At a relatively early moment in what was later to be brought to an end as the ‘Christian century’ in Japan, the confident optimism of the inspirational Jesuit leader Alessandro Valignano created a public relations triumph within global early modern Catholicism. Between 1584 and 1586 the Society of Jesus paraded through the centres of Iberian and Italian Catholic society a delegation of young Japanese noblemen, converts to Christianity. Their European tour created in fact even more public excitement in such places than is traced in this substantial volume. Valignano capitalised with striking promptness on that by arranging publication in Macao, by 1590, of a Dialogue in Latin which should both establish a record of the European tour and provide an apologia for the Catholic faith and, by association, for Catholic Europe, the Iberian monarchy and the Society of Jesus. The form of the text was itself essentially European, a humanist colloquium, in which over many imagined days a main speaker, aided by promptings and questions from his companions, expounded the subject. All the participants in the discussion were real historical persons, both the four original delegates and two further Japanese collocutors. The exemplary edition, with very few slips, provided here by Derek Massarella is a worthy memorial to the translator, the late Joseph Moran. In both the introduction and the annotation the realities which overtook the Far Eastern Catholic outreach not so long afterwards are well traced.