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"The Best Thus Far Discovered": The Japanese in the Letters of Francisco Xavier

2003; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 71; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3247185

1553-0639

Robert Ellis,

Philippine History and Culture

On August 15, 1549, Francisco Xavier, along with two other Spanish Jesuits, three Japanese converts, and two servants, arrived in the harbor of Kagoshima on the Japanese island of Kyushu. Thus, he launched a brief period of missionary activity that climaxed in 1597 with the crucifixion of six Spanish Franciscans and twenty Japanese Christians, and ended in the early seventeenth century with the expulsion of all foreign missionaries and the closure of Japan to the West. Xavier, revered in western Christendom as the Apostle of the Indies and was one of the first European observers of Japanese life.1 In a series of letters to his co-religionists in India and Europe he recounts his journey to Japan, providing the early modern West with a window onto Marco Polo's fabled Zipangu while documenting for posterity the process through which Europe gradually asserted itself over the non-European world. In fact these letters reveal as much about mid-sixteenth-century Europe, in the throes of religious reformation and imperialist expansion, as about Japan itself. Yet they are also a kind of autobiography in which Xavier not only chronicles his extraordinary experiences but attempts to fashion a personal identity through and in opposition to what in subsequent Western discourse would become the very limit-both geographical and conceptual-of the Orient.In his letters Xavier balances his discussion of Christianity by presenting the theological questions and doubts raised by his Japanese audiences. However, he denounces Buddhist monasticism with a zealousness exceptional even in a churchman of the Counter Reformation. In his judgment the bonzes (Buddhist monks) are avaricious, parasitical, and hypocritical. What is more, they are sexually profligate: some have relations with nuns, who regularly induce abortions, and most are practicing sodomites. Yet even though Xavier inveighs against Japanese religion and morality, he expresses great admiration for the Japanese people as a whole, enthusiastically declaring that they are la mejor que hasta aguora esta descubierta.2 Xavier claims the Japanese exceed all non-Europeans through their goodness, honor, and politeness, and also because they are a gemte bramqua [white people] (letter 96, 277) and as such naturally pre-disposed to Christian conversion.3 By defining the Japanese as inherently superior, he implicitly establishes himself, and by extension Europe, as the ultimate arbiter of human worth. But in so doing he also validates indigenous Japanese culture, which for the most part remained intact despite his dreams of conversion and the economic and military designs of the West until well into the nineteenth century.Xavier was a prodigious traveler, even for his age, but not a prolific writer. Born in 1506 in what was then a Basque-speaking region of Navarre,4 he journeyed across Europe to Paris, where he studied theology with Inigo de Loyola; then to Rome to participate in the foundation of the Jesuit order; and finally to Lisbon, to spearhead the Portuguese evangelization of the East Indies. From there, he made his way as a missionary to Africa, India, the Spice Islands, and Japan, reaching the easternmost point of his peregrinations at the Japanese imperial capital of Kyo to. While in Japan, he wrote five letters in which he detailed his experiences and comments on Japanese life. Although the letters were addressed to the Portuguese mission in Goa, India, they were written mostly in Spanish, probably because Xavier's secretary at the time knew only that language.5 Several more letters dating from before and after Xavier's Japanese sojourn also contain important information about Japan. They were written in either Spanish or Portuguese.6 A total of 137 letters still remain from Xavier's entire correspondence. This constitutes his literary legacy, though according to Ignacio Elizalde, Xavier possibly composed several poems and dramas.7 As Elizalde further demonstrates, Xavier wrote in a plain, unadorned Spanish, comparable in its simplicity to the spontaneous style of Teresa de Jesus, albeit even more imperfect than hers because of his long absence from Spain and his constant exposure to other languages (47-48). …