Francis Xavier & Ruiji Izumi
Did you know that a blood relative of the Saint Francis Xavier is currently living in Japan? Saturday night’s episode of Sekai Ichi Uketai Jyugyou introduced him to television viewers in a short trivia segment:
Ruiji Izumi (Luis Fontes prior to naturalization) is a descendant of Francis Xavier’s brother. Just like Xavier, he is a Jesuit priest. According to JCN, he works at a church in Yamaguchi Prefecture.
In 2005, he wrote a book of life lessons in Japanese, which appears to be out of print. Amazon.co.jp is also selling a book about Ruiji Izumi’s life.
Interesting factoid mentioned in the video clip: The painting of Francis Xavier at the top of this post, which is a familiar image in almost every Japanese history textbook, was actually painted long after Xavier’s death. He may have looked nothing like the man in that painting, and as a Jesuit he probably would not have sported a semi-shaved head.
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it irritates me that in order to become a citizen one must take a japanese name. why is this necessary? the only other group which i know of doing this is islam
It is not necessary. For someone logging in to leave comments from a Japanese ISP, you don’t seem very aware of the system they have over here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nationality_law
It is not necessary to take a Japanese name. You can continue to use the name you used prior to taking citizenship. You don’t even need to use Kanji, either of the kana syllabaries are fine – but you cannot use roman letters (duh…).
In addition to Son Masayoshi, I might mention Ramos Rui and Santos Aresandoro.
As for Ruiji Izumi, it looks like he took “Izumi” as the meaning is quite close to “Fontes”, and from Luis to Ruiji… well, you can figure it out while you are being irritated.