ABSTRACT
On Monday, 12 December 1583 Alessandro Valignano, S.J., the man who would become Visitor to the Indies, made a rather singular decision.1 He would request not simply a book, or even a healthy supply of books for the Society of Jesus’ mission to Japan. He would arrange for a whole printing press, with all the accessories, to be shipped to Nagasaki, a resolution that was as extraordinary to conceptualize as it was dicult to execute. is initiative was part of Valignano’s better-known plan to send the rst Japanese delegation to Europe: four young Japanese Christian noblemen in the company of their tutor Diogo de Mesquita, S.J. (1553-1614, later Rector of the Jesuit Colleges of Amakusa and Nagasaki) would be received by Pope Gregory XIII and Philip II of Spain/Philip I of Portugal (under the ‘Iberian union’, 1580-1640).2 Valignano himself had led this entourage, but when he arrived in Goa, he received a letter (dated 4 January 1583) ocially appointing him Superior of India. He had no choice but to assign the Rector of the Jesuit College of Goa, Nuno Rodrigues, S.J. (who was expected for a Procurators Congregation in Rome) to lead the delegation in his place, and he wrote out 55 explicit instructions for his successor to follow. Leaving little to chance, he urged Mesquita to complete his vision: to bring back a printing press and matrices for Japanese kana and kanji letters, syllabary and ideograph system respectively. Just over a year aer the embassy had departed from Goa, Valignano
1 J.A. Abranches Pinto and H. Bernard, S.J., ‘Les Instructions du Père Valignano pour l’ambassade japonaise en Europe (Goa, 12 décembre 1583)’, Monumenta Nipponica, 6 (1943): pp. 391-403; M. Cooper, Japanese Mission to Europe 1582-1590 (Folkestone, 2005), pp. 37-8, 217.
