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Japan and the West

Each of these books enriches, in its own way, our understanding of an important episode in the history of relations between Japan and the west, although Professor Nish's work is more balanced in terms of research perspective and the range of sources used. Dr Moran examines the Jesuits in sixteenth-century Japan almost exclusively from the Jesuit perspective, using Jesuit sources; The Jesuits and the Japanese would have been a more appropriate main title for his book, to better reflect this emphasis. By contrast, Professor Nish examines the politics of the 1931-3 Manchurian crisis from the multiple perspectives of Japan, China and the League of Nations, employing a wide range of western and Japanese sources, including recently-published Japanese documents. Dr Moran's focus is on the Neapolitan, Alessandro Valignano, who presided over the Jesuit mission in Japan from his arrival in 1579, at the age of forty, until his death, in 1606. In his role as 'Visitor' and responsible only to God and to the Jesuit General, Valignano emerges in these pages as an imposing man whom others 'feared and obeyed', by virtue of his strong courage, intellect and diplomacy. His leadership was indeed crucial, for dating from Xavier's arrival in 1549, seven years after the first Portuguese ships reached Japan, the mission could only rely on faith, without the support of European power, to try and convert the Japanese to Christianity. This was a decidedly ambitious project considering the obstacles: Japan's highly organized society, with its own sophisticated systems of belief; Japan's complex and violent political order in which many lords competed for regional and national power; and the physical fact that it normally took five or six years for Valignano to receive instructions from Europe (p. 42), which meant that he was on his own in judging how best to succeed in this, 'the greatest enterprise in the world today', as he once put it (p. 51). Moran shows that for the most part Valignano responded to these and other problems pragmatically. For example, so that the Japanese would come to respect the Jesuits, for a time he deliberately modelled the system of Jesuit ranks on that of a major Buddhist sect and always encouraged the Jesuits to learn Japanese and adapt themselves to Japanese customs as far as possible without seriously compromising Christian principles. Similarly, in struggling to finance the mission without sufficient funds from Europe, he depended upon a share of profits from the silk trade conducted annually with the Japanese when the Portuguese 'great ship' arrived from Macao (it did not always make the trip). He also established Jesuit schools, and a Jesuit College in Macao, and pioneered the use of a printing press to publish religious materials. Such initiatives, insofar as they went, served the Jesuit mission well but ultimately this was not the case with Valignano's grand strategy, itself pre-eminently pragmatic, of converting the lords as the key to converting their subjects. Moran points out that working through Japan's ruling class suited Valignano's own, distinctly elitist, outlook. Then, too, the Jesuits arguably had no alternative, given the