Martins Janeira was born in Felgueiras, Moncorvo, in Northeast Portugal, in 1914 and died in Estoril, in 1988.
The first encounter of Janeira with Japan is dated from his childhood when he read the books by Wenceslau de Moraes, the Portuguese Japanologist who lived and died in Japan in early 20th century. Janeira, in opposition to Moraes was not born in Lisbon but in the far-eastern mountains of Trás-os-Montes near the Spanish border. Again, in opposition to Moraes, who learned Japanese way of life in contact with people, Janeira will absorb Japanese culture and mentality, through an erudite way after artists, writers, historians, and intellectuals, his friends. While Moraes arrived in Japan after living in China, Janeira will discover and study China through Japan. Janeira will find in the ancestral Chinese cultural roots, the success of the contemporary Maoist development.
Moraes was an anticlerical, but in opposition, Janeira, will enhance the work of the Portuguese missionaries of 16th and 17th centuries, whose work he learned from the most updated studies by Okamoto, Matsuda, Abranches Pinto, Wicki and Schurhammer. Dazzled by Japan, Janeira will get from Moraes the enchantment of Orient, that he will promote. Janeira is not the other side of Moraes, as Moraes is not the contradictory of Mendes Pinto, but like Moraes who considered Pinto a pioneer of prot-Orientalism, Moraes was a kind of guide to Janeira in what Orientalism is concerned.
If in early-modern Orientalism, Portuguese discovered a new way of life and a new mentality completely unknown from the West, which was looking for a world supremacy; if Orientalism unveiled an exotic model of a decadent East; Post-Orientalism is trying to explain the old ties between East and West, when a reborn East is competing with West, all together three periods interpreted by Pinto, Moraes and Janeira.