The Tokugawa shogunate's self-serving conceit of a Japan-centered “international order,” described in the conclusion of Chapter 6, could handily comprehend Ryūkyū, Korea, and even the mercantile Dutch, because these foreign entities either acquiesced to being fit or had no power to resist being forced into the Japanese derivative of the traditional East Asian model of international relations. Another group of foreigners posed a more difficult problem: The model of universal truth introduced by Roman Catholic Europeans who came to Japan with a missionary purpose could not be so easily accommodated by a regime intent on refashioning Japanese society in a mold of its own. Hence the Catholics' mission to Japan was ultimately condemned as subversive to the social order of the Tokugawa, and they were expelled as an alien element from the Japanese body politic.

At first, however, the Catholic Europeans were welcomed. At the time of their arrival, Japan was a splintered realm composed of the autonomous domains of many warring daimyo. For reasons that will be discussed in this chapter, some of those daimyo protected the foreigners, sought out their commerce, and even embraced the religion that the Europeans brought with them. The fragmented state of a nation that truly merited the label sengoku, a “country at war,” made it possible for the Christian missionaries to disseminate their faith on a domanial and even regional basis.