[3] Francis Xavier,[4][5] Cosme de Torres (a Jesuit priest), and João Fernandes were the first to arrive to Kagoshima with hopes to bring Christianity and 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.

As trade competitors, the Protestant countries engaged in a campaign against Catholicism, and this subsequently adversely affected shogunate policies toward the Iberian kingdoms.

Katsuhisa adopted Shimazu Takahisa who in 1542 was accepted as head of the clan having previously received the Portuguese merchants on Tanegashima Island, learning about the use of firearms.

Yamaguchi was already a prosperous and refined city and its leaders, the Ōuchi family, were aware that Xavier's journey to Japan had begun after the completion of his mission in India.

Therefore, the success of the Japanese mission cannot be explained only as the result of the action of a brilliant group of missionaries, or of the commercial and political interests of a few daimyōs and traders.

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.

Mendicant orders fiercely accused the Jesuits of being corrupt and even considered their activity as the primary reason for Japan's ban on Catholicism.

Christians Arima Harunobu 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.

Once he became the ruler of Japan, Hideyoshi began to pay attention to external threats, particularly the expansion of European power in East Asia.

The turning point for Catholic missions was the San Felipe incident, where in an attempt to recover his cargo, the Spanish captain of a shipwrecked trading vessel claimed that the missionaries were there to prepare Japan for conquest.

[12] He attempted to curb Catholicism while maintaining good trading relations with Portugal and Spain, which might have provided military support to Dom Justo Takayama, a Christian daimyō in western Japan.

[14] After his invasion of Kyushu, Hideyoshi Toyotomi promulgated the Purge Directive Order to the Jesuits (バテレン追放令, bateren tsuihō rei) on July 24, 1587.

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 Hyūga in Southeast Kyushu to Dewa in North Honshū.

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.

He stayed there for approximately 18 months, until April or May 1595, thus being on record as the first European missionary to visit the Korean peninsula, but was unable to make any inroads.

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.

It seems that the Jesuits realized that the Tokugawa shogunate was much stronger and more stable than Toyotomi Hideyoshi's administration, yet the mendicant orders discussed military options relatively openly.

In 1615, a Franciscan emissary of the Viceroy of New Spain asked the shogun for land to build a Spanish fortress and this deepened Japan's suspicion against Catholicism and the Iberian colonial powers behind it.

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.

Forced to secrecy, and having a small number of clergymen working underground, the Japanese Church was able to recruit leadership from among lay members.

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.

In contrast, Christians attach a great importance to martyrdom and persecution, noting that countless more people were dispossessed of their land and property leading to their subsequent death in poverty.

The reigning shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, who had issued the Sakoku Edict, restricting trade and effectively isolating Japan, two years earlier, came down hard on the Christians.

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.

The succeeding government under Emperor Meiji, who took over from the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, initially continued in this vein and several thousand people were exiled (Urakami Yoban Kuzure).

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.

[32] The tombstone is now protected by a glass-walled structure, and was designated a National Historic Site for its importance in understanding the state of Christian missionary work in the early Edo period.