Justo Kazariya

• Born: 1570
• Died: 1629 or 1630

Father Justo Kazariya was a Japanese convert to Christianity, and a priest active in Macao and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Born in Nagasaki, he entered the Jesuit seminary at Arima in 1585, and was granted membership in the Jesuit order in 1590. Kazariya spent the next 25 years or so in various places in Kyushu, before leaving for Macao in 1614. He was formally ordained as a priest in 1624, and engaged in missionary activity in Quang Nam (Cochinchina) and Cambodia for the remainder of that decade, until his death in 1629 or 1630.

References

• Madalena Ribeiro, “The Japanese Diaspora in the Seventeenth Century, According to Jesuit Sources,” Bulletin of Portuguese/Japanese Studies 3 (2001), 60.