Tensho Embassy (1582): Japanese Envoys Visit the Pope in Rome

The Tensho Embassy was the first official Japanese mission to Europe. Between 1582 and 1590 four young Christian samurai from Kyushu travelled to Lisbon, Madrid and Rome, where they were received by King Philip II and Pope Gregory XIII. The journey made Japan known to a wide European public and showed how far the Catholic mission in Japan had grown in the generation after Francis Xavier’s arrival in 1549.

Background: Christianity in Kyushu

By the 1580s the Jesuit mission in Japan counted perhaps 100,000–150,000 converts, most of them in Kyushu. Several local lords, known as Kirishitan daimyō, had been baptised, partly from conviction and partly because Portuguese ships trading silk and silver tended to call at Christian ports. In 1580 Ōmura Sumitada even handed the young port of Nagasaki to the Jesuits.

The Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, who inspected the mission as Visitor from 1579 to 1582, wanted to raise money and support for it in Europe. He also wanted Japanese witnesses who could later tell their countrymen about the size and splendour of Christian Europe. The result was a carefully planned embassy, which a newly founded order used as a showcase for its work in Asia.

The four envoys

The embassy was sent in the name of three Christian lords: Ōtomo Sōrin of Bungo, Ōmura Sumitada and Arima Harunobu. Its members were four pupils of the Jesuit seminary at Arima, all aged about thirteen or fourteen:

• Itō Mancio, a relative of Ōtomo Sōrin, chief envoy for Bungo.
• Chijiwa Miguel, a relative of Ōmura Sumitada and Arima Harunobu, envoy for those two lords.
• Hara Martinho and Nakaura Julião, who accompanied them as companions.

They were escorted by the Portuguese Jesuit Diogo de Mesquita, who acted as tutor and interpreter. Some historians have questioned whether Ōtomo Sōrin formally commissioned the mission, since letters attributed to him may have been prepared by the Jesuits, but the embassy was presented in Europe as an official one.

The journey to Europe

The party left Nagasaki on 20 February 1582 on a Portuguese ship. They sailed by way of Macau, Malacca and Goa, where Valignano was ordered to remain as Jesuit provincial of India. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope they reached Lisbon in August 1584, two and a half years after leaving Japan.

In Madrid, in November 1584, they were received by Philip II, who ruled both Spain and Portugal. In Italy they were welcomed with festivities in Tuscany and then entered Rome. On 23 March 1585 Pope Gregory XIII, the reformer of the calendar, received them in a public consistory. The elderly pope died a few weeks later, and the envoys took part in the coronation ceremonies of his successor, Sixtus V, who made them knights and citizens of Rome.

Fame in Europe

The visit caused a sensation. Pamphlets and broadsheets about the “Japanese princes” were printed in Italy, Germany and elsewhere, and they were entertained in cities such as Venice, Milan and Genoa. A portrait of Itō Mancio by Domenico Tintoretto, painted in Venice in 1585, was rediscovered in an Italian private collection in 2014.

The envoys left Lisbon in April 1586. In Goa and Macau they waited for passage and studied, and Valignano used their notes for a Latin dialogue, De Missione Legatorum Iaponensium, printed at Macau in 1590 to teach Japanese students about Europe.

Return to a changed Japan

The envoys landed at Nagasaki in July 1590 to find their country transformed. Two of their three sponsors, Ōtomo Sōrin and Ōmura Sumitada, had died in 1587, and in the same year Toyotomi Hideyoshi had issued an edict expelling missionaries. In March 1591 the four young men, dressed in European clothes, accompanied Valignano to an audience with Hideyoshi in Kyoto and played European music for him.

They brought back a printing press with movable metal type. It was used to print the Kirishitan-ban, Jesuit books in Latin, Portuguese and Japanese, including grammars, dictionaries and a romanised version of the Tale of the Heike.

Later lives

Itō Mancio, Hara Martinho and Nakaura Julião joined the Society of Jesus and were ordained priests in 1608. Mancio died in Nagasaki in 1612. When Christianity was banned nationwide in 1614, Martinho was exiled to Macau, where he died in 1629. Julião stayed in Japan in secret, was captured, and died after being suspended in a pit at Nagasaki in October 1633; he was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2008.

Chijiwa Miguel left the Jesuits around 1601 and renounced Christianity. His later life was long obscure, but a gravestone associated with him and his wife has been studied by Japanese archaeologists in Isahaya, Nagasaki Prefecture.

Timeline

• 1582, 20 February: The envoys leave Nagasaki with Alessandro Valignano.
• 1584, August: They reach Lisbon.
• 1584, November: Audience with Philip II in Madrid.
• 1585, 23 March: Pope Gregory XIII receives them in Rome.
• 1585, May: They attend the coronation of Sixtus V.
• 1586, April: They sail from Lisbon for Asia.
• 1590, July: Return to Nagasaki with a printing press.
• 1591, March: Audience with Toyotomi Hideyoshi in Kyoto.

Why it matters

The Tensho Embassy was one of the earliest direct encounters between Japan and Europe at the highest level. It spread knowledge of Japan across Europe, brought European printing to Japan, and its envoys’ later fates mirror the rise and suppression of Christianity in early modern Japan, which culminated in the execution of the Twenty-Six Martyrs and later persecutions.