Bungo: The Ōtomo Domain and Its Christians

Portuguese merchants were living in Bungo (豊後) before any missionary arrived.¹One of them, Diogo Vaz de Aragão, the owner of a junk, stayed about five years, and these traders were probably the authors of the 1549 letters to Xavier (ザビエル) about Japan.¹In 1551 the Jesuit came to the domain himself, and the Portuguese merchants there treated him with great respect and kindness.¹¹When their ship fired a salute in his honour, the ruler at Funai (府内), the capital, feared the Portuguese were under attack by corsairs and sent help, then learned that the guns were for a single priest.¹²

In the capital a learned bonze named Saqay Gyran professed faith in Christ before a large audience after disputing in public with the missionary.¹³Xavier also denounced the killing of infants and abortion among poor women, and obtained a very severe edict from the king against them.¹⁴When the bonzes later shut their temples, the Portuguese withdrew to their ship, but the priest would not flee, and the captain, Duarte da Gama, chose to stay rather than leave him.¹⁵

From 1556 to 1562, Bungo was the base of operations of the Jesuit mission in Japan.²By then Christian villages had grown up around Funai, each with a lay leader, and more than 700 people were baptized in the capital in Lent 1555.¹⁶At Kutami (朽網), the Jesuits Gago and Fernández, with Paulo, baptized 160 people in eight to ten days, 60 of them from one household.¹⁷In January 1557 the Christians there refused their lord's oath written in blood before an idol, swearing "only by God who made heaven and earth" (translated).¹⁸The lord respected them for it.¹⁸

During Lent 1557, with the daimyō away at Usuki (臼杵) castle, bonzes stirred up talk of killing and arson, and he sent word that the Jesuits must defend themselves, since he could not protect them.¹⁹That Holy Week brought the first Japanese communions in the capital: about thirty Japanese men and women received the Eucharist on Holy Thursday, some after asking for two or three years.²⁰For the Easter feast the mission bought a cow and served it with rice to 400 Christians or more, and the leftovers went to the poor.²¹²²In 1562 Almeida (アルメイダ) called the Church of Bungo the greatest in Japan and wrote that no night passed without scourging in the church.²³

Ōtomo Sōrin (大友宗麟), the daimyō whom the missionaries called Dom Francesco, set up a college at Funai and a novitiate at Usuki.³⁴With Valignano (ヴァリニャーノ) he also founded two seminaries in the domain, each for forty noble boys, which later grew to a hundred.²⁴

A noble young page named Stephen, a Christian of only a few months, refused an order from the princess to fetch idol relics from a monastery, although disobeying a master was a capital offence.²⁵When troops were sent against the Fathers, Christians came to Usuki from up to ninety miles away, ready to die for the faith.²⁶²⁷Francisco Cabral (カブラル) told armed nobles that God's cause was not defended by arms, but they answered that they would die defending the altars.²⁸At night noble ladies came on foot in festive dress to the church to die, and one broke through a wall to slip away from her parents.²⁹Moved by such courage, many pagans asked to be counted among the martyrs, and 23 were baptized first.³⁰In the end the attack never came.²⁶

In a heavy defeat in Hyūga (日向), the Bungo army was massacred and the whole province was lost.³¹Many people blamed the Jesuits, and in council the lord Cicacata proposed that the Fathers at Usuki and Funai be killed, until his rival Cicafiro defeated the plan.³²³³By 1578 to 1579 the domain had shrunk to a single province.³⁴

Yet in 1578, in Bungo alone, 8,000 people were won to the Church in five months.³⁵In 1579 Luís Fróis (フロイス) baptized Leon, governor of Nocen, who removed the temples from his lands and built a church; within a year the district had nearly 3,500 Christians.³⁶In 1582 Cabral reported that Buddhist monasteries were being destroyed and their revenues given to soldiers, and that a principal monastery of Funai had been burned to the ground.³⁷In 1584 there were 2,779 baptisms, with 35 Jesuits at the college, the novitiate and two residences.³⁸By 1585 nearly eighty crosses stood in the domain, often lacquered with gilded parts.³⁹

In the winter of 1586 to 1587 the army of Satsuma (薩摩) invaded Bungo and burned Usuki with its church and novitiate.⁵⁶The aged Sōrin fled to an island fortress, and two boats carried 33 Jesuits and 28 Japanese pupils to Shimonoseki (下関).⁶Thirteen Jesuits stayed behind and gathered the surviving Christians into five places.⁴⁰Bonzes marching with the invaders proclaimed a holy war and burned ten or twelve churches in a small area.⁴¹

Towns were sacked, and women and children were led away into slavery two and three thousand at a time.⁴²Fróis wrote: "three thousand souls were taken away only from the lands of Usuqui among women and children."⁴³Many captives were carried to Nagasaki (長崎) and sold to the Portuguese.⁴³In that bitter winter, Christian noblewomen and girls fled into the mountains with crucifixes and holy images, and many died of cold and hunger rather than fall into the soldiers' hands.⁴¹After the war a contagious fever killed 7,000 people in the domain, among them Sōrin himself.⁴The Jesuits had baptized 12,000 people there in the year before the invasion, and only scattered remnants were left.⁴⁴

Sōrin's heir, Ōtomo Yoshimune (大友義統), was baptized Constantine but abandoned the faith soon after the decree issued by Hideyoshi (秀吉) in 1587.⁷⁸⁹Of all the Christian lands, only Bungo largely collapsed in the persecution that followed.⁴⁵The catechists Jean Nakama of Takata (高田) and Joachim Nimura were killed at Funai and Notsu (野津) by the young lord's order.⁴⁶Persecuted Christians migrated from the domain to Nagato (長門).⁴⁷

Others of the ruling house stood firm.⁴⁸Threatened with exile, the young lord's sister replied that she would go, begging at doors for Christ.⁴⁹His stepmother Giulia, his cousin Paul with 8,000 vassals, and Lione, former lord of Notsu, were among the confessors.⁴⁸When the domain was confiscated in 1593, they and about a hundred others had to beg for bread.⁵⁰War, famine and persecution cost Bungo some 40,000 Christians through apostasy and death between 1590 and 1592.⁵¹

In 1597 the Christians of Takata, the largest church in the domain, disguised their church as a house and wrote to the Jesuits at Nagasaki that they would die rather than offend God.⁵²⁵³At Notsu, Lione refused to apostatize, and he and all the Christians made crosses with their own hands, ready to be crucified.⁵²The governor let them be, because they were poor farmers he needed to work the land.⁵⁴

By 1621 the once famous kingdom of Bungo was divided into several states, each with its own lord, and all of them persecuted Christians.¹⁰The missionary Navarro spent twenty very hard years sustaining its scattered Christians and was driven out several times.⁵⁵At Cavanobori, a poor village, Christians hid him in an underground cave reached by a ladder down a shaft.⁵⁶

In April 1614 seven Christians, husbands, wives and children, were stripped and paraded for nearly a league.⁵⁷On April 6, 1614, a Christian named Benedict died confessing the faith, and his wife and children were banished.⁵⁸On July 13, 1614, at Kibara (also given as Kibata), Michael Chubyoe and his brother Linus were burned alive, and Michael's wife Maxentia, a noblewoman aged 39, was beheaded.⁵⁹⁶⁰⁶¹Their parents, Clement and Mancia, were also counted among the confessors of that place.⁶²The father had once signed a declaration of apostasy for himself and his sons, but the sons protested their faith and he repented.⁶³

About the same time, a Christian gentleman named Titus was ordered by his lord to give up the faith.⁶⁴The lord took away his children and his wife one by one, telling the father each time that the one taken had been killed, until the father came to the palace to die himself.⁶⁴⁶⁵Accounts differ on how the story ended.⁶⁵⁶⁶His constancy became the Japanese subject most often staged in German college plays.⁹

Peter Torosaku was beheaded on March 6, 1618.⁶⁷On November 27, 1619, Baldassare Fazaiemon was beheaded at Hiji (日出), where he lived in exile for the faith.⁶⁸In 1620 the harshest persecutor was Nakagawa Naizen, lord of Oka (岡) at Takeda (竹田).⁶⁹On May 28, 1624, Leo Misaki Kinemon of Hiji and three of his children were drowned.⁷⁰That September, Organtino Tanshu and his wife Lucia were burned alive.⁷⁰⁷¹Executions went on: in 1637 and 1638 Christians from Kazuraki and from villages near Funai were beheaded, and from 1661 to 1671 Christians from the province were beheaded at Nagasaki.⁷²⁷³