Missionary Luis Frois
When William Shakespeare was rising to stardom in London, a genius from Portugal was writing a great report on and history of Japan as he had been sent to the then mysterious country Japan for a mission.
Luís Fróis (1532 – 1597) was a Portuguese missionary.
He was born in Lisbon and in 1548 joined the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). In 1563, he arrived in Japan to engage in missionary work, and in the following year arrived in Kyoto, meeting Ashikaga Yoshiteru who was then Shogun. In 1569, he befriended Oda Nobunaga and stayed in his personal residence in Gifu while writing books for a short while.
His writings include the History of Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu%C3%ADs_Fr%C3%B3isHowever the original writings by Frois were not sent to Europe. Only their copies were sent to the Portuguese court in the 18th century. The original documents were stored in a Church in Macau. But, in 1835 a fire broke out in the church to destroy the precious documents.
It was in 1970s that a Japanese scholar found, by chance, missing copies of the History of Japan in a library in Lisbon. This discovery made the History of Japan by Frois complete for the first time.
It was the first book ever written by a European to describe detailed states of Japan, including battles and behaviors of samurais and daily lives and practices of ordinary Japanese, though the Japanese society there introduced was that of the late 16th century.
Even Japanese of today can understand, by reading the History of Japan Frois wrote with incredible skills and talent, how Japanese people lived and thought in the last years of the age of provincial wars of Japan, namely in the late 16th century. Things very common to Japanese were not written down by Japanese themselves, but they looked very strange to Frois, so that he always made quick notes of such things, thus leaving concrete records of people's lives in those years.
Without the work by Frois, knowledge of the Japanese people on their own history must be more incomplete today.
As Frois was allowed to directly communicate with the greatest samurai hero Oda Nobunaga, whom Frois met with 18 times, and his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who unified Japan after the civil war period, his remarks and opinions about Nobunaga and Hideyoshi always have caught the eye of Japanese readers. Even Japanese authors who write novels about Nobunaga or Hideyoshi today would refer to passages in Frois' History of Japan where each of the historic figures is vividly and realistically described.
But Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa samurai regime which continued till 1868, put an end to the history of missionary work by Catholic priests and missionaries in the early 17th century when Ieyasu took over, through a civil war, as the samurai king of Japan from Hideyoshi's son. Ieyasu ultimately forbade Christianity in the Japanese society.
Frois died in Nagaski, Japan, in 1592 during the reign of Hideyoshi. At the time, Luis Frois had just wrote a record about 26 Japanese Christian martyrs who were executed by Hideyoshi. Virtual king of Japan Toyotomi Hideyoshi was then also busy invading the Korean Peninsula to fight the Chinese Ming dynasty.
Marco Polo's book presented Japan to Europe in the end of the Middle Ages, but works by Frois introduce Japan which existed 400 years ago to modern Japanese.
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Act 9:5 And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.