page_title: João Rodrigues Tçuzu
section_title: In Japan
hierarchical_section_title: João Rodrigues Tçuzu / Life / In Japan
caption_attribution_description: Peter Paul Rubens made this drawing of Nicolas Trigault in a Chinese costume when the Jesuit missionary to China was in Antwerp
context_page_description: João Rodrigues, distinguished as Tçuzu and also known by other names in China and Korea, was a Portuguese sailor, warrior, and Jesuit interpreter, missionary, priest, and scholar in Japan and China. He is now best known for his linguistic works on the Japanese language, including The Art of the Japanese Language. He was also long erroneously supposed to have been the main compiler of the first Japanese–Portuguese dictionary, published in 1603.
context_section_description: Rodrigues was born at Sernancelhe in Beira, Portugal, in 1561 or 1562. He sailed to Asia in his early teens and reached Japan by 1577. Ōtomo Yoshishige, daimyō of Funai ("Bungo"), had long maintained a friendly relationship with the Portuguese and Spanish against the strong resistance of his wife and counselors; at some point, Rodrigues joined his campaigns against other clans competing for control of Kyushu.
  Ōtomo divorced his Shinto-priestess wife and converted to Catholicism in 1578. In December 1580, around age 19, Rodrigues joined the Jesuit novitiate at Ōita ("Funai"). At the time, the Society of Jesus reckoned a Christian community in Japan of about 100,000 converts.
  Despite having an admittedly unpolished style in Portuguese, he knew Spanish he taught grammar while he studied Latin and theology under the Jesuits and Japanese literature and philosophy with others. He was soon recognized for his fluent Japanese, and his knowledge of Han script also allowed him to translate documents written in Chinese. (From examples and comparisons in his works, he also seems to have had some knowledge of Italian and one of the Indian languages around Goa, possibly a dialect of Konkani or Tamil.) He served as interpreter for Alessandro Valignano during his visit and for vice provincial Gaspar Coelho (1581–1590). He began to preach in Japanese in 1588, despite still being unordained. During Valignano's visit to Toyotomi Hideyoshi in July 1590, Rodrigues so impressed Toyotomi that the shogun hired him for a time as his personal interpreter. He was procurator of the Jesuits' Japan mission from 1591 to 1626.
  Rodrigues finished his theological studies at Nagasaki in 1593 and was ordained as a priest at Macao the next year, returning to Japan in 1596. On 16 September 1598, Rodrigues visited the dying Hideyoshi and tried unsuccessfully to convert him to Christianity. He remained well-liked and influential under the new shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, protecting Jesuit missions and Japanese converts at Nagasaki, Osaka, and Kyoto. Native courtiers tried to remove him on several occasions and even Tokugawa tested his honesty on a few occasions before admitting his suspicions were ill-founded. Following a violent suppression of marauding Japanese sailors in Macao in 1608 and court intrigues the next year, however, Tokugawa resolved to replace Portuguese traders with red seal ships, the Dutch, and the Spanish in early 1610. After a successful assault on a Portuguese ship then in Nagasaki Bay, he permitted most of the missionaries to remain but replaced Rodrigues with the Englishman William Adams. In 1614, he was finally compelled to leave Japan altogether, having lived there over thirty years.
caption: Rubens's sketch of Rodrigues's contemporary missionary Nicolas Trigault in mandarin robes.
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