This ‘book of the doctoral thesis’ has the appropriate virtues of succinct argument and clear expression. The lengthy title gives an accurate sense of the author's purpose. The author also has had access to works in Japanese which many other historians have not had. On the other hand, the magisterial and transformative work on the the global Jesuit mission by Paolo Broggio (Evangelizare il mondo, 2004) seems not to be noted. The evolution of Jesuit missionary strategy in Japan is reviewed, and an initial case is made that the disruptively competing Spanish Franciscan mission, the arrival of which complicated the situation facing the essentially Portuguese Jesuit mission, was not after all following a diametrically different strategy opposed to any degree of assimilation. Whether or not that precise case is convincingly established, a more general point is well put: that in many mission zones Jesuits and other religious orders were following variants of missionary method, on the need for native languages for instance, which represented differences of degree, not methods of total assimilation or total non-assimilation. The one important exception, of course, for the later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century period chiefly considered here, was the issue of whether (as by the Jesuits in Japan) a native priesthood could be seen as an ideal, or regarded as neither possible nor welcome, as the author concedes. The further necessary concession is made, that the circumstances in which the Jesuits had to work in North America could hardly have been more different from those in Japan, while the available historical sources also differ for want of written Amerindian evidence. But a decidedly ambitious argument is then advanced, concerning one of the received opinions in the existing North American historiography which the author feels need to be challenged. This is that in those cases where the Jesuits attempted to bring North American Amerindians into residential settlements such ‘reductions’ took as their model the similarly named and famous Jesuit mission settlements in greater Paraguay. The author contends instead for a Japanese model, on the partly reasonable grounds that the Paraguay enclaves were in fact very different from North American Jesuit settlements on many scores. But the positive Japanese alternative appears hard to establish, and the generic point that Jesuits had access to reports of missionary colleagues' work elsewhere in the globe is arguably unconvincing as sufficient specific proof, given the author's previous concession that the Jesuits' circumstances were so very different in Japan and North America. This is perhaps where consideration of Broggio's revisionist analysis of how early modern Jesuits conceived of activities distinguished in modern historiography as ‘mission’ or ‘missions’ might have been valuable. As a fresh perspective, however, this volume is entirely welcome.