page_title: Luis Sotelo
section_title: Embassy project
hierarchical_section_title: Luis Sotelo / Embassy project
caption_attribution_description: Replica of the Japanese Galleon San Juan Bautista (1613) in Ishinomaki, Japan. Comes from en, where it specifies: Photograph released in the public domain by the author.
context_page_description: Luis Sotelo, in English known also as Louis Sotelo, was a Franciscan friar from Spain who died as a martyr in Japan, in 1624, and was beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1867.
context_section_description: Sotelo, fluent in Japanese, planned and acted as translator on a Japanese embassy sent by Date Masamune to Spain on October 28, 1613. The embassy was headed by Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga, and crossed the Pacific to Acapulco on board the Japanese-built (with assistance from European sailors) galleon San Juan Bautista. The embassy continued to Veracruz and Sanlucar de Barrameda, Seville, and Madrid. Sotelo had the Japanese receive baptism in Madrid, before accompanying them to see Pope Paul V in Rome.
  The embassy was a product of ambitions of Sotelo to increase the spread of the church in Japan and of Date Masamune to provide more priests to man the churches of his Christian subjects and to establish trade between Sendai and New Spain, and it had the approval of the shōgun, Tokugawa Ieyasu.
  Sotelo remained for a full year in Madrid on the return journey, along with the rest of the embassy, delayed because Christianity was being harshly repressed in Japan, and because he was awaiting consecration as second Bishop of Japan. Pope Paul V had appointed him as such, pending the approval of the King of Spain, but, primarily because of rivalries between Franciscans and Jesuits, he was never consecrated. However, the Catholic Council of the Indies sent him back to Nueva España in 1618, to pursue his missionary activities there. Most of the Japanese samurai sent with the mission, who had converted to Christianity, remained at Coria del Río, near Seville, where their descendants live to this day. Sotelo accompanied ambassador Hasekura and the remains of the embassy back to Veracruz and Acapulco, where the San Juan Bautista, requested by the outgoing Viceroy of the Philippines to convey him to the Philippines before returning to Sendai, diverted their course to Manila, arriving there in 1620.
  The ambassadors' plan to return to Sendai from Manila was obstructed first by pirates and contrary winds. When Hasekura finally was able to return, the Spanish authorities impounded Sotelo in Manila, having no desire to stir up conflict with the Portuguese Jesuit mission in Macao by allowing a second, rival Franciscan bishop to be consecrated in Sendai, in addition to the existing Jesuit Bishop of Japan, previously ruling the diocese of Funai (Nagasaki). Date Masamune had wanted to trade with Nueva España (Mexico), but it soon became apparent that the policy of sakoku (the late-1613 closure of Japan to outside influences except for very carefully controlled trade through south-western ports), along with Spanish insistence that all trade to the East be channelled through the Philippines, would make this impossible.
caption: A replica of the Japanese-built 1613 galleon San Juan Bautista.
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