Bowl with Cross Design

The first Christian missionaries, namely Portuguese Catholics, arrived in Japan in the late 1540s and achieved success converting Christians in some areas of the country. Christians were persecuted by authority of Japan’s military leaders on and off through the 1630s, by which time all adherents of Christianity had renounced their faith or moved underground. Stoneware bowls bearing Christian crosses began to be made in the early seventeenth century, but it remains unclear who might have used such bowls.