Database: Luis Frois

Originally from Lisbon, Luís Fróis entered the Society of Jesus as a novice in 1548 and was sent to Goa, India where he met three Japanese people brought by Francis Xavier. Fróis was ordained a priest in 1561 and left for Macau the following year before landing at Yokoseura in Japan in 1563. First a missionary in Kyushu where he immediately began to learn Japanese, he was sent in 1564 to the Kinki (Sakai and Kyoto) to continue evangelizing. In 1569, he was received by Nobunaga, "the king of Owari" (according to Fróis) who had entered Kyoto the previous year. Fróis returned to Kyushu as a superior in Bungo from 1577 to 1581. In 1582, he became the translator and interpreter for the Jesuit in Japan, Alessandro Valignano. Fróis subsequently divided his life between Kyushu and the capital and accompanied Valignano again when he returned to Japan in 1592. After a new stay in Macau for five years to escape persecution, Fróis returned to Japan and died in Nagasaki in 1597, a few months after the first Christian martyr.

Additionally, Fróis is known for his extensive correspondence and especially his History of Japan written between 1584 and 1594. More precisely, a history of the Christian church in Japan, which is a crucial source. In 1585, he wrote an astonishing Treatise on the Contradictions of Customs between Europeans and Japanese, which constitutes a true ethnological work ahead of its time (the text was rediscovered in 1946 in Madrid). It notably contains a fascinating discourse on the understanding of otherness as well as a unique set of data for the history of daily life and mentalities, both in Europe and Japan.