Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine, through the writings of Juan de Jesús, a Franciscan missionary active in Manila at the turn of the eighteenth century, the image of Japan that emerged within the Spanish missionary imagination in the decades following the country’s closure in the 1630s.

Paper long abstract

Juan de Jesús, OFM (†1706), was a Spanish Discalced Franciscan friar who spent nearly three decades in the Philippines, where he held several leadership positions and produced a remarkable yet almost entirely overlooked body of writings. His work consists of one major treatise and eight short opuscula, which address a wide range of missionary, linguistic, spiritual, and historical issues.

His main work, and the only one to have received sustained attention in recent scholarship, is the Arte de la lengua de Japón, a Spanish adaptation of Diego Collado’s Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae (Rome, 1632). Far from being a mere translation, Juan de Jesús’s Arte expands Collado’s grammar by incorporating original linguistic, missionary, and intercultural reflections, which make the text, to a significant extent, an autonomous work.

Among his eight opuscula, one particularly striking text offers a critical reassessment of earlier Philippine chronicles and provides an internal account of Jesuit and mendicant evangelization efforts in Asia, with a strong focus on Japan. Drawing on oral testimonies and personal experience, this treatise preserves valuable information absent from other contemporary sources and sheds light on intra-missionary debates during the period of Iberian presence in East Asia.

Across both his grammar and his shorter writings, Juan de Jesús reflects on the symbolic and spiritual significance of Japan within the Spanish missionary imagination, expressing a recurring longing to return to the land of martyrs, a territory that had been effectively closed to foreign contact for several decades.

The aim of this paper is to analyze through Juan de Jesús’s writings, and particularly through these two works, the image of Japan that took shape within the Spanish missionary imagination in the decades following the sakoku. It examines how this image oscillates between critical reflection on the actions of the different religious orders during the period of Iberian presence in Japan, the idealization of Japan as a land of martyrdom, and the persistent hope of a future return.

Keywords: Early Modern Japan, Catholic Missions, Franciscans, Religious Historiography, Spanish Philippines