The paper highlights translations of the baptismal formula in catechetical sources of the early Jesuit mission in Buddhist Japan. It focuses on the guidance that these sources provide for the performance of embodied practices central to Catholicism. Since the Jesuit missionaries took an exclusivist approach to overcoming competing world interpretations, they had to design a vocabulary that could convey general Catholic conceptions of the world, humanity, and salvation in a way that would distinguish them from equivalent Buddhist conceptions. There was substantial epistemic competition with Japanese Buddhism regarding conceptions of the body, the senses, and embodied practices. The Jesuits and their teams were aware that Christianity’s acceptance in Japan also depended on the translation of the words to be spoken during sacramental rites. In this paper, I introduce catechetical texts created in Japan, and compare their treatments and translations of the baptismal formula, in the context of the local sonic culture.