Luís Fróis

Signature of Frois with the addition of Manu propria

Manuscript page from the História do Japão

Memorial stone for Fróis in Nagasaki. On the left is a tabular curriculum vitae.

Luís Fróis (* 1532 in Lisbon , † July 8, 1597 in Nagasaki ( Japan )) was a Portuguese missionary of the Society of Jesus who played a prominent role in the "Christian Century" of Japan.

Details of his childhood and early adolescence are not known. Fróis grew up at the court of the Portuguese King John III. , called "the pious" ( O Piedoso or O Pio ) or "the colonial ruler " ( o Colonizador ). For one way he worked in the royal chancellery, which later benefited him in his administrative duties. In February 1548 he joined the Society of Jesus at the suggestion of Simão Rodrigues de Azevedo, companion of Ignatius of Loyola and co-founder of the Jesuit order.

Departure to the east

After just a few weeks he was traveling on the galega with a group of nine Jesuits to the Portuguese base Goa in India , where he landed in October. Here Francisco de Xavier had founded the St. Pauls College (Colégio de São Paulo) six years earlier for the training of missionaries as a base for the East Asian Mission. According to his companions, he seems to have been a not too emotional person who was gifted as a writer and carried out a variety of tasks carefully. As early as 1552, at the age of 20, he wrote the annual report of India.

In 1554 Fróis set out for China in the wake of Melchior Nunes Barreto, but was then commissioned to run a small school in Malacca . In this function he copied letters from Japan, among other things, and forwarded them to Goa and Portugal. In 1558 he returned to Goa and took up theological studies. In 1561 he was finally ordained a priest. In 1563 the company sent him to Japan on a ship belonging to Dom Pedro da Guerra. On July 6th of that year he landed in the small port of Yokoseura on the island of Kyushu . With the exception of a three-year stay in Macau , from then on he spent his life in Japan. First he acquired language skills and rudimentary knowledge of the country in Takushima. He was then used in various places in the country, but the twelve years in Miyako (now Kyōto ), where the Tennō resided , were decisive for his acculturation and work . Gradually he got to know important personalities of that time. In 1565 he met the then shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru and four years later with Oda Nobunaga , the de facto ruler of the archipelago.

Fróis and Oda Nobunaga

Oda saw in the Christian missionaries a counterbalance to the Buddhist sects that were hostile to him . Large temples such as the Enryaku Temple ( Enryaku-ji ) on Mount Hiei-zan or the Negoro Temple ( Negoro-ji ) had monk warriors ( sōhei ) who gave them considerable influence in the hegemonic battles of the time. After a meeting with Fróis, the Jesuits received permission to proselytize in Kyoto and the surrounding areas. Previously, this was only possible for them in those areas of Kyūshū whose rulers ( daimyō ) had converted to Christianity or were hoping for economic advantages through trade with the Portuguese .

The initially friendly relationship between Fróis and Oda, however, cooled down over time, partly because Oda refused to convert, partly because he decreed that a temple to be built should posthumously worship him as a deity. When Oda committed seppuku encircled in the burning Honnō Temple ( Honnō-ji ) in Kyoto in 1582 , Fróis, who was staying in a church opposite, was an eyewitness. One of his numerous missives ( cartas ) goes into this in detail.

Fróis as an author

In the years 1580 to 1582 the visitor of the Society of Jesus, Alessandro Valignano , inspected the Japanese archipelago to get an impression of the successes and problems of the mission and to determine the further course of the society. So far, the only written records on Japan have been correspondence from senior missionaries and annual accounts. Fróis was commissioned to summarize the history of the mission in Japan. The first part of his História do Japão was completed in 1586. After his second trip to Japan, Valignano took Fróis with him to Macau in 1592, where he had completed the last chapter of the second part by 1595. Valignano showed little interest in a print edition, so that the work was not published until the 20th century.

In addition, Fróis wrote a treatise on the cultural contrasts between Europe and Japan for Valignano: Tratado em que se contêm muito sucinta e abreviadamente algumas contradições e diferenças de costumes entre a gente de Europa e esta província de Japão . In 611 short memorized sentences (distiches) he grouped them into topics (men, women, children, food and drink, weapons, doctors, medicines, therapies, diseases, books, houses, gardens, horses, ships, dramas, dances, singing, musical instruments etc.) a number of differences in relation to each other. Although this text was not printed until the 20th century, it was used intensively in Valignano's famous Advertimentos e avisos acerca dos costumes e catangues de Japão (1582) and the Sumario de las cosas de Japon (1583), so that traces of it can even be found in Dutch publications of the 17th century can prove. A large number of his letters to Europe were printed in Italian and Latin translations in the 1890s. The descriptions of the deaths of Christian martyrs published by Luigi Zanetti in the course of the increasingly severe persecution were particularly widespread.

Death in japan

Life in Macau with its hot climate, the different types of food, as well as the efforts in the service of Valignano put Fróis hard. He himself complained that he had not had a single healthy day there. The personal relationship with Valignano also seems to have been tense. After completing his Historia de Japam , the sick Fróis asked for permission to return to Japan in 1595. He died in Nagasaki two years later.

Fonts

• The History of Japan (1549-1578) - translated and commented by G. Schurhammer and Ernst Arthur Voretzsch from the manuscript of the Ajuda library in Lisbon . Asia Major publishing house, Leipzig 1926.
• Historia de Japam - edição anotada por José Wicki . Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, 1976–1884.
• Segunda parte da Historia de Japam: que trata das couzas, que socedarão [ie socederão] nesta V. Provincia da Hera de 1578 por diante, comecãdo pela Conversão del Rey de Bungo (1578-1582) [...] editados e anotados por João do Amaral Abranches Pinto e Yoshitomo Okamoto, Edição da Sociedade Luso-Japonesa,
• Tratado em que se contêm muito sucinta e abreviadamente algumas contradições e diferenças de costumes entre a gente de Europa e esta província de Japão . Print: Kulturgegensätze Europa-Japan (1585) First, critical edition of the handwritten Portuguese Frois text in the Biblioteca de la Académia de la História in Madrid with German translation, introduction and comments by Josef Franz Schütte. Tokyo, 1955.
• Relatione della gloriosa morte di XXVI. posti in croce: per commandamento del Re di Giappone, alli 5th di Febraio 1597 de quali sei furno religiosi di S. Francesco, tre della Compagnia di Giesù, & dicesette Christiani Giapponesi. Mandata dal P. Luigi Frois alli 15. di Marzo al RP Claudio Acquaviva generale di detta Compagnia; et fatta in Italiano dal P. Gasparo Spitilli di Campli della medesima Compagnia. Appresso Luigi Zannetti, 1599.
• Tratado dos Embaixadores Japões que forão de Japão a Roma no Anno de 1582 (manuscript). Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.

literature

• Jorissen, Engelbert: "The image of Japan in the 'Tract' (1585) by Luis Frois". Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagbuchhandlung, 1988.
• Loureiro, Rui Manuel: Turning Japanese? The experiences and writings of a Portuguese Jesuit in 16th century Japan . In: Dejanira Couto / François Lachaud (ed.): Empires éloignés: Europe et le Japon (XVIe – XIXe sièles). Paris: École Française d'Extrême Orient, 2000, pp. 155–168.

Web links

• Cartas qve os padres e irmãos da Companhia de Iesus escreuerão dos Reynos de Iapão & China aos da mesma Companhia da India, & Europa des do anno de 1549. até o de 1580. Euvra: Manoel de Lyra, 1598.

See also

• Francisco Javier
• Alessandro Valignano

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Loureiro (2000), p. 155.
2. ↑ Loureiro (2000), p. 156.
3. ↑ Loureiro (2000), p. 157.
4. ↑ Loureiro (2000), p. 157.
5. ↑ See Schütte (1955), Jorissen (1988).
6. ↑ Loureiro (2000), p. 164.

Remarks

1. ↑ Biographical summary in German in Schütte (1955), pp. 10-16.
2. ↑ The only evidence for this is the later remark of a Jesuit priest who attributed Fróisen's conversational style to the fact that he grew up in a palace.