kagoshima, the principal port of the province of Satsuma on the island of Kyūshū.
[citation needed] Xavier was welcomed by the Shingon monks since he used the word Dainichi for the Christian God; attempting to adapt the concept to local traditions.
Katsuhisa adopted Takahisa Shimazu, who in 1542 was accepted as head of the clan, having previously received the Portuguese merchants on Tanegashima Island and learned about the use of firearms.
Yamaguchi was a prosperous and refined city, and its leaders, the Ouchi family, were aware that Xavier's journey to Japan had begun after the completion of his mission in India.
The uncompromising Xavier took to the streets of the city denouncing, among other things, infanticide, idolatry, and homosexuality (the last being widely accepted at the time).
[17] The Jesuits possessed in 1614 eleven colleges, sixty-four residences, two novitiates, and two seminaries; according to Ludwig von Pastor (citing Steichen (194) and L. Delplace (1884)), the total number of Christians in Japan was c. 1,000,000.
[18] Its uniqueness meant that Japan was then the sole overseas country in which all members of those confraternities were locals, as was the case with Christian missions in Mexico, Peru, Brazil, the Philippines, or India, in spite of the presence of a colonial elite.
On the eve of the Sekigahara battle, fifteen daimyōs were baptized, and their domains stretched from Hyuga in Southeast Kyushu to Dewa in North Honshū (see Costa 2003).
Accepted on a national scale, Christianity was also successful among different social groups from the poor to the rich, peasants, traders, sailors, warriors, or courtesans.
By 1606, there already existed a feminine religious order called Miyako no Bikuni (Nuns of Kyoto) which accepted Korean converts such as Marina Pak, baptized in Nagasaki.
At the same time, Portuguese merchants required the assistance of procurators who were familiar with Japanese customs, since they established no permanent trading post in Japan.
In 1585, Gaspar Coelho asked the Spanish Philippines to send a fleet but the plan was rejected due to the shortness of its military capability.
Christians Protasio Arima and Paulo Okamoto were named as principals in an assassination plot to murder the magistrate in charge of the shogunate's most important port city of Nagasaki.
[28] From then on, he attempted to curb Catholicism while also maintaining good trading relations with Portugal and Spain, who may have provided military support to Dom Justo Takayama, a Christian daimyō in western Japan.
[additional citation(s) needed] [29] He was concerned that divided loyalties might lead to dangerous rebels like the Ikkō-ikki sect of earlier years and produced his edict expelling missionaries.
The Tokugawa shogunate finally decided to ban Catholicism in 1614, and in the mid-17th century demanded the expulsion of all European missionaries and the execution of all converts.
In 1615, a Franciscan emissary of the Viceroy of New Spain asked the shōgun for land to build a Spanish fortress and this deepened Japan's suspicion against Catholicism and the Iberian colonial powers behind it.
Nagasaki remained a Christian city in the first decades of the 17th century, and during the general persecutions other confraternities were founded in Shimabara, Kinai and Franciscans in Edo.
The Buddhist ecclesiastical establishment was made responsible for verifying that a person was not a Christian through what became known as the "temple guarantee system" (terauke seido).
By the 1630s, people were being required to produce a certificate of affiliation with a Buddhist temple as proof of religious orthodoxy, social acceptability, and loyalty to the regime.
Biblical phrases or prayers were transferred orally from parent to child, and secret posts (Mizukata) were assigned in their underground community to baptize their children, all while regional governments continuously operated fumi-e to expose Christians.
Robert Bruce Van Valkenburgh, the American minister-resident in Japan, privately complained of this persecution to the Nagasaki magistrates, though little action was taken to stop it.
After Europe and the U.S. began to vocally criticize the persecution, the Japanese government realized that it needed to lift the ban in order to attain its interests.
[39] When Pope John Paul II visited Nagasaki in 1981, he baptized some young people from Kakure Kirishitan families – a rare occurrence.
