A Tale of Two Templa

The Portuguese sailor and trader Mendes Pinto, later a companion of the Jesuit Francis Xavier, claimed to have “discovered” Japan in 1542.1 Although he had an expedient personality, his description of Japan and the South China Sea trade is strikingly accurate and gives his claim credibility. Even if he was not the very first European to tread Japanese soil, he was undoubtedly “one of the earliest Portuguese travelers to that country, which he visited three or four times between 1544 and 1556.” This potentially earliest European voyager to Japan was an associate of Francis Xavier both before and during the Jesuit leader’s early missionary efforts in Japan, a fact that that prolific member of the Society of Jesus’ own reliable correspondence corroborates. Pinto indeed helped to finance one of the first Jesuit churches in Japan in 1551 and seems to have taken the Society’s Exercises and become a Jesuit himself in 1554.2 European trade, exploration, and missionary activity in the South China Sea were demonstrably intertwined during the mid- and late-1540s. The Jesuits were thus at the forefront of intercultural interaction between Reformation Europe and warring states-period Japan.