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There have been a number of "What If?"s surrounding the possibility of Nobunaga surviving the Incident at Honnou-ji, but it's been my personal experience that most of them seem to focus on the possibility of early Japanese westernization, or early Japanese expansionism into the Pacific and onto the mainland, or other such more mundane topics. But, recently, I've become a lot more curious about the religious aspects surrounding a surviving Nobunaga.

To say that Nobunaga was a secular man would be an understatement. He mostly paid lipservice to the Shinto-Buddhist religious establishment to keep his people and his vassals happy, but willfully defied religious convention and taboo if there was sufficient enough of reason for it. In that sense, then, I doubt that a surviving Nobunaga would have been a "genuine" convert to Catholicism (heavy quotes there), but OTL Nobunaga did have a lot of sympathy for Jesuits and, of course, a love of all things western. In OTL, though, after Nobunaga's death, western religion was quickly suppressed by the efforts of Toyotomi and the Tokugawa shoguns.

So. Let's say that Nobunaga survives Akechi's attack on Honnou-ji, and proceeds to finish his conquest of Japan, which will necessarily include the heavily Christianized (by 1582) island of Kyushu. If Nobunaga allows the Jesuits and domestic Japanese converts to do as they will, could we see a fully Christianized Japan within a century or so? Would Nobunaga, the secular pragmatist and lover of all things Western, convert to Catholicism just for the sake of appeasing the mass of new Kirishitans, and to foster good relations with Europeans in Japan?

What do you all think?
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