Paper short abstract:

During the 16th century, many Jesuits witnessed, wrote, edited and corrected the news that arrived to Europe about Japanese culture. Tensions between the experience and the narrative were shown in the edition process of that corpus. In this paper, we analyze this in three epistles published in 1598.

Paper long abstract:

Firstly conceived only for Jesuit readers, the Jesuits' letters written in the 16th century from societies unknown in Europe rapidly became invaluable material for publishers (Zupanov 1999). However, the original letters were edited before their publication. Everything that was "not edifying" (Palomo 2006) or, as we propose, that was inconvenient for the image of the missionary work, resulted to be erased.

In this paper, we analyze a corpus of three letters written from Japan in 1562 and published in 1598 in Évora (Cartas que os padres e irmãos da Companhia de Iesus que andão nos Reynos de Iapão ascreuerão aos da mesma Companhia da India e Europa des do anno de 1549 até o de 1580). The documents' authors were Baltasar Gago, Aires Sanches and Luis de Almeida. In each case, we compare (i) the published version with (ii) the original one, edited by Ruiz-de-Medina from the remaining manuscripts (1995).

The comparison reveals that several fragments were removed or subtly edited. For example, Almeida narrates a voyage to a little Christian community in Kagoshima, which had been converted by Francis Xavier; only in (ii) the original version, Almeida says that they still worshiped Dainichi, a Buddhist word used by Xavier himself as a translation of "God" at the beginning of the mission.

We believe that these differences between published and not-published versions show the Society's aim to build an official history about the Japanese mission. What was put aside from the European readers' eye? And why?