João Rodrigues (1561or 1562 1633or 1634),ãoRodriguesTç 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.
Name
João Rodrigues's epithet Tçuzu was an early Portuguese transcription of his Japanese descriptor Tsūji (, "the Interpreter"). It distinguished him from a contemporary João Rodrigues in the Jesuits' China mission. João's surname sometimes appears in its Spanish form Rodriguez, the form he himself used in his Portuguese works; his epithet is sometimes mistakenly written as Tçuzzu.
In Japan and China, Rodrigues used the Chinese name (), abbreviating his family name to a single character Lu in the Chinese style and transcribing his given name's Latin form to Ruohan. In modern Korean sources, Rodrigues's name is written with the pronunciation (), although at the time his Chinese surname would have been pronounced Ryuk (). In 19th- and early 20th-century sources, his name appears as "Jean Niouk", a blend of the French form of his given name and Dallet's French transcription of the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese form of his surname.
Life
In Japan
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 regent 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.
In China
Rodrigues returned to Macao and then began work with the China mission. He first worked at Zhenjiang near Nanjing and then traveled the interior of the country looking for antiquities related to the medieval Church of the East. He participated in the Chinese Rites Controversy, where he opposed Matteo Ricci's attempts to permit most traditional Chinese rituals within a Christian context.