significance than ever before in Japanese history. The first Europeans to reach Japan were Portuguese mariners who landed on an island off the southern tip of Kyushu in 1542 or 1543. Trade relations soon sprang up between the Portuguese and the feudal lords of western Kyushu, who learned the use of firearms from the European traders.
Contacts with the Portuguese took on a new aspect when St. Francis Xavier, the famous Jesuit missionary, introduced Christianity to Japan during a two year stay there from 1549 to 1551. He and many other Jesuits who followed in his footsteps met with considerable success in their proselytizing. The Buddhist churches soon recognized Christianity as a dangerous rival and opposed it bitterly, but several of the petty lords of Kyushu favored the missionaries, realizing that Portuguese traders tended to bring their ships to ports where the Jesuits had been welcomed. A minor Daimyo, who himself had earlier embraced Christianity, managed with the aid of the Portuguese to build the fishing village of Nagasaki in western Kyushu into the chief port for foreign trade in all Japan. Many small lords had already become Christians, when in 1578 one of the great Daimyo of Kyushu was converted. Japanese of all classes in western Japan and particularly in Kyushu were beginning to embrace the new faith. It is estimated that there were some 150,000 Christians in Japan around the year 1580 and twice that number in the early seventeenth century.
Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa who followed him had no particular objection to Christianity on religious grounds, but they looked upon it with deep suspicion