Some Background on Japanese Missions (Part II)

"The missionaries suffered severely from the cold -- they had no idea in advance what a Japanese winter could be like. They had difficulty in getting enough to eat. They wrestled with the daunting difficulties of language:

Now we are like so many strange statues amongst them, for they speak and talk to us about many things, whilst we, not understanding the language, hold our peace. And now we have to be as little children learning the language.


They gradually became aware of the imperfections of Yajiro's translations, in particular of the harm wrought by his choice of the wholly inappropriate Buddhist term Dainichi to represent 'God' -- a difficulty the missionaries then dodged by simply introducing Portuguese terms into Japanese to represent the Christian ideas. And yet friendship and understanding did develop, and in spite of all disappointments Xavier never lost his feelings of respect for the Japanese. In a letter of 5 November 1549 he writes:

Firstly the people whom we have met so far are the best who have as yet been discovered, and it seems to me that we shall never find among heathens another race to equal the Japanese. They are a people of very good manners, good in general, and not malicious; they are men of honour to a marvel, and prize honour above all else in the world.... They are a people of very good will, very sociable and very desirous of knowledge; they are very fond of hearing about the things of God, chiefly when they understand them.... They like to hear things propounded according to reason; and, granted that there are sins and vices among them, when one reasons with them, pointing out that what they do is evil, they are convinced by this reasoning.

These early contacts with the Japanese produced a change in Xavier's understanding of the nature of Christian missionary work which was to be of the greatest significance for the whole future of the enterprise. In earlier years he had been inclined to accept uncritically the doctrine of the tabula rasa -- the view that in non-Christian life and systems there is nothing on which the missionary can build, and that everything must simply be levelled to the ground before anything Christian can be built up. This was the general view of the Spanish missionaries in Latin America and the West Indies; in his dealings with the simple and illiterate fishers in South India, Xavier had seen no reason to modify it. But now that he was confronted by a civilization with so many elements of nobility in it, he saw that, while the Gospel must transform and refine and recreate, it need not necessarily reject as worthless everything that has come before. This new idea was to be fruitful in results -- and also in controversies." (132-3)

Neill, Stephen. A History of Christian Missions. London: Penguin Books, 1990.