ABSTRACT
Another great beginning of the West in Japan was the arrival of Father Francis Xavier1 and with him the Jesuit mission to Kagoshima on 15 August 1549. It was again the Portuguese who led the vanguard of European expansion, and for the next fifty years mainly Portuguese and Spanish Jesuits were to be the predominant Christian missionaries in Japan. The Portuguese were certainly firstly merchants, but with them followed the royal commandment that wherever they came, it was for the Holy Faith and for the Portuguese Empire-‘a Fé e o Imperio’—and in that order.2
