(Mis)managing Finances on a Global Scale: The Accounting Documents of the Jesuit Mission to Japan

Abstract This article aims at describing the sixteenth-seventeenth century Jesuit Japan mission’s finances through its accounting documents. The article demonstrates that accounting documents played a key role in the dialogue with Rome over the mission’s financial management and needs. Portraying a mission dependent on Europe and India to secure its resources, the accounts raise the question of how religious orders managed funds on a global scale. This article provides a detailed analysis of a type of source specific to the Society of Jesus, namely its catalogues. While it was common for overseas missions to purchase goods from Europe or other distant places, the Japan mission was singular in that it also had highly dispersed sources of income, spreading between Europe and Asia. This article demonstrates how the Jesuits of Japan articulated these resources and their disbursements, so that they could meet the material and spiritual needs of their evangelical project. The study of the catalogues thus reveals the challenges faced by a mission trying to manage its finances between Europe and Asia. It questions the order’s ability to design and enforce an administrative and institutional framework that could fit the complex case of globally deployed religious missions.