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Updated: May 31, 2025
His stay in Japan had lasted twenty-seven months, and in that interval he and his comrades had won some 760 converts. It is worth while to recapitulate here the main events during this first epoch of Christian propagandism in Japan. It has been shown that in more than a year's labours in Kagoshima, Xavier, with the assistance of Anjiro as an interpreter, obtained 150 believers.
It, is also noteworthy that, just as the edict of Ieyasu was immediately preceded by statements from Will Adams about the claim of Spain and Portugal to absorb all non-Christian countries, so the edict of Hidetada had for preface Cock's attribution of aggressive designs to the Spanish ships at Kagoshima in conjunction with Christian converts.
It was on the 27th of January, 1614 that is to say, fifty-four years and five months after the landing of Xavier at Kagoshima that an edict appeared ordering that all the foreign priests should be collected in Nagasaki preparatory to removal from Japan; that all churches should be pulled down, and that all converts should be compelled to abjure Christianity.
Anjiro, after learning Portuguese and becoming a Christian, was baptized with the name of Paul. The heroic missionary of the cross and keys then sailed with his Japanese companion, and in 1549 landed at Kagoshima, the capital of Satsuma. As there was no central government then existing in Japan, the entrance of the foreigners, both lay and clerical, was unnoticed.
Xavier landed at Kagoshima in 1549; and by 1581 the Jesuits had upwards of two hundred churches in the country. This fact alone sufficiently indicates the rapidity with which the new religion spread; and it seemed destined to extend over the entire empire.
The upshot of this affair was that the British Government, having demanded the surrender of the samurai implicated in the murder, and having been refused, sent a naval squadron to bombard Kagoshima, the capital of the Satsuma baron.
They were able ultimately to guide the Osaka army through the forests and mountains on the north of Kagoshima, and Hideyoshi adopted the same strategy as that pursued in a similar case three hundred years later, namely, sending a force of fifty thousand men by sea with orders to advance against Kagoshima from the south.
The missionary party landed at Kagoshima, in Satsuma. Here they had little success, only the family and relatives of Anjiro accepting the new faith, and Xavier set out on a tour through the land, his goal being Kioto, the mikado's capital.
In the last chapter we have noticed what a commotion had been caused in Japan by the sudden advent of Commodore Perry, how the councils of Kuges and Daimios were called into spontaneous life by the dread of foreigners and by the sense of national weakness, and how the bombardments of Kagoshima and Shimonosheki tested these fears and taught the necessity of national union.
Nothing remained, therefore, but recourse to street preaching, and for this they were ill equipped, for Xavier, constitutionally a bad linguist, knew very little of the Japanese language, and his companion, Fernandez, even less, while as for Anjiro, he had remained in Kagoshima. After devoting a few days to this unproductive task, Xavier returned to Yamaguchi.
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