Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"In 1542 Francis Xavier, one of Ignatius Loyola's original group of Jesuit companions, traveled to the Portuguese trading settlement at Goa in India at the invitation of King Joao III of Portugal, where he spent three years and made many converts before sailing on to found missions in Malacca and the Spice Islands. It was in Malacca in 1548 that he met Anjiro, a Japanese trader from Kyushu, who persuaded Francis that Japan would prove a fertile ground for conversion. . . . At this time Europeans knew virtually nothing of Japan--the first Portuguese ship had arrived there only seven years before. . . . All the same, when he returned to Goa in 1551, he left 2,000 converts in the charge of his companions." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "Initially welcomed to Buddhist Japan, the tide turned for Jesuit missionaries in the 1590s, when the shoguns issued a series of edicts forbidding Christianity. The rulers were suspicious of the alien faith; they were also alarmed when local feudal lords adopted new religion as a badge of independence of the ruling elite." The Japanese began executing missionaries and torturing Japanese converts. All Portuguese & Spanish were expelled but a small colony of Dutch stayed. [DK Timelines, p. 299]