The Jesuits also were targeting the elite class as opposed to the Franciscans working with the poorer classes. The problem was that the ruling people, because of the drama and tension between Christian sects, saw Christianity as a threat to their own power. In the book The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth Century Japan, Moran and Moran (1992: iii) that in promoting Christianity, the Jesuits -- one of them being Valignano, a prominent figure among the Jesuits in Asias -- looked to the ruling class for support of their religion. Valignano was a different type of missionary as he impressed the importance of learning Japanese upon the missionaries. However, after Valignano's death, Christianity was proscribed and missionaries were banished from Japan (iii). What was interesting about Valignano is that he understood that foreign missionaries were not capable of converting the Japanese to Christianity, and one of his chief concerns was to train the Japanese Jesuits and priest and break down the barriers between them and the Europeans (iii).

Moran and Moran's (1992: 2) book explains that the Jesuits were the only missionaries in Japan until the arrival of the Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian friars in the 1590s and 1600s. Likewise, the authors explain that Japan was in a very turbulent state when the Jesuits -- chiefly Xavier -- first got there in 1549 and there were many negative beliefs that came to be about Christianity. Nelson (2002: 100) notes that Christianity was thought to be a "diabolical religion" -- something like black magic. Still, it has to be noted that Christianity was one of the most important things to happen to Japan.

Elison's book, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan, notes that there has been much comparison between the process of Christianity's progress of the Christian movement in the classical...

The missionaries who went to Japan were known to take solace in the similarities between their situation and that of the Primitive Church. However, Elison notes that those difference constituted a "formidable obstacle to the spread of their religion in Japan" (13).
There were many conditioning factors lacking for Christianity to be truly successful in Japan. Elison (13) states that, "the points of resemblance with Buddhism were ephemeral and delusory" and the first missionaries had absolutely no foundations in which to build upon. Though the missionaries may have considered what they were doing similar to what was done when the "Primitive Church" was formed, this was not the same case at all. The missionaries, after all, were looking back to a tradition that was a millennium and a half years old and what they were preaching was, in many ways, not the same faith as they were harking back to (13). Perhaps one of the reasons for the tension between Christian groups (mainly the Jesuits and the Franciscans) was because the religion had become too complex over the years. It seemed like whatever purity there had been in the Christian religion was gone once the missionaries got to Japan. Elison argues that sheer manpower was lacking in Japan when it came to the Christian mission (14). More likely there were just too many challenges that the missionaries faced in this foreign world.

Works Cited

Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan.

Moran, J.F. & Moran, J.F. The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth Century Japan. Routledge; 1st edition, 1992.

Nelson, John. "Myths, Missions, and Mistrust: The Fate of Christianity in 16th and 17th

Century Japan." History and Anthropology,13(2), pp. 93-111. Routledge,…