along with other products of Chinese civilization, the Confucian philosophy lay dormant during the middle ages, the period of the supremacy of Buddhism.  It awoke with a start in the early part of the seventeenth century when Iccasu, the great warrior, ruler, and patron of learning, caused the Confucian classics to be printed in Japan for the first time.  During the two hundred and fifty years that followed, the intellect of the country was molded by Confucian ideas.  Confucius himself had, it is true, labored for the establishment of a centralized monarchy.  But his main doctrine of unquestioning submission to rulers and parents fitted in perfectly with the feudal ideas of Old Japan; and the conviction of the paramount importance of such subordination lingers on, an element of stability, in spite of the recent social cataclysm which has involved Japanese Confucianism, properly so-called, in the ruin of all other Japanese institutions."[CD]

Christianity was first brought to Japan by Francis Xavier, who landed in Kagoshima in 1549.  His zeal knew no bounds and his results were amazing.  “The converts were drawn from all classes alike.  Noblemen, Buddhist priests, men of learning, embraced the faith with the same alacrity as did the poor and ignorant....  One hundred and thirty-eight European missionaries” were then on the field.  “Until the breaking out of the persecution of 1596 the work of evangelization proceeded apace.  The converts numbered ten thousand yearly, though all were fully aware of the risk to which they exposed themselves by embracing the Catholic faith.”  “At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Japanese Christians numbered about one million, the fruit of half a century of apostolic labor accomplished in the midst of comparative peace.  Another half-century of persecution was about to ruin this flourishing church, to cut off its pastors, more than two hundred of whom suffered martyrdom, and to leave its laity without the offices of religion....  The edicts ordering these measures remained in force for over two centuries.”  Tens of thousands of Christians preferred death to perjury.  It was supposed that Christianity was entirely exterminated by the fearful and prolonged persecutions.  Yet in the vicinity of Nagasaki over four thousand Christians were discovered in 1867, who were again subject to persecution until the pressure of foreign lands secured religious toleration in Japan.

Protestant Christianity came to Japan with the beginning of the new era, and has been preached with much zeal and moderate success.  For a time it seemed destined to sweep the land even more astonishingly than did Romanism in the sixteenth century.  But in 1888 an anti-foreign reaction began in every department of Japanese life and thought which has put a decided check on the progress of Christian missions.