I'm doing this for the first time, so I hope I'm doing it right!

The first catholic missionaries arrived in Japan in 1543 and began spreading the Gospel in 1549. The Portugese Jesuits were the first to arrive and, followed by the Spanish Franciscans and Dominicans.

Missionaries began learning the Japanese language right after their arrival in 1549 and started translating single words into Japanese. For example, they initially translated God as 大日 dainichi (big sun), though this was also a word associated with Buddhism as the deity of esoteric Buddhism.

Thus they began making sound-based translations from the Latin version of the bible into Japanese.

The missionaries dedicated a great portion of their time into learning the Japanese language, consequently they began publishing Christian books since the 1590s, however the bible was not yet among these books. Thousands of these books were printed, especially since the first printing press in Japan was established in 1601.

In 1613 a few passages of the bible including Decalogue and the Lord's Prayer. However, it is not known how much more was translated since Christiany was banned since 1587, all missionaries were exiled and the translations were lost.

Another attempt at translating the bible was made by K. F. A Gützlaff, a German missionary, in 1837. However, at the time Japan had a policy of isolation. Only a few Dutch traders who had no intention of spreading the Gospel were permitted to enter the country, thus Gützlaff published his work in Singapore instead and his translation never made it to Japan.

Only in 1859 Protestan missionaries began to translate the bible into Japanese once again. Other Protestans had already translated the bible from Latin into Chinese, thus they were able to use Chinese terms and characters to convey Christian terminology.

Japanese scholars were already able to read texts in Chinese and texts with annotations with so called 万葉仮名 Man'yōgana (Chinese characters that represent Japanese syllables, but had no meaning) were created so the common folk could read Chinese texts. However, efforts were being made to create an actual translation of the bible into Japanese.

By 1873 John, Mark and Matthew had been translated into Japanese and printed from hand carved wooden blocks.

Funded by the American Bible Society the new testament was finally complete in 1880 and the old testament in 1887. However, this translation was criticized for its bad quality. Thus, a new committee of translators was created to translate the original Greek version 1910.

This revised new testament was completed in 1917 and was used until 1954.

Sources

Masashi Takahashi. The Colloquial Japanese Bible of 1955, With a Short History of Bible Translation in Japan, 1959.

Norihisa Suzuki 鈴木範久. Japanese in the Bible, the history of translation『聖書の日本語 : 翻訳の歴史』. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten 岩波書店, 2006.

Arimichi Ebizawa. Bible in Japan, A History of Japanese Bible Translation, Kodansha, 1989.