Japanese manners through the eyes of a late-Renaissance Jesuit: Alessandro Valignano’s Advertimentos (1583).

The paper examines Alessandro Valignano’s Advertimentos e avisos acerca dos costumes e catangues de Jappao (“Warnings and notices about the customs and manners of Japan”, 1583), a manual that provides directives for Jesuit missionaries in Japan. The work comprises a list of guidelines to behave in every public and domestic situation “in the Japanese way”, since the author believed this was a chance for Jesuit missionaries to be taken seriously by Japanese people and, therefore, convert them to Christianity. The Advertimentos serves as a critical resource for Jesuit adaptation, revealing Valignano’s commitment to understanding and integrating into Japanese culture while navigating the complexities of cross-cultural interactions within the Jesuit mission. In this context, Valignano’s observations on good manners and gestures of social relationships are particularly highlighted, as they are among the first direct testimonies of how the Catholic European culture of the late Renaissance perceived Japanese culture during the Tokugawa era.