Francis Xavier in Japan
A Jesuit missionary reaches the Far East
Francis Xavier is one of Ignatius's original Paris companions — a Navarrese nobleman of considerable charm and physical energy who has already spent seven years in India when he receives word that there are people in Japan who might receive the gospel.
He arrives in Kagoshima in August 1549 with three Japanese converts, a Portuguese interpreter, and no knowledge of Japanese. He is forty-three years old and has perhaps two years to live.
Japan in 1549 is a society of extraordinary sophistication and complexity — feudal, hierarchical, religiously diverse, deeply proud. Xavier immediately grasps something that his successors will spend decades working out: Japan will not receive a faith presented as the religion of cultural inferiors. The Japanese respect learning, refinement, and intellectual seriousness. He must engage them on those terms or not at all.
He adapts. He learns Japanese. He seeks audiences with daimyo — feudal lords — and engages Buddhist monks in serious theological debate. He writes letters back to Europe describing Japan with genuine admiration: a people of good manners, honor-loving, capable of reason.
In two years he establishes communities of several hundred converts. He dies on an island off the coast of China in December 1552, trying to reach the mainland.
Within fifty years of his arrival in Japan, there are perhaps 300,000 Japanese Christians. The Tokugawa shogunate will then systematically destroy them over the following century — burning, crucifying, torturing, driving underground. A remnant survives in secret for 250 years until Christian missionaries return in the nineteenth century and find communities still practicing a recognizable faith.
What Xavier planted, the hidden Christians kept.
“Tell the students of the University of Paris that many people here fail to become Christians only for lack of someone to make them so.”
— Francis Xavier, letter from India, 1543 AD
“Then he said to his disciples, The harvest indeed is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Pray therefore that the Lord of the harvest will send forth laborers into his harvest.”
Xavier's letter from India is one of the most urgent missionary calls in the history of the church: people are not becoming Christians only for lack of someone to make them so. The harvest is there. The laborers are not.
He is not writing about impossibility. He is writing about absence — the gap between the readiness of people to receive the gospel and the presence of people willing to bring it.
The harvest is plentiful. That has not changed. The laborers are few. That has not changed either.
Xavier left the comfort of Europe and the company of his friends and went to India, then Japan, then died trying to reach China. The question his life puts to everyone who reads it is the same question he put to Paris:
Who is going? And if not you, then who?