15. The most concise account in English of Portuguese activities in Japan is Jurgis Elisonas’ “Christianity and the Daimyo,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4, Early Modern Japan, ed. John Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 301–372.

16. Even after Hideyoshi banned the Jesuits from Japan in 1587, he was afraid of enforcing it because he was convinced that if the priests left, Portuguese trade would also leave. Father Valignano, writing in 1592, stated, “They are nearly all of them convinced that if the padres were not here, the Japanese could not deal with the Portuguese, which opinion is no small help to us at this juncture.…they were convinced that there was no trading with the Portuguese in Japan unless the padres acted as intermediaries.” Charles Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 152–153.

17. For a good account of the establishment of the Jesuit headquarters at Nagasaki and the controversy surrounding the city's cession to the Jesuits, see Diego Pacheco, “The Founding of the Port of Nagasaki and Its Cession to the Society of Jesus,” Monumenta Nipponica 25, nos. 3/4 (1970): 303–323.

18. A good discussion of the question of how many converts were in Japan can be found in Boxer's Christian Century in Japan, 320–323. Boxer settled on 250,000 because it is the number referred to in the Jesuit annual letter to Rome in 1614. There were certainly other estimates, including one estimate of two million converts, but this can be easily dismissed. One problem in my mind is that the Jesuits had a vested interest in making their mission in Japan seem as promising as possible in order to procure funds from Rome, Madrid, or Lisbon, so it is not hard to imagine them inflating the numbers of converts. Therefore, I would propose using 250,000 converts as the upper limit.

19. As John Hall and Toyoda Takeshi stated, “In an East Asian international community in which trade was subordinated to diplomacy, such traders had to turn pirate or else subordinate themselves to elaborate official regulations.” John Hall and Toyoda Takeshi, eds., Japan in the Muromachi Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 126.

20. A short but authoritative synopsis of this trade can be found in Michael Cooper's article, “The Mechanics of the Macao-Nagasaki Silk Trade,” Monumenta Nipponica 27, no. 4 (Winter 1972): 423–433.

21. The head of the Dutch factory on Deshima noted in his diary on June 26, 1641, that the city of Macau was devastated by the loss of the Japan trade, in part because “they owed about 180,000 taels to several Chinese merchants,