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Francis left Kagoshima for good at the end of August 1550, one year after arrival, and stayed for two months in Hirado. The Portuguese gave him a triumphal welcome and the local daimyo Matsura Takanobu granted him a solemn audience and willingly gave him permission to preach the Gospel. During his two months in Hirado he administered baptism to about a hundred catechumens. When in late October the Portuguese made ready to return to their winter lodgings in the coast of China, Xavier left the new Christianity of Hirado in the hands of Cosme de Torres and accompanied by Bro. Juan Fernandez and by Bernardo, recently baptized in Kagoshima, continued his journey to Kyoto. On his way there, he would stop in Hakata, the emporium of commerce with China and Korea, and in Yamaguchi, on a level with imperial Kyoto in culture and prestige.
Xavier and companions arrived in Yamaguchi in early November. It was a town of about 50.000 people, at the best of its golden age, both culturally and economically. Its center, spanning both sides of the river Ichinosaka, only a few hundred meters from Kameyama hill, where Xavier basilica is now located.
The center of Yamaguchi hosted the palace of the local daimyo Ouchi Yoshitaka, the dwellings of the nobility and all public buildings. South of the daimyo's palace was Otono oji, the Avenue of the Nobles, and many sumptuous temples. The newcomers, exhausted from the journey and shabbily clad, finally settled in the house of a certain Uchida. Now that they were in Yamaguchi, the trip to Kyoto could still wait a little longer: Christianity had first to be introduced in Yamaguchi. Their first days in town were hard enough to demoralize anyone who was not Francis. Day after day, morning and afternoon, Xavier and Fernandez came to the crossings of the streets, and while Fernandez preached, Francis--who could not preach yet--was deep in prayer beside him, sitting sometimes on the rim of a well. It must have been a rather pathetic sight. Fernandez read a passage from the book written by Francis in Kagoshima and translated by Anjiro into his native dialect. Sometimes Fernandez added his own comments or translated Xavier's words, using all the time the dialect of Kagoshima, still half'-learnt and very different from the Japanese spoken in Yamaguchi.
The end-result of such street preaching can easily be guessed: most people laughed at them, others poured ridicule and contempt on them and a few remained silent and thoughful, without understanding much of what the foreigners said, but deeply impressed by Xavier's praying countenance and the passionate preaching of Fernandez.
Very often the newcomers were invited to the houses of the nobility, an invitation that Francis never rejected. The audience was then more sophisticated, more demanding in questions they posed and more difficult to convince. Besides, the samurai were not used to being threatened with eternal hell, with no prospect of rescue by alms given to the local clergy. Reactions on the whole were negative, although Xavier managed to make some friends, among them Naito Okimori, secretary to the local lord Ouchi Yoshitaka.
With the preachers having no support from the daimyo and being unwelcome to the local clergy, the days passed by and still there were no conversions. Finally it was their zeal and forbearance--always nailed on the cross and always risen--that worked the miracle. One day, while Fernandez was preaching in the street, one of his listeners not only insulted him, but spat on his face. Without betraying the slightest emotion, the preacher quietly drew out his handkerchief and wiped the spittle. This was the last convincing argument for another listener--most probably the missionaries' innkeeper Uchida--to ask to be baptized
.Thanks to the good offices of Naito Okimori, Xavier was finally received in audience by Ouchi Yoshitaka, but the event was far from being a success. The foreigners' attire predisposed people against them, and their language was almost unintelligible. For a whole hour, starting with the Creation narrative, Fernandez continued to read from the catechism written by Francis in Kagoshima, and for a whole hour did Yoshitaka--a man of refined culture and intellectual curiosity--patiently listen to him. But when Fernandez proceeded with the sin of Sodom, without sparing the derogatory remarks much in vogue at the time, Yoshitaka's patience came to an end, and without much ado put an end to the audience. Xavier and friends left the daimyo's palace just the way they had arrived: with no permission to preach and no prospect of getting it.
Conversions were still very few and the air around was becoming more and more rarefied. Francis thought it over and decided to abide by his previous decision: he would go to Kyoto to see the emperor and visit the universities of the capital of Japan. This would mark the opening of a new stage in his missionary endeavour.
Francis was a dyed-in-the-wool Navarrese: very cheerful, and yet very serious. The Japanese he had met up to then might not have been so cheerful, but they were serious to a man, and Anjiro in particular was not the liar type. The report on Japan he wrote for Xavier presented the Emperor as the ruler of the whole country, obeyed by all and endowed with a kind of religious halo that made of him a pope in addition to being an emperor. Francis, who had lived both under the Pope and the Emperor, made of Anjiro's report his personal dogma, and it took him much time and many disappointments to realize that the Japanese of his time could easily harmonize a mystical belief in an emperor-god with allowing His Imperial Highness to live in almost abject poverty, selling his calligraphy in the streets in order to make a living. Tu put it bluntly, to revere the emperor was not the same as obeying the emperor.
Travelling from Yamaguchi to Kyoto in late December was far from being a pleasure trip. The three travellers--Francis, Fernandez and Bernardo--had to walk three days before reaching Iwakuni, their port of embarkation. After Tokuyama, the road zig-zagged across mountains covered with forest with snow up to their knees. The cold was unbearable and our travellers' clothing scarce and out of season. Very often Francis was walking barefoot and his feet bled, but absorbed as he was in prayer he did not seem to notice it. The nights in ramshackle inns and with only one blanket to keep themselves warm made the journey twice as painful.
Travelling by ship in winter from Iwakuni to Sakai was not a pleasure cruise either. It used to take from two to three weeks and was done in big boats equipped with matted sails and oars, coasting along the Inland Sea and laying anchor at night in any available harbour along the route. The three voyagers had no protection against the wind, rain and snow. The Inland Sea was infested with pirates, and having three foreigners on board meant courting disaster. They had therefore to be concealed somewhere on the deck.
This notwithstanding, not everything went badly during the trip. In one of the ports a compassionate Japanese gave them a letter of recommendation for Hibiya Ryokei, a merchant of Sakai, asking him to lend them a hand in what St. Ignatius would have called "the difficult undertaking they had started".
The travellers reached Sakai late at night and had to spend the night in the open air near the harbour. The following day Ryokei gave them a friendly welcome and helped them with the two-day trip to Kyoto, finding a place for them in the retinue of a nobleman going to the capital. He also recommended them to his close friend Konishi Ryusa, a fellow-merchant resident in Kyoto. And so it was that in a wintry day of January, accompanied by a servant of Ryusa, Francis and his companions stood at the entrance of mount Hiei, after a four-hour walk from Kyoto.
Since the time when Saicho, founder of Tendai Buddhism, established himself in mount Hiei in the eighth century, his net of monasteries in the mountain had become the most prestigious place for Buddhist scholarship. With Fernandez as his interpreter, Xavier conveyed his desire to meet the zasu (abbot-rector) and exchange views with the staff of the university, but the answer was summary and negative: without the customary gifts, such a request was unacceptable. Francis had left his the presents in Hirado, and our Navarrese had to return to Kyoto with a curt "no" for an answer.
The audience with the emperor met with a similar fate. The imperial palace was in ruins, and looked more like a derelict barn than anything else. On the other hand, the attire of Xavier and his companions did not precisely ingratiate them with the powerful of this world, and when it became clear that they had no gifts to offer they were unceremoniously dismissed.
Francis experienced then the biggest disappointment of his life. Back at the house of Konishi he was able to complete his information: neither did the emperor reign nor did the shogun (military ruler) wield any military power, nor were the intellectuals of Hiei particularly interested in a dialectic war with foreigners. Another civil war was in the offing, and for the time being to stay in Kyoto was a sheer waste of time.
Xavier's stay in the capital lasted eleven days altogether. And very soon he was already on his way back. He had given up his dream of converting Japan with the backing of the emperor and the intellectual elite of Kyoto, but he would never give up on his missionary dream. He would pursue his work, but with a different set of guiding lines. And, come to think of it, his sojourn in Kyoto had not been after all a total failure: the Hibiya and Konishi families he had met would play a very important role in the Christian history of Japan.
