[1] He lived in Lisbon, then one of Europe's most flourishing cities, where his brother was a rich merchant who owned a business that sold expensive silks and velvets on the fashionable Rue Novo do Mercadores.
The ceremony so affected Fernández, that soon thereafter he aspired to religious life and before too long he asked to be admitted to the Society of Jesus, only not as a priest, but as a temporal coadjutor or a lay brother in 1547.
The early Jesuit missionaries arrived in Japan on 15 August 1549, on the Feast of the Assumption, and spent their first year in Kagoshima, a port city on the southern tip of the island nation.
The Jesuits moved on from Kagoshima and Xavier planned to convert to Christianity the emperor of Japan, which they hoped would result in a Constantine-style conversion of the entire island nation.
Jesuit missionaries later in the sixteenth century had high hopes that the complete conversion of Japan would counterbalance the defection of England from the comity of Catholic nations.
In a letter from Portuguese Malacca, dated 20 June 1549, Francis Xavier begs the prayers of the Goa brethren for those about to start on the Japanese mission, mentioning among them Juan Fernández.
The success of Brother Fernández on this occasion in refuting his Japanese adversaries resulted in the ill will of Buddhist priests, who stirred up a rebellion against the local daimyō, who had become a Christian.