Francisco Cabral

• Born: c. 1533
• Died: c. 1609

Francisco Cabral was a Jesuit missionary active in Japan in the 1580s.

Upon the departure of Visitor Alessandro Valignano from Japan in 1582, Valignano appointed Cabral to oversee Jesuit operations in the country. However, whereas Valignano encouraged the Jesuits to adopt Japanese customs in order to better earn the support of Japanese patrons (and to avoid tensions with the authorities), Cabral is said to have found Japanese culture highly unpalatable, refusing to even drink tea, and regularly disparaging the Japanese in his writings. After a very brief term of service, he was thus replaced, at Valignano's orders, with Gaspar Coelho.

References

• William Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann (eds.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, Second Edition, vol 2, Columbia University Press (2005), 155-156.