The Jesuit Experience in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan: Francis Xavier’s Prophecy

Starting from the accounts by the first Jesuit missionaries to arrive in Japan, this article documents their culture shock at witnessing the sexual habits of the country’s upper classes, in particular the clergy and warrior class. It shows how these sexual customs were part and parcel of the samurai construction of virility and of organising their hierarchy. Therefore the missionaries came to face an impossible choice: either accept these customs or fight them on the ground. The result was an instance of ideological warfare that resulted in the departure of the missionaries or their persecution and eventual execution.