The Dutch and the Kirishitan ban

For more than two centuries after 1641, the only Europeans allowed in Japan lived on a small fan-shaped island in Nagasaki harbour. There were, the Heibonsha encyclopedia says, nine to twelve of them at a time: the chief, his deputy, a storekeeper, a clerk, a surgeon, a cook, a carpenter and a smith. They could not leave Dejima without permission.¹They were Dutch, and they were Protestants.

For Japan's Catholics the Dutch are an uncomfortable part of the story. They came as rivals of Portugal and Spain, they encouraged the shogunate's fear of the Catholic powers, and on one notorious occasion their guns fired on Christians at Hara Castle. But Dejima was also the window through which Japan went on looking at Europe, and it was through that window, two centuries later, that the first Catholic priests could see the country again. This page follows the Dutch through the story of the ban, honestly, and from the side of the Church.

The first Dutch ship to reach Japan came by accident. The Liefde, a 300-ton ship of a Rotterdam company that had sailed for the East in 1598, crossed the Pacific by the Strait of Magellan and was wrecked on the coast of Bungo in 1600; only about twenty of its crew of 110 survived.²The ship had first been called the Erasmus, and its carved stern figure of the humanist Erasmus still survives, kept for centuries in a temple in Sano, in Shimotsuke, as a figure called Kateki-sama.²Its pilot was the Englishman William Adams, and Adams and the Dutchman Jan Joosten entered the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu.²The Heibonsha encyclopedia notes that through Adams and others Ieyasu gained a new knowledge of the world, and Adams joined the circle of advisers around him at Sunpu.³

In 1609 the Dutch East India Company received Ieyasu's licence to trade and opened a trading post at Hirado, with Jacques Specx as its first chief; Nipponica says seventy-two houses were cleared to build it, at the eastern end of Hirado harbour, where the site is now a national historic site.¹Hirado was the port where Portuguese ships had once called and where Francis Xavier had baptised about a hundred people in 1550; now it was the Protestants' harbour.¹⁵The English opened one there too, and the Dutch, Britannica's dictionary says, competed with them and drove them out.¹

The Dutch and English had every reason to warn the shogun against the Portuguese and the Spaniards, who were both their commercial rivals and their enemies at war in Europe. Pagès, the French Catholic historian of the persecution, lists the reasons he says were whispered to Ieyasu before the ban of 1614: that the Christians honoured as martyrs men put to death by the law; that converts gave their goods and their lives for foreign masters; and that the priests were the forerunners of conquest, as the Dutch and English, through William Adams, kept telling him.⁴This is Pagès's reading, written from the Catholic side; Japanese historians weigh Ieyasu's motives differently, and our page on the 1614 ban sets out the views.⁴³The edict came at the end of 1613, and in 1614 the missionaries were exiled.⁴

After 1614 the missionaries who tried to return came in secret, often on Japanese ships from Manila. In 1620 the English and the Dutch seized a Japanese trading ship captained by Hirayama Jōchin and found two missionaries hidden aboard, the Augustinian Pedro de Zúñiga and the Dominican Luis Flores.⁵In the summer of 1622 Hirayama and the two priests were burned and the crew beheaded, and the historian Murai Sanae sees in this affair the spark of the great persecution that followed: on 10 September 1622, fifty-five Christians died at Nishizaka in the Great Martyrdom of Genna.⁵The Church counts Zúñiga, Flores and Hirayama among its martyrs; the Dutch who took them are remembered for their part in it.

The most painful episode came at the end of the Shimabara rising. In 1637 the peasants of Shimabara and Amakusa, many of them Christians, rose against crushing taxes and persecution and held the old castle of Hara.⁶After two failed assaults, in the second of which the commander Itakura Shigemasa was shot dead on 14 February 1638, his successor Matsudaira Nobutsuna decided to starve the castle out.⁶

The head of the Dutch factory at Hirado, Nicolaes Koeckebacker, was required to bring his ship De Ryp to bombard the castle from the sea. It fired from late February until 12 March 1638, when the Dutch were thanked and dismissed.⁶Kōdansha's biographical dictionary says Koeckebacker directed the bombardment and supplied cannon and powder, and so won the shogunate's trust; his war diary was later translated into Japanese under the title Tenba ibun.⁷Pagès, a Catholic writer, compares Koeckebacker to Pilate.⁶Koeckebacker, born in Delft in 1597, had been chief at Hirado since 1633 and had already accepted the shogunate's silk-price rules and the limits it set on the sailing dates of Dutch ships.⁷The final assault on Hara came on 11 and 12 April 1638. Murdoch says 37,000 people were put to death; Pagès says thirty-five or thirty-seven thousand, "not counting the women and children".⁶Excavations since 1992 have found crosses, medals and rosary beads among the ruins, which the city calls direct evidence of the faith of those who held the castle.⁶

In 1639 the shogunate forbade the Portuguese ships, on the ground that they kept bringing priests to Japan.⁸The Dutch stayed. Even they were treated warily: in 1640, Heibonsha records, the shogunate used the Western year written on the gable of their new warehouse at Hirado as a pretext to order it pulled down, and in 1641 ordered the whole factory moved to Dejima, empty since the Portuguese had gone.¹From then until the treaty of 1855, the Dutch handled all Japan's trade with Europe.¹

The price of staying was cooperation. From 1641, Heibonsha says, the shogunate required the Dutch chief to submit each year a report of foreign news, the Oranda fūsetsugaki; the Yamakawa dictionary adds that it began after the Portuguese ban as a way to watch the movements of Spain and Portugal in Asia, and Ōbunsha that it began as a measure against Christianity.⁹Some 318 of these reports survive, Nipponica says, in Japanese and Dutch, from 1641 to 1857; they were translated by the Dutch interpreters and passed to the shogunate through the Nagasaki magistrate, and Mypedia notes that news unfavourable to the Dutch was left out.⁹The Dutch traded, and told Edo where the Catholic ships were. The same reports, later widened to cover the whole world, became the shogunate's chief source of knowledge of Europe, and after the Opium War a more detailed "special report" was added from 1842.⁹

They also watched the persecution, and their records are now part of its history. The Dutch chief François Caron wrote down on 2 November 1639 what an interpreter brought back from Edo about the death of the Jesuit Petro Kasui Kibe, who died in the pit without giving up his faith: dry sticks, Caron heard, were laid on his bare belly and slowly set alight while he was questioned. How Kibe was finally killed is Disputed, and Caron's report is second-hand, but it is one of the few accounts we have.¹⁰A Dutch diary of 1643 is one of the sources for how long the Jesuit Cristóvão Ferreira was kept in the pit before he gave way: Jesuit reports say five hours, the Dutch diary four days, and the question is Disputed.¹¹When the Italian priest Giovanni Battista Sidotti landed in 1708, he was questioned at Nagasaki through interpreters and men of the Dutch company, who had no idea what to make of him; in Edo the scholar Arai Hakuseki spread a Dutch-printed world map before him and asked him where Rome was.¹²

At the end of the ban the Dutch played a different part. The fumie, the treading on images of Christ and Mary that every Nagasaki household had to perform each year, ended in Nagasaki with the New Year of 1857, after the Dutch chief Jan Hendrik Donker Curtius urged its abolition, the Urakami parish history says. Other sources date the order ending it to 1858. Disputed.¹³

And on 19 February 1865, when the new church at Ōura was dedicated to the twenty-six martyrs, captains of French, British, Dutch and Russian ships came with their men and fired salutes.¹⁴Less than a month later, on 17 March, the hidden Christians of Urakami made themselves known to Father Petitjean in that church.¹⁴

It is right to remember both sides. The Dutch came to Japan for trade, not for religion, and their trade depended on the shogun's goodwill; to keep it, they seized a ship carrying missionaries, fired on the Christians at Hara and reported on the Catholic powers. A Catholic historian like Pagès could only see Koeckebacker as Pilate. Yet their records keep the memory of martyrs like Kibe, their chief pressed for the end of the fumie, and their window was the one through which, in the end, the Church came back.

Read the pages on the Shimabara rising, Dejima, the Great Martyrdom of Genna, Petro Kasui Kibe, Cristóvão Ferreira, Sidotti and the fumie.