Modern Japan, Social--Industrial--Political

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII RELIGION IN JAPAN CHRISTIANITY Christianity was introduced into Japan in the middle of the sixteenth century by Jesuits working under Portuguese auspices. Though progress was somewhat slow at the outset, the seed sown did not fall on stony ground. Fertilized by commercial motives, it soon...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII RELIGION IN JAPAN CHRISTIANITY Christianity was introduced into Japan in the middle of the sixteenth century by Jesuits working under Portuguese auspices. Though progress was somewhat slow at the outset, the seed sown did not fall on stony ground. Fertilized by commercial motives, it soon brought forth a good harvest, especially among the daimios and their retainers of Kiu- shiu. Within a generation, the Jesuits could boast of one hundred and fifty thousand converts, perhapsone per cent, of the population. The eagerness of the local princelets for the Portuguese trade vastly aided the work of the Jesuit missionaries, who proceeded to convert the rulers and then persuaded them to proscribe all non-Christian cults within their domains. In some cases only a day's notice was granted for those who would not adopt the foreign religion to quit their ancestral homes, the images of Buddha were hacked to pieces and the native temples given over to the flames. The famous Spanish missionary to the Indies, Francis Xavier, landed at Kagoshimo in August, 1549. He was not very successful in this new field, having made less than one thousand converts, mainly in the southern island of Kiushiu, during his stay of twenty-six months in the country. His journey to Kyoto was wholly fruitless from a religious point of view. He soon discovered that one of the main impediments to the adoption of Christianity by the educated Japanese was that the Chinese had evidently heard nothing about a personal Creator. He therefore determined upon his futile mission to China under the impression that if the Chinese adopt the Christian religion the Japanese also will abandon the religions they have introduced from China. He died near Canton on December 2, 1552. The citations are from Murdock's...