Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan Read Online Free Page A

Jesuit who had spent more than eight years in India and the Malay archipelago. He saw a whole new world of missionary activity opening up and was even more excited when Captain Alvarez introduced him to an open-minded Japanese refugee called Anjiro. After converting to Christianity in 1548, Anjiro—along with his servant and a friend—accompanied Xavier to Japan.
    The voyage was not without its difficulties. The junk carrying Xavier and his companions suffered a treacherous passage, dodging hurricanes and hidden reefs, pirates and shallows. When the captain’s daughter fell overboard and drowned, the “pagan” Chinese crew engaged in diabolical rituals, sacrificing seabirds and smearing blood over the images of their goddesses. Finally, after three wearisome weeks at sea, Xavier and his companions sighted the forested coast of Kagoshima in southern Japan. It was August 15, 1549: the twenty-second day of the seventh month of the eighteenth year of the period known as Tembun.
    Kagoshima lay some 130 miles to the southwest of Funai and was much more impressive. It was the capital of the Satsuma fiefdom, and its wooded hills were bedecked with many-storied pagodas with their distinctive concave roofs. Xavier arrived when it was looking its most picturesque. Just a week earlier, the inhabitants
had celebrated the great Bon festival—the Buddhist All Souls’ Day—and the city’s graveyards had been sprinkled with fresh blossoms.
    Xavier was delighted to discover that this island nation more than lived up to expectations. The Japanese, he wrote, were “of astonishing great sense of honour, who prize honour more than any other.” He was disappointed, however, to discover that the Buddhist monks were “inclined to sins abhorrent to nature,” but he felt convinced that Japan would prove fertile territory. “If we knew how to speak the language,” he wrote, “I have no doubt that many would become Christians.”
    Kagoshima was situated in one of the most conservative provinces of Japan—a bastion of the ancient Shinto cult—and the city’s alleys were decked with ancient wooden shrines with their characteristic double-beamed gateways. There were Buddhist temples as well: dimly lit altars whose gilded statues glittered in the candlelight. The city was home to all the principal sects, including the exotically dressed followers of the fanatical Hokke and the gray-robed monks of the Ji-shu. These lived together with female nuns and were rumored to spend their nocturnal hours in a frenzy of copulation.
    Xavier headed for the great Fukosho-ji monastery, which lay just a short walk from the harbor. It was an exquisite spot, shaded with camphor trees and scented with plum blossom. The place was adorned with stone lanterns and a lotus pool, a dragon-gate bridge, and giant stone figures with hideous grimaces. Xavier made contact with the venerable superior, an eighty-year-old Zen Buddhist abbot called Ninshitsu, and found him to be an amiable man. Ninshitsu had long been troubled by the issue of the immortality of the soul and was fascinated by Xavier’s preaching and simple piety. After a lengthy conversation, with Anjiro acting as interpreter, he led his guest into the meditation hall to watch the monks at prayer. When Xavier asked what they were doing, Ninshitsu gave a despondent shrug. “Some are counting up how
much they received during the past months from their faithful,“he said,”others are thinking about where they can obtain better clothes … In short, none of them is thinking about anything that has any meaning at all.”
    from Arnoldus Montanus’s Atlas Japannensis, 1670 .
    The natives of Kyushu wore elaborate costumes, spoke courteously, and had extremely refined manners. “[They] prize honour more than any other,” wrote Francis Xavier.
    The weather began to turn soon after Xavier’s arrival in Kagoshima. The autumnal breezes brought squally showers and the days grew cooler. The chrysanthemums bloomed