The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan

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CHRISTIAN DAIMYO 365

Christian religion in Japan and a grim first foreboding of the two and a

half centuries of persecutions that were yet to come.

THE CHRISTIAN DAIMYO AND THE EARLY TOKUGAWA

REGIME

There were no further martyrdoms of Christians in Japan under

Hideyoshi: In the year and a half he had left to live, he was preoccu-

pied with inflicting carnage on a far greater scale in Korea. Under his

successor as national hegemon, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the Christian mis-

sion was to enjoy a decade of calm weather and clear sailing. But the

missionaries were sailing in the eye of

storm.

Ieyasu at first took a conciliatory stance toward them, partially at

least in consideration of the efforts of Christian daimyo who played

important roles in the alliance that brought the Tokugawa to power in

the great military conflict of

1600.

To be sure, one of the principals of

the anti-Tokugawa coalition that lost the battle of Sekigahara and,

with it, the contest for Japan was also a Christian daimyo, Dom

Agostinho Konishi Yukinaga. For every Konishi on the side of

Ieyasu's adversaries, however, there was a Kuroda among the parti-

sans of the Tokugawa.

That his coreligionists should have been instrumental in his defeat

might be called poetic justice for Konishi, who had slaughtered large

numbers of his fellow Christians only a decade earlier, in 1589 and

1590,

in putting down a

kokujin

rebellion in the

fief

that Hideyoshi had

assigned him in Higo Province. At least three of the "five Amakusa

barons" (goninshu) who organized this ikki were Christians. But

Konishi's brutal action as well as the uprising of the barons who

wished to defend their regional autonomy should be considered as

nothing more than further proof of the essential nature of the Chris-

tian daimyo: They pursued their own interests first and those of their

religion second. It was an illusion to think that Christianity could be

used to bind them in fraternal union, let alone a political alliance.

Thus Dom Protasio Arima Harunobu first promised to support

Konishi in 1600 but then switched sides in time to help in the reduc-

tion of Dom Agostinho's fortress of

Uto

in Higo, and the Arima family

thereby gained the confirmation of its daimyo status after the Toku-

gawa victory. Dom Simeao Kuroda Yoshitaka also took a stand against

Konishi and was responsible for pacifying northern Kyushu in Iey-

asu's

behalf.

Among those he defeated there was the ever-hapless

Otomo Yoshimune, who had sought

last chance to recover Bungo but

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366 CHRISTIANITY AND THE DAIMYO

had bet on the wrong party in the national conflict. (Supposedly,

Kuroda also managed to reconcile Otomo with Christianity, a task that

surely took considerable powers of persuasion.) It is known that

Yoshitaka's diplomatic skill was of great help to the missionaries, for

whom he interceded with Ieyasu after the campaign's conclusion. No

doubt as important in influencing Ieyasu to take a positive attitude

toward the Christians was, however, the role played at the battle of

Sekigahara by Yoshitaka's son, Dom Damiao Kuroda (Nagamasa,

1568-1623).

His old and intimate political enmity against Ishida Mitsunari

(1560-1600), the moving spirit of the anti-Tokugawa league, made

Kuroda an early and fervent adherent of Ieyasu's cause, to which he

made a critical contribution: It was Dom Damiao who engineered the

defection of the opposing general Kobayakawa Hideaki (1582-1602)

and his army to Ieyasu at a crucial moment in the battle, thereby

sealing the defeat of Ishida, Konishi, and their allies. For this service

Kuroda was rewarded with a great domain at Fukuoka, a fief assessed

at 523,100 koku, where he actively encouraged the Jesuit mission at the

beginning of his tenure. But his affection for the missionaries would

last only as long as his master, Ieyasu, permitted. Unlike in Sengoku,

in Tokugawa Japan the daimyo danced to the shogunate's tune.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the inception of the Tokugawa

regime's anti-Christian measures was intimately connected with the

settlement of

problem of corruption in the Tokugawa house govern-

ment. The man who set off this scandal was none other than Dom

Protasio Arima.

Arima, who sought the addition of certain properties in Hizen to his

fief,

thought he could obtain this goal by the payment of

large

sums of

money to Okamoto Daihachi, an aide of Ieyasu's senior councilor

(rcj/'w) Honda Masazumi (1565-1637). Okamoto took the bribe but

could do no better than forge the required documents. In 1612, this

confidence game was inevitably exposed and Okamoto was executed,

but not before he had had the chance to denounce Arima Harunobu

for plotting the murder of the shogunate's commissioner

(bugyo)

Nagasaki, Hasegawa Sahyoe.

For at least two reasons, this matter was far more serious than the

melodrama that it may appear to be: That a vassal's investiture with

land, a matter at the very pith and core of the feudal relationship,

could be reduced to a business proposition between a subject daimyo

and a relatively low-ranking member of their councils shocked the

heads of the Tokugawa regime, the retired shogun Ieyasu (r. 1603-5)

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CHRISTIAN DAIMYO 367

and his successor Hidetada (1579-1632, r. 1605-23). And the allega-

tion that the magistrate charged with the government of one of the

shogunate's most important direct holdings, the port city of Nagasaki,

had become the object of an assassination plot raised broader ques-

tions regarding the loyalty of the western daimyo.

It did not help

matters that both the principals in this nasty business, Protasio Arima

and Paulo Okamoto, were Christians.

For his part in the Okamoto Daihachi incident, Dom Protasio

Arima was first exiled from his province and then sentenced to death.

But the incident had far broader consequences than the punishment of

this one daimyo. The Tokugawa turned against Christianity with a

vengeance, prohibiting the religion in shogunal domains. Needless to

say, this measure was imitated by their subjects, the domanial rulers.

One of the first who sought to ingratiate themselves with the Toku-

gawa that way was Harunobu's son, Dom Miguel Arima (Naozumi,

1586-1641), who apostatized, was installed by the shogunate as

daimyo in Arima, and immediately began a massive effort to force his

Catholic subjects into abandoning their faith. Not successful enough

in that effort to please his masters, he was in 1614 transferred to

another

fief,

Nobeoka in Hyuga. He left behind him

restive Christian

populace and the seedbed of the Shimabara Rebellion, a large-scale

disturbance that broke out in 1637 and confirmed the Edo bakufu in

its cherished conviction that Christianity was a subversive faith.

The basic rationale for that judgment was laid out on February 1,

1614 (Keicho 18.12.23), f°

the rest of the Tokugawa era in a docu-

ment that had the force of an ancestral law, because it was written at

the behest of the founding father, Ieyasu. This "Statement on the

Expulsion of the Bateren," which was drafted by the Zen monk

Konchiin Suden (1563-1633), first rehearses the standard traditional-

ist dictum, "Japan is the Land of the Gods," and then declares that the

Christians seek to make Japan into "their own possession." Their

religion teaches them to "contravene governmental regulations, tra-

duce Shinto, calumniate the True Law, destroy righteousness, corrupt

goodness" - in short, to subvert the native Japanese, the Buddhist,

and the Confucian foundations of the social order. What else was this

if not

jaho,

the ultimate "pernicious doctrine?"

75 See Shimizu Hirokazu, Kirishilan kinseishi, vol. 109 of Kyoikusha rekishi

shinsko:

Nihonshi

(Tokyo: Kyoikusha, 1981), pp. 98-101.

76 The original text can be found conveniently in Okubo Toshiaki, Kodama Kota, Yanai Kenji,

and Inoue Mitsusada, eds., Shiryo ni yom Nihon no ayumi (kinsei) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa

kobunkan, 1963), pp. 124-5.

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368 CHRISTIANITY AND THE DAIMYO

What undermined society, however, had to be uprooted. Hence,

from this year 1614 onward, there followed a general persecution in

Japan.

THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN SYSTEM OF THE TOKUGAWA

True to the "statement's" title and intent,.the first and foremost mea-

sure of the general persecution was to order the expulsion of the

missionaries from Japan. Many of them defied the bakufu's decree and

stayed in the country in order to try keeping Japanese Christianity

alive. Others, even more courageous, sought to slip into Japan from

abroad, an adventure made all the more difficult by the prior need to

find a sea captain prepared to take the risk involved in flouting the

regime's explicit law. In some parts of Japan, the priests at first found

ample protection from the

populace.

This was most notably the case in

and around Nagasaki. In the seventeenth century's first decades, the

port city had a population of some 25,000, almost all of them Chris-

tian. The neighboring areas of Hizen, too, were thoroughly Christian;

indeed, many of the people of this region had been nourished in the

Christian faith for three generations. Here the faith retained its vigor

the longest, and here the persecution did its worst.

No less than forty-seven missionaries, including twenty-seven Jesu-

its,

refused to leave in

1614,

evaded the shogunate's agents, and contin-

ued their activities underground. Including those who were smuggled

into Japan in trading ships, the number of Jesuits in that country had

by the year 1621 actually increased to thirty-six.

Evidently, their zeal

for the cure of souls did not diminish under persecution: Between

1614 and 1626, the Jesuits alone claimed seventeen thousand adult

baptisms in Japan, and the total number of Japanese converted to

Christianity under the grim conditions of those years must have been

even higher, because members of other religious orders were also ac-

tive in this mission.

Aware of the porous nature of his network of surveillance, Shogun

Hidetada in 1616 ordered the daimyo to intensify their efforts to

eradicate Christianity among the people of their domains. The perse-

cution became more brutal. A sporadic bloodletting among the sus-

pect populace followed, leading up to the so-called Great Martyrdom

of Nagasaki in 1622, when fifty-five Christians were executed. But it

77 On the number of Jesuits in Japan between 1615 and 1644, see the charts set out by Schutte in

Intwductio ad hislonam Societatis Jesu in Japonia, pp. 348-66. On the number of adults

baptized by them under persecution, see ibid., pp. 415-18, 422-3.

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ANTI-CHRISTIAN SYSTEM OF THE TOKUGAWA 369

was not until the reign of the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu

(1604-51,

r. 1623-51), that the bakufu's anti-Christian system was

perfected.

There were two faces to that system. Toward the inside, the bakufu

asserted its supremacy by making the scrutiny of

all

possible traces of

Christianity an instrument of social control throughout the country.

The face directed toward the outside expressed the conviction that the

"Christian peril" could be controlled and even eliminated if Japan

were totally isolated from the sources of that contagion. Within Japan,

all Catholic priests and their believers were to be hunted down, made

to renounce their faith, or executed. Their sympathizers and sometime

providers, the Portuguese traders were to be banned from the country.

In 1639, the Portuguese were expelled, and all contacts with Catho-

lic lands were cut. In the next year, sixty-one members of an embassy

sent by the Portuguese of Macao to seek a remission of that harsh

ruling were beheaded: The world was to know that the shogunate

meant what it said in its decrees. Thereafter, the Dutch were the only

Europeans permitted an existence in Tokugawa Japan. Merchants im-

bued with a purely Protestant ethic, Christians who were enemies of

the Catholics, they accommodated themselves to the shogunate's

whims for the sake of profit and were content with their isolated niche

sakoku,

a country under isolation.

How intimately the two sides of the system instituted by Iemitsu

were associated may be seen from the so-called closed-country direc-

tives

(sakokuret)

issued over the names of his senior councilors and

addressed to the bakufu's commissioners in Nagasaki. Five of these

administrative directives were issued between 1633 and 1639, the year

that ended the Christian Century. They deal in an increasingly rigor-

ous fashion with three topics that the shogunate clearly thought to be

interconnected: restrictions on Japanese travel abroad (after 1635,

such travel was punishable by death), the reduction of the European

presence in Japan, and the merciless persecution of Christianity.

The very first of these directives proved fatal to the Jesuit missionar-

ies in Japan. The document included a paragraph that offered financial

incentives to inform on the whereabouts of Christian priests or their

helpers, and this "infernal design" in short order led to the arrest of

ten Jesuit padres and one

irmdo

in Nagasaki. Another member of the

Society of Jesus was arrested that year in Edo, and his capture reduced

the number of Jesuits in Japan to six. By 1644, they all had been

78 See Asao Naohiro, Sakoku, vol. 17 of Nikon

no rekishi

(Tokyo:

Shogakkan, 1975), pp. 223-30.

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37° CHRISTIANITY AND THE DAIMYO

rounded up, tortured, and killed or forced to apostatize.

There were

no missionaries left, but the shogunate did not relax its watchfulness.

Indeed, it urged redoubled vigilance on its subject daimyo.

A central Office of the Inquisition (Shumon aratame yaku), estab-

lished in Edo in 1640 and destined to remain in the bakufu's table of

organization until 1792, coordinated the effort to purge Japan of

Chris-

tians.

In January 1665 (Kambun

4.11.25),

the

daimyo

were

told

emu-

late the shogunate and appoint inquisitors in their domains. From

Yone-

zawa in the north through Okayama in the west of Honshu and down to

Kagoshima in southernmost Kyushu, han governments instituted of-

fices called "religious commissioner"

{shumon bugyo)

and the

like.

sure,

there was no real reason for this elaborate network's existence.

The fact is that there were practically no Christians left in Japan by

the 1660s. Some three thousand Japanese Christians had died for their

religion, including some six hundred captured in the Omura domain

as late as 1657 and 1658, the last large group to be discovered. The

mass of Japanese Christians had been driven into apostasy. All but a

few, remote pockets of adherence to the "pernicious faith" had been

eliminated, and it is doubtful that those few remaining groups of

believers could properly be called Christian: Deprived of priests, cut

off from the sources of their faith, their memories of its doctrines

fading even as the Tokugawa era progressed, the "crypto-Christians"

(kakure

Kirishitan) of these isolated groups imperceptibly drifted from

Catholicism into a syncretic folk creed tinctured with Buddhism and

Shinto, the native Japanese religion.

And yet the machinery of surveillance did not rest. Indeed, at least

one of the processes that the inquisition set in motion developed a

dynamism that made it something more than a meaningless routine, a

fruitless search for Christians where none was to be found. That pro-

cess was the compilation of "religious inquiry census registers"

(shumon aratame ninbetsu

cho),

which were part of

more comprehen-

sive scheme of social control. As no one was exempted from these

surveys, which classified individuals according to the religious organi-

zation in which they claimed membership, they permitted the regime

to keep tabs on all its subjects, whether or not there had ever been a

Christian branch on their family tree.

79 The shock dealt to the Society of Jesus in Japan by the first

sakoku

directive and its immediate

effects is described vividly in Visitator Andre Palmeiro SJ to General SJ, dated Macao, March

20,

1634, in Schutte,

Invroductio

historiam Societatis

Jesu injaponia, pp. 256-8. Schutte

painstakingly examines the process of the Society's extinction in Japan between 1639 and

1654,

ibid., pp. 266-81.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

ANTI-CHRISTIAN SYSTEM OF THE TOKUGAWA 371

The Buddhist ecclesiastical establishment was made responsible for

verifying that a person was not a Christian through what became

known as the "temple guarantee system"

(terauke

seido).

By the 1630s,

people were being required to produce a certificate of affiliation with a

Buddhist temple as a proof of religious orthodoxy, social acceptability,

and loyalty to the regime. In the Obama domain of Wakasa Province,

for example, the daimyo Sakai Tadakatsu (1587-1662), a senior coun-

cilor of the shogunate, decreed peremptorily: "Everyone must have a

[Buddhist] temple to go to for proof that he or she is not a Christian.

Temple priests will therefore be required to issue guarantees." In

1639,

newcomers who wanted to buy or rent houses in the city of

Osaka were required to produce a temple's attestation before the con-

tract could be signed. By the 1670s, such guarantees were required of

anyone wishing to enter any type of service.

When this system matured at the beginning of the eighteenth cen-

tury, all members of the population were enrolled at birth in the Bud-

dhist temple with which their family was affiliated and were listed as

parishioners in the temple's

shumon aratame ninbetsu

cho.

The temple

was responsible for keeping these registers up-to-date and for forward-

ing

them periodically through the local officials to the domanial lord. So

rigorously enforced was the

terauke

requirement that in many portions

of Japan these documents provide modern demographers with exten-

sive

and reliable population

data.

Surely

this is an

effect that the inquisi-

tors neither intended nor foresaw.

What does the sum total of

the

shogunate's policies amount to? The

Edo bakufu seized control of the country's relations with the outside

world even as it directed a nationwide network of vigilance aimed at

what it regarded as the enemy within - the adherents of Christianity,

the alien religion. In these two closely related realms of national policy,

the shogunate was supreme. With the exception of the So of Tsu-

shima, whose mediate role in relations with Korea was described in

Chapter 6, the daimyo were kept out of foreign affairs. In the internal

sphere, they followed the shogunate's lead and acted as its faithful

agents in tracking down all those infected with the "pernicious faith."

Thus the daimyo, whose patronage had been so avidly sought by the

missionaries of the sixteenth century and whose protection - once

upon a time - had made Christianity flourish over wide regions of

Japan, became in the seventeenth century the efficient instruments of

80 The "temple guarantee system" is discussed compendiously by Okuwa Hitoshi, Jidan no

shiso, vol. 177 of

Kyoikusha rekishi

shinsho:

Nihonshi (Tokyo: Kyoikusha, 1979), pp. 97-127.

On Sakai Sadakatsu's decree, see ibid., p. 102.

372 CHRISTIANITY AND THE DAIMYO

a nationwide inquisition. They worked hard to eliminate from their

domains and from their country what had been, in the case of daimyo

families such as the Arima, Omura, and Kuroda, quite literally the

faith of their fathers.

Just as some of their Sengoku ancestors had exerted themselves in

forcing their populations to become Christian, mercilessly purging the

priests, the symbols, and the practice of the "native" religions, Shinto

and Buddhism, from the territories they ruled, so did the domanial

lords of the Edo period seek to eradicate all traces of the "foreign"

religion from the

han

entrusted to them by the shogunate. They forced

the people subject to them to denounce Christianity, trample its sym-

bols,

and submit themselves to the officially sponsored Buddhist eccle-

siastical structure.

What we see here is an extraordinarily vivid illustration of the extent

to which the daimyo institution itself was transformed in the course of

the Christian Century of Japan, the ninety years or so that passed from

the arrival of Xavier and the first Jesuits to the promulgation of the

final sakoku directives. With the advent of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi

Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the regional hegemonies and petty

baronies of Japan were integrated into a national body politic, and the

daimyo, rulers over parts of that body, were subordinated to its head,

the national hegemon. The Christian mission, which had established

itself in a disjointed realm and had managed to survive the topsy-

turvydom of Sengoku daimyo politics, lost its opportunity to thrive

with the establishment of

strong central regime. The daimyo who

once had sought profit by favoring the foreigners were henceforth

bound by different rules of self-interest, needing to safeguard them-

selves in a world of constraints imposed on them by the Tokugawa

shogunate.

CHAPTER

THOUGHT AND RELIGION: 1550-1700

Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Japanese society un-

derwent fundamental changes that led to the dissolution of the tradi-

tional state structure and the appearance of new forms of state and

social organization. This chapter focuses on the period from the mid-

dle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. It

begins with the final stages of the era of social upheaval and ends a

century after the formation of

unified political regime. During these

150 years a new state structure became firmly established, and the

stable social environment that evolved led to a relatively steady im-

provement in the lives of the people. The factors that brought about

this social change and the precise nature of

its

impact on the structure

of society and the lives of the people are issues about which the opin-

ions of researchers continue to differ. In this chapter, I would like to

touch first on one social phenomenon that is central to the develop-

ment of religion and thought in this period but has not received from

researchers the attention it deserves. I refer to the establishment of the

(house or lineage) as the basic unit of

social

organization among both

the

bushi

(warrior class) and the rest of the population.

What I refer to here as the "house" is centered on the family. But the

house was not identical with a consanguineous family unit; it incorpo-

rated

members unrelated persons such

employees

(hdkdnin),

and it

was possible for an adopted heir who had no blood relationship to the

other members to succeed

its

headship.

Rather than

natural kinship

grouping, the

may be described more accurately as an artificial func-

tional entity that engaged in a familial enterprise or was entitled to a

familial source of income.

The research of sociologists and anthropologists has made clear that

beginning in the seventeenth century, "houses" of this kind consti-

tuted the basic units of Japanese society, and indeed the house has

come to be recognized as a characteristic feature of Japanese society. It

is believed that among the court aristocracy and the upper stratum of

bushi, the house pattern took shape between the eighth to tenth centu-

373

374 THOUGHT AND RELIGION: 155O-I7OO

ries,

but it probably did not become characteristic of the ordinary

population until the fifteenth century, a period of widespread social

upheaval that had a far-reaching impact on thought and religion.

The social structure that became established after the upheavals of

the late medieval period

was

based on

system of functionally differen-

tiated status categories: the bushi, peasant, artisan, and merchant

classes. Within each category the house was the unit that performed

the function associated with that status. In other words, the principle

society organized around family units, each pursuing a hereditary

"house occupation"

(kagyo),

emerged from the disintegration of the

social structure of earlier times.

That the house became a characteristic phenomenon of the com-

moner stratum of society, a category that also encompassed the lower

levels of the bushi class, was closely linked to an improvement in the

standard of living of the ordinary populace. Researchers have found

that from the fourteenth century the agricultural population began to

establish solid ties to a particular piece of land, while merchants,

artisans, and those engaged in various arts shifted from an itinerant

to a more settled life-style. This development, as well as the closely

related rise of cities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

may be regarded as consequences of the spread of the house structure

throughout society.

To be sure, not everyone could establish a "house" of his own. As

late as the seventeenth century many people in the poorer strata of

society were unable to form a house, and not all of those who were

born into a house were able to preserve a place for themselves as

regular members of it. The number of members that a house could

accommodate was limited by the family enterprise and its total in-

come. But even for those excluded from one house there remained

the possibility of affiliating with another as an employee, servant, or

adopted heir. And if one secured the economic wherewithal, one

might eventually form a new house. The existence of various ways of

pursuing a living within the framework of the house structure is

evidence of the economic development that characterized the age.

Bushi enjoyed far fewer opportunities for economic advancement

than did peasants and townsmen. The stipends and fiefs that consti-

tuted the bushi's sources of familial income were rigidly fixed accord-

ing to hereditary criteria that allowed little room for expansion of the

house or its division into separate branches.

To ronin

(unattached samu-

rai) or those second and third sons who faced exclusion from the house