Catholicism was introduced to Japan in the 16th century. I guess it didn’t really take, since there’s no more than a handful of Japanese Catholics today. The samurai class lasted until the 19th century. So in 300 years of Catholicism and samurai co-habitating, were there ever any Catholic samurai?
To get you started: Japanese Christian Samurai & Warlords
Evidently you never saw Akira Kurasawa’s movie Kagemusha. There’s a great mopment when a Catholic priest appears atop a Japanese Castle wall with two acolytes and gives a blessing in Latin to the Japanese Warlord (Nobunaga Oda? My memory’s vague) , who responds with a very martial-sounding:
“Ahhh-men!”
carterba writes:
> I guess it didn’t really take, since there’s no more than a handful of Japanese
> Catholics today.
If a half a million constitutes a handful, that may be so:
St. Francis Xavier’s mission and the resulting church, which did hang in there and remain Catholic for nearly three centuries until Japan was opened up in 1854, was in a city famous for quite different reasons today: Nagasaki.
Takayama Ukon, was a Daimyo, and a Samurai who was Christian. When he was exiled his status as Daimyo was taken away. He is significant to the Philippines, because after being exiled from Nagasaki along with 300 others, he ended up in Manila. There’s a statue of him in Plaza Dilao, which was the area where about 3,000 Japanese were living at the time.
Thanks, everybody. Interesting stuff.
My question was inspired by a character in Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion who is a Catholic samurai. The character is the son of a Catholic Daimyo who was exiled to Manila. I was wondering if it had any root in reality, and I guess that answers it. 
I have a system:[ul]
[li]“handful”: less than 1%[/li][li]“a few”: >1%, <5%[/li][li]“several”: >5%, <10%[/li][li]“many”: >10%, <50%[/li][li]“most”: >50%[/li][/ul]
she may not be a samurai, the current empress of japan was raised catholic.
Takayama Ukon’s name upon becoming Catholic changed to Dom Justo Takayama.
The Japanese community in Manila during Spanish times isn’t really discussed (well, Philippine history as a whole isn’t something well known outside of the Philippine educational system). In addition to the exiles from Nagasaki (other ships went to Macau), there were apparently some Japanese settlers in the area just before the Spanish arrived, since certain rather plain jars, called Rusun jars were sought after highly by the Japanese for use as tea canisters (they were said to preserve tea like no other canister could). These same jars are used for pickling Umeboshi (pickled plums) nowadays.
Of course when Japan was closed off to the outside world, Japanese settlers stopped going to Manila (of course, they didn’t return until WWII, in large numbers, at least).
Haven’t you ever read the book/seen the mini-series Shogun?