João Rodrigues Tçuzu
In modern Korean sources, Rodrigues's name is written with the pronunciation Yuk Yakhan[5] (육약한), although at the time his Chinese surname would have been pronounced Ryuk (륙).
[9][b] Ōtomo Yoshishige, daimyō of Funai ("Bungo"), had long maintained a friendly relationship with the Portuguese and Spanish against the strong resistance of his wife[10] and counselors;[11] at some point, Rodrigues joined his campaigns against other clans competing for control of Kyushu.
[2] Despite having an admittedly unpolished style in Portuguese,[14] he knew Spanish[3] and taught grammar while he studied Latin and theology under the Jesuits and Japanese literature and philosophy with others.
[16] He remained well-liked and influential under the new shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu, protecting Jesuit missions and Japanese converts at Nagasaki, Osaka, and Kyoto.
[16] Following a violent suppression of marauding Japanese sailors in Macao in 1608 and court intrigues the next year, however, Tokugawa resolved to replace Portuguese traders with red seal ships, the Dutch, and the Spanish in early 1610.
After a successful assault on a Portuguese ship then in Nagasaki Bay, he permitted most of the missionaries to remain but replaced Rodrigues with the Englishman William Adams.
[16] During the Manchu invasion of Ming China, Rodrigues came to Beijing in 1623 as the interpreter for the Portuguese company charged with demonstrating European firearms.
[c] Rodrigues introduced him to the Jesuits' work on astronomy and other sciences and made a personal gift of his telescope, which Jeong highly praised for its use in warfare.
A record survives of his conversation with Yi, who was most curious about whether or not China—whose native name Zhōngguó (中國) literally means "The Central Realm"—did in fact occupy the middle of the earth.
When the city fell a little over a week later, Sun was spared by Kong and Geng for his leniency but, for the same reason, he was then arrested, court-martialed, and executed by the Ming government.
[23] Captain Teixeira and 11 other Portuguese were killed in battle, 15 escaped only with serious injury, and Rodrigues himself survived by jumping from the high city wall into the sea.
It does not mere abridge the earlier work but reformulates its treatment of grammar, establishing clear and concise rules regarding the principal features of the Japanese language.
[16] His History of the Japanese Church (Historia da Igreja do Japão) was a monumental attempt to complete the earlier unfinished works of Valignano and Luís Fróis but was itself uncompleted.
[16] Despite the book's name, the details of the Jesuit efforts in Japan are largely relegated to an appendix entitled "Bishops of the Japanese Church" (Bispos da Igreja do Japao).
During this period, he also wrote observations on Japanese life, including political events of the emergence of the shogunate and a detailed description of the tea ceremony.
[26] He worked on two treatises—one concerning the Chinese Buddhist sects and their relation to those in Japan and another on the geography of China after the style of Ortelius's Theater of the World—that have only survived in manuscript fragments.
