First Contact With the West

How Contact With a Different Culture

Threatened the Shogun Government

The European Age of Exploration

We have learned how the shogunate used
military and social control to shape Edo
society in Japan.
The Japanese were developing a strong
sense of their identity as a people.
Now we step further back in time to 1534,
before the shogun ruled Japan. It was the
European Age of Exploration and for the
first time the Japanese came into contact
with a culture very different from their
own!

The Southern Barbarians

In 1534, a Portuguese ship was wrecked off the shore
of a small Japanese island. The sailors said they
were traders. Because they approached Japan from a
southerly direction, the Portuguese became known
as the southern barbarians They were soon
followed by the Spanish, Dutch, and British traders
and by Christian missionaries.
At first, the Portuguese and the Japanese had
favorable impressions of one another. However, they
did have many differences, both cultural and
religious. Portuguese society, which had been
influenced by Humanism and the Renaissance,
favored competition, the individual, and a more

A New Kind of Belief

Francis Xavier, a Jesuit, arrived in Japan in 1549 to start missions to
convert the upper classes, the daimyo and the samurai to Christianity.
Many more Jesuits came after Xavier, while the Portuguese also sent
Franciscan priests, who worked with the poor and lower classes.
The Japanese people were a combination of Shinto worship, Confucian
code of conduct, and a Buddhist value of self discipline. There were
some similarities between the beliefs of the Christian clergy and the
Japanese, but the Christian idea of only one god was new for them.
The Japanese were expected to be totally loyal to their daimyo,
emperor, and the shogun. The Christian missionaries taught that a
persons spiritual loyalty should be to God in heaven.
It became clear to the shogunate that what Christianity stood for was
very different from the beliefs that were considered an essential part
of Japanese identity. But what to do about it?