Thus far, however, Xavier had seen only a few seaports of comparatively successful daimi[=o]s.  Though he had heard of the unsettled state of the country because of the long-continued intestine strife, he evidently expected to find the capital a splendid city.  Despite the armed bands of roving robbers and soldiers, he reached Ki[=o]to safely, only to find streets covered with ruins, rubbish and unburied corpses, and a general situation of wretchedness.  He was unable to obtain audience of either the Sh[=o]gun or the Mikado.  Even in those parts of the city where he tried to preach, he could obtain no hearers in this time of war and confusion.  So after two weeks he turned his face again southward to Bungo, where he labored for a few months; but in less than two years from his landing in Japan, this noble but restless missionary left the country, to attempt the spiritual conquest of China.  One year later, December 2, 1551, he died on the island of Shanshan, or Sancian, in the Canton River, a few miles west of Macao.

Christianity Flourishes.

Nevertheless, Xavier’s inspiring example was like a shining star that attracted scores of missionaries.  There being in this time of political anarchy and religious paralysis none to oppose them, their zeal, within five years, bore surprising fruits.  They wrote home that there were seven churches in the region around Ki[=o]to, while a score or more of Christian congregations had been gathered in the southwest.  In 1581 there were two hundred churches and one hundred and fifty thousand native Christians.  Two daimi[=o]s had confessed their faith, and in the Mikado’s minister, Nobunaga (1534-1582), the foreign priests found a powerful supporter.[7] This hater and scourge of the Buddhist priesthood openly welcomed and patronized the Christians, and gave them eligible sites on which to build dwellings and churches.  In every possible way he employed the new force, which he found pliantly political, as well as intellectually and morally a choice weapon for humbling the bonzes, whom he hated as serpents.  The Buddhist church militant had become an army with banners and fortresses.  Nobunaga made it the aim of his life to destroy the military power of the hierarchy, and to humble the priests for all time.  He hoped at least to extract the fangs of what he believed to be a politico-religious monster, which menaced the life of the nation.  Unfortunately, he was assassinated in 1582.  To this day the memory of Nobunaga is execrated by the Buddhists.  They have deified Kato Kiyomasa and Iyeyas[)u], the persecutors of the Christians.  To Nobunaga they give the title of Bakadono, or Lord Fool.

In 1583, an embassy of four young noblemen was despatched by the Christian daimi[=o]s of Kiushiu, the second largest island in the empire, to the Pope to declare themselves spiritual—­though as some of their countrymen suspected, political—­vassals of the Holy See.  It was in the three provinces of Bungo, Omura and Arima, that Christianity was most firmly rooted.  After an absence of eight years, in 1590, the envoys from the oriental to the occidental ends of the earth, returned to Nagasaki, accompanied by seventeen more Jesuit fathers—­an important addition to the many Portuguese “religious” of that order already in Japan.