The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan
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WAR
AND
PEACE
295
repatriation
of
a large number
of
Korean captives. More than 4,390
were sent back
in the
fourth
and
fifth months
of
1605, bringing
the
total
to
5,720
returnees.
83
These gestures were meant to elicit the appointment of
a
fully consti-
tuted Korean embassy
to
Ieyasu, who exercised
a
dominant influence
over Japan's foreign affairs even after retiring from
the
shogunate
in
1605.
The court
of
Seoul, however, refused
to
send one until
it had
received an official communication
- a
"document of
state"
(kukso,
J:
kokusho)
-
from the Japanese ruler. But because the dispatch of such a
message would show that the initial effort to resume relations after the
war
was
Japanese
and not
Korean
and
could accordingly
be
inter-
preted
as an
admission
of
defeat
on the
part
of
the Japanese,
it
was
apparent to the So and their diplomatic councilors that none would
be
forthcoming from Tokugawa Ieyasu. Hence they decided
in
1606
to
write the letter themselves
in
the name
of
the "King
of
Japan, Mina-
moto no Ieyasu." Although the Korean court knew this letter
to
be
a
forgery,
it
nonetheless determined
to
send
a
"return embassy"
(hoe-
dapsa,
J:
kaitoshi).
In order
to
keep their first fraud from being exposed,
the
nimble
diplomatists
in the
Tsushima chancery next
had to
deliver
to
their
overlords
a
document that was ostensibly
the
message
of
peace
and
friendship expected by the Tokugawa from the king
of
Korea and was
moreover, free of the nuances of
a
response to a previous communica-
tion. They edited
the
text
of
the document that
the
Korean mission
(purged by this hocus-pocus
of
the stain of
a
mere "return" embassy)
actually bore with
it
and then,
in
a risky sleight of hand as the envoys
were
on
their way
to
their audience
in
Edo Castle, they substituted
their counterfeit for the original.
84
The Tsushima chancery's exertions
proved fruitful,
as the
Korean ambassadors, who were, during
the
summer
of
1607, received not only by Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada
in
Edo but also by the "retired" Ieyasu
in
Sumpu, concluded their busi-
ness smoothly, and returned
to
Korea with 1,240 more former prison-
ers.
The means used to bring about this embassy's success were more
ingenious than honest; that success, however, was
the
indispensable
precondition
if
normal relations were again to be established.
Two years later, when Korea
and
Tsushima concluded
a
formal
agreement, Japanese-Korean relations were restored on the same ba-
83 Naito "Jinshin, Teiyu
no
eki,"
pt. 2,
Chosen gakuho
33
(October 9449
84
The
text
of the
Korean king's message,
the
emendations made
by the
diplomatists
of
Tsu-
shima,
and a
brief discussion
of
this forgery
may be
found
in
Tashiro Kazui, Kakikaerareta
kokusho: Tokugawa,
Chosen
gaiko no butaiura (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1983), pp. 31-9.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
296 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA
sis that had prevailed before Hideyoshi's invasion, indeed, since the
so-called Kakitsu treaty of 1443. To be sure, the terms of the 1609
agreement were the most severe yet: The So were permitted to send no
more than twenty ships to Korea annually, and various other privileges
previously enjoyed by the Japanese were likewise reduced. Pusan was
to be the sole port of entry open to the Japanese; moreover, the Japa-
nese were restricted to a trading factory on the outskirts of that city
and were no longer allowed to travel to the capital of Korea, Seoul, as
they had been permitted in the past. In their walled compound outside
Pusan - called Waegwan (J: Wakan), "Japan House" - the Japanese
traders were confined in just the way their Dutch colleagues in Japan
would be sequestered on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki
harbor after 1641. And yet, notwithstanding all the restrictions im-
posed by the Korean government (which the So by various devices
tried to circumvent), a flourishing trade was maintained between Ja-
pan and Korea by way of Tsushima throughout the Edo period.
In diplomatic relations, Tsushima continued to play a highly inven-
tive role unhindered by higher authority for almost three decades.
Although embassies were actually sent by Korea at the Japanese sho-
gunal government's request, which was transmitted through the
agency of Tsushima, for reasons of prestige it was thought necessary
by the Japanese to disguise the fact that the initiative was theirs and
not Korean. The Tokugawa wanted the gesture of recognition from
the Korean government but did not wish to show deference to the
neighbor country. The Koreans, for their part, were not unwilling to
accommodate the bakufu, but they insisted on adherence to what they
considered the proper forms of converse between nations. The differ-
ences between the expectations of the two parties were papered over
by the original devices of the chancery of Tsushima, which handled
the exchange of documents and the reception of the embassies in
Japan.
An excellent example of
the
daring with which Tsushima's diploma-
tists went about their business is their management of the second offi-
cial Korean embassy to the Edo bakufu, that of 1617. It took at least
four separate missions from the So to Korea before that country's gov-
ernment agreed to appoint this embassy, which was ostensibly sent to
congratulate the Tokugawa on their victory in the Osaka campaigns of
1614-15.
(Because that victory involved the destruction of the Toyo-
tomi family and Hideyoshi's heritage, it was depicted to the Koreans as
an act of retribution exacted on their behalf by the Tokugawa.) The
insistent emissary of the
So,
Tachibana Toshimasa,
finally
succeeded in
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
WAR AND PEACE 297
swaying the Koreans when he presented them with a forged document
purportedly sent by Shogun Hidetada. When the Korean "return em-
bassy" bore with it merely a response to that forged communication
instead of the felicitations commissioned by the Tokugawa, the con-
gratulatory message expected at the shogunal court had to be fabricated
in Tsushima. When the bakufu's diplomatic experts avoided using the
title "King of Japan"
(Nihon kokuo)
in the reply that this embassy
was
to
take back to Seoul and identified Shogun Hidetada only by the country
he ruled, the "State of Japan"
(Nihonkoku),
the counterfeiters of Tsu-
shima falsified this document, too, by adding the character for the
missing syllable.
85
Although dissimulation is not unknown in the con-
duct of foreign affairs, this was a diplomacy based on outright forgery.
What caused the diplomatists of Tsushima so much toil? The Ko-
rean court expected the title "King" to be used in official correspon-
dence with Japan, accepting it as the proper appellation of the ruler of
a country within the East Asian international order dominated by
China. The Edo bakufu (unlike its Muromachi predecessor) shunned
the use of that title for the same reason, rejecting it as redolent of the
language of enfeoffment used by Chinese emperors and an admission
of subordinate status in the Sinocentric world system. Instead of com-
municating with the kings of Korea as with their peers - that is, as
fellow vassals of China - the Tokugawa wanted to place themselves a
level above them. Indeed, the Japanese rulers sought a supreme desig-
nation within an order of their own. Tsushima, the mediator, was
caught in the middle of the conflicting interpretations of sovereignty.
On the occasion of the third official Korean embassy, which was
sent in 1624 to congratulate Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu
(1604-51,
r.
1623-51) on his accession, the diplomatists of Tsushima once again
had to counterfeit a shogunal message to make it conform with Korean
expectations: They adjusted the title "Sovereign of Japan" (Nihon
kokushu),
which was selected this time by the bakufu's secretariat, to
the familiar "King of Japan"
(Nihon
kokuo).
This was
a
serious manipu-
lation, even if it required nothing more than the reduction of one of
the characters in the compound
kokushu
by a single pen stroke. Could
the bakufu have been completely unaware of such remarkable creative-
ness on the part of its island subjects? That is not very likely. It is more
probable that for a time, the shogunate chose to turn a blind eye to the
unorthodox activities of the editors of state papers in the service of
85 Tanaka Takeo, "Sakoku seiritsuki Nitcho kankei no seikaku," Chosen gakuho 34 (January
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
298 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA
Tsushima, for they did, after all, smooth the relationship with Korea.
At length, however, the manipulation of documents threatened to get
out of hand and the bakufu had to crack down. In 1635, it took the
opportunity of an internal power struggle on Tsushima to purge the
forgers' group and install guardians against further diplomatic mal-
practice in the domain of
the
So.
The bakufu intervened when the history of forgeries became the
central issue in a suit that pitted the daimyo of Tsushima, So Yoshinari
(1604-57), against his vassal and accuser, Yanagawa Shigeoki
(1603-
84),
one of the most influential samurai of the Tsushima domain, who
also had excellent connections at the court of the Tokugawa in Edo.
Shigeoki, who aimed at nothing less than Yoshinari's disenfeoffment
and the displacement of the So from Tsushima, thought he could
buttress his assertion that the daimyo was incompetent by denouncing
the So family for decades of falsification of documents of
state,
forgery
of shogunal seals, and gross malfeasance in the conduct of relations
with Korea. Because Shigeoki had played a role almost surpassing that
of the daimyo in Korean affairs - as had his father Toshinaga (d. 1613)
and grandfather Shigenobu (d. 1605) before him - it could be as-
sumed that he did, indeed, have intimate knowledge of such matters.
But he fell into his own trap.
Yoshinari produced a number of witnesses who incriminated the
Yanagawa in the planning, fostering, and actual execution of the forger-
ies,
and Shigeoki was unable to discredit them. His Edo connections
did not help him. On Kan'ei 12
(1635).3.11,
after an investigation that
dragged on for almost two years, he was summoned before Shogun
Iemitsu, found guilty, and condemned to exile in a northern province.
Some underlings of both the principals in the suit were sentenced to
death. So Yoshinari, however, was vindicated and permitted to retain
his position as daimyo of Tsushima.
86
No doubt the reason for exoner-
ating him and also for sparing Yanagawa Shigeoki's life was that the
bakufu wished to avoid a scandal that would disturb the Koreans. The
last thing the bakufu wanted was draw attention to the fraud that had
for years been perpetrated in its name. Instead, it sought above all to
preserve the appearance that propriety and normalcy ruled at least the
Japanese side of Japanese-Korean relations.
The conduct of those relations on behalf of the bakufu was, how-
ever, much more circumscribed after this so-called Yanagawa incident.
What had been until then
a
regionally managed concern was put under
86 Tashiro, Kakikaerareta
kokusho,
pp. 133-60.
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WAR AND PEACE 299
the supervision of the national government's emissaries. To be sure,
the So were left in place, and they remained the key intermediaries
between Japan and Korea until the end of the Edo period. But they
were no longer in full charge.
In the seventh month of 1635 - a year of many institutional
innovations - the bakufu started the practice of sending priests from
the Five Great Zen Monasteries of Kyoto (Kyoto
gosan,
a traditional
center of Chinese learning and source of expertise on correspondence
in Chinese, the language of diplomacy in East Asia) to Tsushima,
where they would keep a sharp eye on the management of official
contacts with Korea. Because their residence was the cloister called
Iteian and because they served on the basis of one to three years'
rotation, this arrangement, which lasted until the fall of the sho-
gunate, is called the Iteian rotational supervisory system (Iteian
rinbansei).
In the same year, a question that had long disturbed the
diplomatists of both countries was resolved when the bakufu suc-
ceeded in establishing "Sovereign Lord of Japan"
(Nihonkoku
taikun)
as the form of address to be used in official communications from
Korea.
87
Taikun is the style that the Tokugawa shoguns bore thence-
forth (with a brief interruption early in the eighteenth century) in
their capacity as sovereigns of a nation engaged in intercourse with
other nations. The English word "tycoon" derives from it.
The Japan-centered "international order" of
the
Tokugawa
regime
That regularity had at length been achieved in the bakufu's foreign
relations was demonstrated in 1636, when the Korean court for the
first time appointed not a "return embassy" but a "diplomatic mis-
sion"
(fongsinsa;
J:
tsushinshi)
to Japan. This large Korean embassy,
which traveled to Edo for an audience with Shogun Iemitsu and then
to Nikko to pay its respects at the shrine of the deified Ieyasu, was
followed in 1643 by one sent to offer congratulations on the birth of
Iemitsu's heir Ietsuna (1641-80; r. 1651-80) and then between 1655
and 1811 by seven others dispatched to celebrate accessions to the
shogunate. For the entire Edo period, that makes a total of twelve
official embassies from Korea, the only foreign country with which the
Tokugawa regime maintained diplomatic relations
(tsushin,
as opposed
to commerce,
tsiisho)
until the nineteenth century.
87 See Hayashi Akira, comp.,
Tsuko
ichiran,
vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, 1912), 28:336-7
and 30:365; and Kondo Morishige, comp., Gaiban
tsusho,
no. I, p. 11, in Kondo Keizo, ed.,
Kaitei
shiseki
shuran,
vol. 21 (Tokyo: Kondo kappansho, 1901).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
300 JAPAN'S RELATIONS WITH CHINA AND KOREA
Commercial relations with the outside world were also extremely
limited. Under the prohibition of foreign voyages
{kaigai toko
kinshi
rei;
sometimes called kaikin in reference to the Ming Chinese model,
hai-chiri)
issued by the bakufu in 1635, Japanese were forbidden on
pain of death to travel abroad. Apart from the sanctioned commerce
carried on by Tsushima through the Waegwan in Pusan, this measure
left Japanese foreign trade in the hands of
a
few rigorously controlled
groups of foreign traders resident in Japan. After the exclusion of the
Portuguese in 1639, the Dutch were the only Westerners permitted to
enter the country. Alongside them, there existed in Nagasaki
a
Chinese
trading community that was, however, not officially countenanced by
the Chinese imperial government. Relations with China were not rees-
tablished during the Edo period, although there is some evidence of
interest on Ieyasu's part in restoring them. Evidently, the Tokugawa
shoguns were unwilling
to
demean themselves in the way the Ashikaga
had, by submitting themselves to China's standards and entering into
vassalage in order to enjoy the benefits of
a
tributary relationship with
the "Central Country."
Between 1634 and 1806, the kingdom of Ryukyu also sent fifteen
embassies to the Tokugawa shoguns, but this could scarcely be called a
foreign country insofar as Japan was concerned. Ryukyu was not an
independent or even an autonomous state: It had been conquered in
1609 by the Shimazu and was no more than a dependency of the
daimyo of Kagoshima, whom the bakufu enfeoffed with Ryukyu just
as it did with Satsuma and Osumi. This colony, which was intensively
exploited by the Shimazu, was permitted to call itself a "kingdom,"
that is, to maintain a tributary relationship with China, merely as a
device that would give it continued trading access to that country. To
be sure, in 1636 the bakufu ordered the Shimazu to cease referring to
their puppet on the islands as a "king" and to call him "provincial
governor"
(kokushi)
in future communications.
The colorful processions of the exotically garbed envoys from Korea
and Ryukyu may have impressed the populace along their route of
progress to Edo with the notion that the bakufu enjoyed great author-
ity among foreign nations. In actuality, however, they only masked the
fact that after the 1630s Japan had a government that barely pursued
foreign relations at all. The sham played with Ryukyu's enforced
participation and the facsimile of a formal relationship in which Korea
acquiesced sufficed to create for the bakufu its own international or-
der, in which Japan ranked first, even if it had to be
prima
in vacua.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CHAPTER
7
CHRISTIANITY
AND THE
DAIMYO
The Tokugawa shogunate's self-serving conceit
of a
Japan-centered
"international order," described
in the
conclusion
of
Chapter
6,
could
handily comprehend Ryukyu, Korea,
and
even the mercantile Dutch,
because these foreign entities either acquiesced
to
being
fit or had no
power
to
resist being forced into
the
Japanese derivative
of
the tradi-
tional East Asian model
of
international relations. Another group
of
foreigners posed
a
more difficult problem:
The
model
of
universal
truth introduced
by
Roman Catholic Europeans
who
came
to
Japan
with
a
missionary purpose could
not be so
easily accommodated
by a
regime intent
on
refashioning Japanese society
in a
mold
of
its
own.
Hence
the
Catholics' mission
to
Japan
was
ultimately condemned
as
subversive
to
the social order
of
the
Tokugawa,
and
they were expelled
as
an
alien element from
the
Japanese body politic.
At first, however,
the
Catholic Europeans were welcomed.
At the
time
of
their arrival, Japan
was a
splintered realm composed
of the
autonomous domains
of
many warring daimyo.
For
reasons that will
be discussed
in
this chapter, some
of
those daimyo protected
the for-
eigners, sought
out
their commerce,
and
even embraced
the
religion
that
the
Europeans brought with them.
The
fragmented state
of a
nation that truly merited the label
sengoku,
a
"country
at
war," made
it
possible
for the
Christian missionaries
to
disseminate their faith
on a
domanial
and
even regional basis.
Because those missionaries' activity
in
Japan lasted
for
roughly
a
hundred years, from
the
1540s through
the
1630s, Western historians
have developed the practice of calling this Japan's "Christian Century."
To
be
sure, the last half
of
that "Christian" period saw
the
paradoxical
conditions that
had
once permitted
the
religion
an
entry into Japan
eliminated and almost all traces of Christianity erased.
As
Japan passed
from
a
state
of
extreme political dissolution
and
social upheaval
to a
new
era of
unity
and
peace,
it
also turned inward
and
away from
the
relative cosmopolitanism
of the
Christian Century's first
half.
From
sengoku,
Japan was transformed into
sakoku,
a
"closed country."
301
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3O2 CHRISTIANITY AND THE DAIMYO
For the daimyo, the establishment of a new order meant a reduc-
tion to fealty under the Tokugawa shogunate. For the Christian mis-
sionaries and their converts, it meant a bitter persecution and the
nearly total eradication of their religion in Japan. For the country at
large, it was the beginning of more than two centuries of national
seclusion.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS
The first contact between Japan and Europe, as far as can be deter-
mined, occurred in 1543, when two or three Portuguese traders ar-
rived on board a Chinese junk in Tanegashima, the oblong island that
forms a pendant to the southernmost tip of Kyushu at the entrance to
Kagoshima Bay.
1
Scarcely a household word before that date, the
island's name was destined to become famous throughout Japan on
account of a Western product brought on this voyage, the harquebus.
Tanegashima became synonymous with firearms when this weapon -
introduced by those first Portuguese, imitated, improved, and pro-
duced in numbers by Japanese armorers, and employed in battle by
daimyo fighting over a dismembered body politic - began to trans-
form the methods of warfare in the "country at war."
The Portuguese
traders'
contribution of
a
new,
modern instrument
of
mayhem to Japan's well-stocked but still medieval and, by European
standards, obsolescent arsenal
was
one of those remarkable accidents of
history that have a revolutionary effect. In the hands of the two or three
warlords who had both the tactical acumen and the economic where-
withal to employ firearms massively, guns that evolved from the
Tanegashima prototype would, later in the sixteenth century, become
the indispensable tools of Japan's military reunification.
But the undoubted historical significance of their initial import not-
withstanding, the traders were not the most important European ac-
tors in this first, dramatic encounter between Japan and the West.
Their interest in Japan was exclusively material, and their activities
there were, by and large, confined to a few spots on the country's
periphery. For better or for worse, they had neither the inclination nor
the capacity to play the parts of Europe's cultural emissaries to Japan
1 The date of the Portuguese traders' arrival in Tanegashima is given as Tembun [12].8.25
(September 23, 1543), and Wang Chih, alias Wu-feng, is identified as their interpreter, in the
brief essay Teppoki (1607) by Nampo Bunji, a Zen priest and diplomatist in the employ of the
Shimazu daimyo of Kagoshima. The text is most conveniently found in Okamoto Yoshitomo,
Juroku seiki Nichio kdlsushi no
kenkyu
(Tokyo: Kobunso, 1936), pp. 187-9.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE ARRIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS 303
or the disseminators of knowledge about Japanese civilization in Eu-
rope.
Rather, those roles were to be filled by men with a definite
cultural purpose and
a
special spiritual
calling,
the Christian missionar-
ies who followed the merchants to Japan. The first of that dedicated
and ultimately tragic group were three Jesuits led by the future saint,
Francis Xavier, who were brought to Kagoshima in 1549 as passengers
on another Chinese junk.
Both the merchants and the missionaries were carried to Japan in
the backwash of the wako tide. Indeed, in view of what has been
observed in Chapter 6 regarding the character of the
bahan
trade and
the role played by the Portuguese in its principal base of the 1540s,
Shuang-hsii-kang or Liampoo, it was perhaps unavoidable that the
first Europeans to visit Japan should have come in the company of
Chinese illicit traders. For all that, it is rather startling to recognize in
the "Confucian scholar" called Wu-feng, the fellow traveler who acted
as an interpreter for the first Portuguese in Tanegashima, none other
but the most notorious of all the wako captains, Wang Chih, sailing
under a nom de plume. Another noted interpreter who voyaged under
"tattered sails" was Yajiro, the Kagoshima samurai who displayed
natural qualities of such apparent excellence that Xavier was led to
believe in the likely prospect of
a
rich harvest awaiting Christian mis-
sionaries in Japan: "For if all the Japanese are as eager to learn as
[Yajiro],
then it seems to me that, in all the lands that have been
discovered, they are the people that is the thirstiest for knowledge."
Yajiro was a wako, if not when Xavier first met him in December 1547
in the Portuguese colony of Malacca as a fugitive from justice in his
homeland, then certainly a few years later at the end of his days: He
died on a pirate raid to China.
2
Needless to say, Xavier was conveyed
from Malacca to Japan on the ship of yet another wako, "a pagan
Chinese pirate" named Avan.
3
2 On Yajiro's intellectual curiosity and the conclusions Xavier drew from it regarding the Japa-
nese, see Xavier to Ignatius Loyola and other Jesuits, dated Cochin, January 20, 1548, in
Georg Schurhammer SJ and Josef Wicki SJ, eds., Epistolae S.
Francisci
Xaverii aliaque eius
scripta, vol. I,
Monumenta
Historica Societatis lesu, vol. 67 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Soc.
Iesu,
1944), no. 59, pp. 391-2. On Yajiro's end, see Padre Luis Frois SJ, Historia dejapam,
pt. i, chap. 6, ed. Josef Wicki SJ, vol.
1
(Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, 1976), p. 46;
Matsuda Kiichi and Kawasaki Momota, trans.,
Furoisu
Nihonshi, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Chuo koron-
sha, 1978), p. 72.
3 Frois, Historia, pt. I, chap. 1, Wicki, vol. I, p. 22; Matsuda and Kawasaki, trans.,
Furoisu
Nihonshi, vol. 6, p. 29. On Av£n, also see Xavier to Dom Pedro da Silva, dated Cangoxima,
November 5, 1549, Epistolae, vol. 2,
Monumenta,
vol. 68 (1945), no. 94, p. 230; and Xavier to
various Jesuits in Goa, dated Malacca, June [20] and 22, 1549, ibid., no. 85, p. 124. Cf. Josef
Wicki SJ, "Das neuentdeckte Xaveriusleben des P. Francisco P6rez S.I. (1579)," Archivum
Historicum
Societatis Iesu 34.67 (January-June 1965): 63-4.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
304 CHRISTIANITY AND THE DAIMYO
As could be expected from these associations, the list of place names
mentioned in the reports of the earliest Portuguese mariners who vis-
ited Japan overlaps considerably with the Japanese toponymy found in
Ch'ou-hai fu-pien and other Chinese sources on the home grounds of
the wako. From those reports, it is clear that the Portuguese traders
were informed about routes beyond Kyushu, both through the Inland
Sea and around the southeastern coast of Shikoku. But they never
sailed to Sakai or any of the other harbors of the Kinai region in
Honshu. Instead, they confined themselves to Kyushu ports. From
1550 to 1562, they mainly used Hirado, the ancient lair of the
Matsuura-to, although on occasion they called at Kagoshima and
Yamagawa in Satsuma and such places as Hiji and Funai in Bungo.
After 1564, they abandoned Hirado for other ports in Hizen. The
most notable of those was Nagasaki, which became the recognized
-terminus of their trade with Japan from 1571 onward. Apart from the
navigational and commercial, these changes had political and, indeed,
also religious reasons.
The missionaries no less than the merchants sought a safe harbor, a
place free of storms where they could anchor their enterprise in the hope
that it would prosper under official protection. That type of security
was not easy to find in Kyushu or, indeed, anywhere in Japan at the
middle of the sixteenth century. The atrophy of Japan's central govern-
ing organism, the Ashikaga shogunate, had by that time reached an
advanced stage. The malady of the central system of authority affected
the political health of the entire country. The provinces were swept by
disorder: Regional hegemonies emerged, only to disappear under what
seemed to be the constant condition of
war.
Where, then, would their
quest lead the foreigners through Sengoku's tempest?
THE CONDITION OF KYUSHU
When the first Portuguese and Jesuits arrived in Japan, Kyushu in
particular was an arena of contention among many great or lesser
warlords. No decision had yet been reached in that struggle, and the
island would not be pacified until the great unifier Toyotomi Hide-
yoshi (i537?-98) invaded and conquered it in 1587. Hence missionar-
ies and merchants alike repeatedly had to change their bases of opera-
tion in their search for a place of refuge and patronage. Eventually,
they learned to utilize the political confusion that was endemic in
Sengoku Japan to their own advantage.
Southern Kyushu was in turmoil because of
the
long-lasting internal
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