This book's focus is the Tenshō Embassy, a “ceremonial” rather than a strictly diplomatic undertaking in which four Japanese teenage boys ventured to Rome as representatives of three Christian daimyo. Accompanied by Jesuit overseers and two attendants, the boys departed Nagasaki in 1582, reaching Lisbon more than two years later. While their audience with Pope Gregory XIII just weeks before his death in 1585 and their participation in the coronation ceremonies for Pope Sixtus V were highlights of their eight years abroad, they also met King Philip and numerous members of the European nobility and were warmly received when they toured several Portuguese, Spanish and Italian cities.
With the goal of raising his mission's profile in the eyes of the Church, Jesuit East Indies Inspector Alessandro Valignano, the driving force behind the Embassy, intended to offer the boys as a living testament to the Jesuits’ success in Japan, though an unexpected order prevented him from accompanying the boys to Rome and pressing his case in person. In addition to the role he imagined the Embassy would play in stimulating European interest in Japan, Valignano had a secondary aim of showing the boys the “grandeur” of Christendom in the hope that they would disseminate their positive impressions among fellow Japanese. To this end, the boys’ exposure to European cities was carefully managed, and upon their return, Valignano assigned Duarte de Sande the task of recasting the boys’ diligently inscribed journals (unfortunately, no longer extant) into a Latin text that could be used as a primer for Japanese students. The book under review features J. F. Moran's complete translation of the Latin text (published as De Missione in Macao in 1590) and Massarella's thorough annotations of it, along with the latter's insightful introductory essay.
The text takes the form of a dialogue between the four newly-returned boys, now young men, and two youthful interlocutors who are eager to hear of the travellers’ experiences and of conditions abroad. The preface to the original text states that the dialogue format was chosen not only to add interest but also to make the text more convincing: “it is no foreigner that you are listening to … it is your own people who are speaking” (p. 37), a point that is reiterated often within the dialogue itself. In addition to enhancing the text's believability and permitting the speakers occasionally to vouch for each other's veracity, the dialogue format had other functions, as Massarella shows in his introduction. Noting that the genre was often employed in contemporary Europe as a means of bringing an unfamiliar or dubious topic inside the realm of acceptable discourse, he argues: “De Missione was a vital part of the Jesuit ambition to secure squatters’ rights for Europe within Japan's epistemological and cognitive worlds and, ultimately, permanent residency within Japanese society and culture” (p. 24).
Divided into 34 colloquia that follow the basic sequence of the boys’ journey but also focus on discrete thematic topics (civil administration, military readiness, the distinction between secular and religious authority, etc.), De Missione is a tendentious text that aims to convince its Japanese readers that Europe is a powerful, wealthy and splendid place worthy of emulation, and that Christianity has in large part made it so. It speaks most directly to what the Jesuits thought of themselves but also tells us much about how they viewed Japan, how they understood their challenges there, and what persuasive strategies they thought would be most effective. The text's seemingly interminable avowals of European wealth, for example, point to a concern to refute the charge that the fathers had come to Japan out of penury; the frequent attempts to distinguish between the Jesuits and Japan's Buddhist priesthood indicate Jesuit awareness that Christianity was widely perceived to be another sect of Buddhism; and the repeated attention to the generous treatment the boys received abroad may have helped allay fears that the Jesuit fathers harboured ulterior motives of conquest.
Throughout, the travellers’ listeners express scepticism, asking, for example, how can you claim that Europeans are elegant when we see them spit on our tatami mats? (p. 137). While such conversations sometimes conclude with an affirmation of cultural relativism, they can also end formulaically, with the querulous interlocutor ultimately convinced that “all things European are admirable” (p. 158). Nevertheless, there are also a number of interesting exchanges in which apparent contradictions are explored: if Europe is such a place of civility why does it expend so much on its military?
Massarella's excellent annotations explain the historical background, identify the sites visited, and direct readers to relevant primary materials as well as secondary scholarship in numerous European languages and Japanese. Moreover, by identifying omissions and misrepresentations, his notes serve as correctives to the sunny picture of Europe that the dialogue presents. He also draws the reader's attention to errors in the dialogue's portrayal of Japan (such as its assertion that the Japanese viewed borrowing from other cultures as shameful) and offers expansive consideration about contemporary theories of racial difference among a host of other subjects.
The book is well edited and I noticed only a tiny number of trivial typos. In the sections touching on China, there are a few minor errors; where the text refers to “those known in China as cen, and among us as bonzes” these are not “Chan” 禪 priests, but rather the more general seng 僧; likewise the Chinese term intended by “tauzu” is not “Laozi” but daoshi 道士.
While the Tenshō Embassy has been the subject of an engaging monographic study by Michael Cooper (The Japanese Mission to Europe, 1582–1590: The Journey of Four Samurai Boys through Portugal, Spain and Italy. Global Oriental, 2005), the present volume provides ready access to a valuable primary document with rich scholarly contextualization; it sheds much light on how the Jesuits sought to present the Embassy and their broader project to a Japanese audience.
