Cosme de Torres

Cosme de Torres (1510 – October 2, 1570), a Spanish Jesuit of the sixteenth century, was one of the first Christian missionaries in Japan. He was born in Valencia and died in Amakusa, an island now in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan.

Born in Valencia in 1510, Torres was ordained into the priesthood in 1535. In 1536 he was a teacher of grammar at Mons Rrendinus university, Mallorka. After a stay in Valencia and Uldecona, he was sent as a missionary to Mexico. From there, he went to Asia and met Francis Xavier in the Moluccas in 1546. He entered the Society of Jesus in Goa in 1548, where he worked as a teacher of grammar at the Jesuit college.

Torres arrived in Kagoshima, a city located in Kyushu, the southernmost of the three main islands of Japan on August 15, 1549. He was accompanied by Francis Xavier, Brother Juan Fernandez, and several Indian servants, as well as by three Japanese Christians converts that had met Xavier in Malacca in 1547. The missionaries began work in Kagoshima by preaching on the streets, reading from a catechism written by Xavier that had been translated into Japanese by their companion, Anjiro.

In late 1549, Xavier decided to travel to Kyoto where he intended to request an audience with the Japanese emperor, Emperor Go-Nara. Both Torres and Fernandez went with him. En route, they stopped in Yamaguchi, where they began working to convert the population of the city. When Xavier and Fernandez left Yamaguchi in December 1550 to continue the journey to the capital, Torres was left behind to continue the missionary work begun there. In mid-1551, Xavier returned to Yamaguchi after a disappointing trip to Kyoto, where he was denied his request for an imperial audience.

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