In the 16 th century the whole land of Japan was split into so many territories, each one of which was owned and ruled by a feudal lord daimyo, and a feudal lord in those days had an absolute power as strong and mightly as that of the king himself. It is, therefore, nothing strange that the Jesuits, who came over to this island-country all of a sudden and started to work as Christian missionaries, looked upon each one of these feudal lords as kings (reis) of Japan. For the time being, such lords of the land acted like an independent ruler, but later only those influential lords usually called yakata came to be called "king" (rei) and those below were called "principality" (principe).
They interpreted the fact that Japan was divided into 66 cuni as reminiscent of the fact that there had been so many kingdoms (reinos). Of course this interpretation was far wide of the mark, and yet the result of this interpretation was not without some distinct effects. When the converted lords-such as Sorin Otomo, Harunobu Arima and Sumitada Omura despatched some boy-envoys to the Vatican to pay homage to the then Pope, the-first two lords were recognized as kings as they had the title of yakata. These envoys were very cordially treated with honors equal to their rank. Needless to say, the fact that Japan, a country in the liar East, had sent a delegation to the Vatican to pay homage to Pope, was taken advantage of by the Vatican in order to carry on a most effective campaign against Protestantism that had spread already wide in those days. And quite naturally Cubo, or Shogun Yoshiteru was looked up to as the Emperor (Emperador) of Japan as he was standing above those kings. He was treated as the emperor belonging to the same category as that of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. As the natural result of this, occidentals came to call Japan as an empire. But missionaries of the Order of Christ, though they had made some mistakes at first, gradually came to see that Dayri was the real ruler of Japan-especially after Nobunaga and Hideyoshi acquired power, for they payed homage to Dayri as the Sovereign of Japan. The Order of Christ was allowed to share the privilege just as powerful as that of an influential when the commercial ports Nagasaki and Mogi were given to this Order by the aforesaid Sumitada Omura.

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