Twenty days
In the summer of 1587 the shore of Hakata Bay was full of soldiers. had just brought the Shimazu of Satsuma to their knees, and with them the whole of Kyushu. On Tenshō 15.6.7 he came north to Hakozaki, the shrine town on the bay, and pitched camp there.A paper in his name, sent to the people of Hakozaki, survives: it warns that, rain having driven his troops to build huts, he will stay some days, and that any soldier who loots, or forces a householder to give him firewood or straw, will lose his head.From the shrine he ordered the rebuilding of Hakata, burned in the wars, and held tea gatherings among the pines of the shore, where Sen no Rikyū hung a kettle from a branch.
The Jesuits came too. , head of the mission, sailed up from in his fusta, a light oared warship. Hideyoshi came alongside in a boat, and Coelho gave him a tour of the vessel with its three hundred rowers, and wine and sweet fruit on deck.Hideyoshi admired the ship. Two Christian lords in his service, and , urged Coelho to make him a present of it at once; the ship was not given.
On 22 July, a week after the visit, Ukon came to the fusta and warned Coelho that he was sure some great calamity was about to fall on the Christians of Japan, and that they should prepare for it.
The Hirado ship
Hideyoshi had never seen a great Portuguese carrack, and he asked for the one lying at to be brought round to Hakata. Its captain, Domingos Monteiro, did not bring it. On 24 July he came to Hakata in person, with gifts worth more than five hundred cruzados, and explained that the passage would be too dangerous.Hideyoshi received him kindly and gave him a sword.
That night everything changed. Around midnight, Murdoch writes, a messenger woke Coelho with questions from Hideyoshi. Why did the padres force his subjects to become Christians? Why did they have the temples destroyed? Why did they persecute the Buddhist clergy? Why did they and the Portuguese eat oxen and cows, animals useful to man? And why did Coelho allow the Portuguese to buy Japanese and carry them off as slaves to the Indies?Before Coelho could gather himself, a second messenger read out a sentence of exile against Takayama Ukon.
Coelho answered in writing. He said that the padres had never used force, and pointed to the permission Hideyoshi himself had granted them the year before. Hideyoshi read the answers and sent no reply but an order: the Vice-Provincial was to go to Hirado, gather all his religious there, and leave the country within six months.The next day the edict was posted at Hakata, and a sealed copy was sent to Coelho.
The words of the edict
The document itself is a single sheet of five articles, dated Tenshō 15.6.19. The text known in Japan is kept today among the papers of the Matsura family, lords of Hirado, in their museum there.In our rough translation of the Japanese text:
- Japan is the land of the gods. For a Christian country to come and teach a false law here is a very wicked thing.
- They approach the people of a province or district, make them their followers, and have shrines and temples destroyed: this is unheard of. A lord's fief is given him only for a time; he must keep the laws of the realm. That those below should act so wildly is an offence.
- The padres, by their clever teaching, gather followers as they please, and so destroy the Buddhist law of Japan. They may not stay in Japan. Within twenty days from today they are to make ready and go home. Anyone who wrongs the padres in that time will be punished.
- The black ships come for trade, which is a separate matter. Trade may go on.
- From now on, anyone who does not hinder the Buddhist law, merchants or others, may come and go freely from the Christian countries.
A longer memorandum of eleven articles dated the day before, Tenshō 15.6.18 (23 July), is known from a later copy found in the twentieth century. It leaves the faith of ordinary people to their own choice (心さし次第), forbids lords to force their vassals to become Christians, and forbids the sale of Japanese to China, the southern barbarians and Korea, and the buying and selling of people in Japan.Its standing and its relation to the five articles are debated (see Disputed).
The European missionaries knew the edict in their own translation, which Murdoch gives from Charlevoix. In it Hideyoshi orders the foreign religious "under pain of death to quit Japan within twenty days", while the Portuguese merchants may "continue their accustomed trade", but are forbidden "to bring any foreign religieux into the country".
An order that could not be obeyed
Coelho pointed out at once that the order was impossible. There was only one Portuguese ship in Japan, and it would not sail for six months. Hideyoshi accepted the point: the padres were to leave on the first ship, and the Japanese members of the Society with them.
When Monteiro's carrack finally sailed at the end of February 1588, it carried only three Jesuit brothers, who had been due to go to for ordination anyway.The rest of the missionaries had not gone. Rather than abandon their flocks, they scattered into the Christian domains of Kyushu and carried on their work quietly.In Nagasaki Hideyoshi's officers pulled down the bastions and filled in the moat; in 1588 the town was made part of his own domain.When Hideyoshi learned in March 1588 that the padres were still in the country, he ordered the Jesuit houses in , Osaka and Sakai destroyed.
And yet the ships kept coming. The edict had separated the trade from the faith, at least on paper, and Hideyoshi wanted the trade. In 1591 he received 's embassy and allowed ten Jesuits to stay in Nagasaki for the Portuguese.Four years after the edict the churches of Nagasaki were still standing.
The Visitor, Alessandro Valignano, learned what had happened only when he reached Macao on 28 July 1588. He spent the following years working to rebuild the mission. Coelho did not see the outcome; he died on 25 July 1590, four days after Valignano landed again in Japan.
Human cargo
One of Hideyoshi's midnight questions has weighed more heavily with later readers than the rest: the sale of Japanese people abroad. A Japanese account of the campaign, the Kyūshū godōza ki, describes Japanese men and women bought by the hundreds into the black ships, chained hand and foot and driven into the hold; it lays this, with much else, at the door of the padres, and ends by praising their expulsion as the foundation of peace in the realm.The trade was real, and it was carried on by Portuguese merchants, against their own king's law and against the protests of the Church.The Portuguese crown had prohibited the trade in Japanese slaves on 20 September 1570.Coelho wrote on 2 October 1587 of Portuguese who obtained Japanese men and women "in any manner possible", and that certificates issued by the padres had been abused in the trade.The Church moved against it: Murdoch records that Bishop Martins excommunicated buyers of slaves, and that his successor Cerqueira renewed the measure in 1598.
Why?
Hideyoshi gave his own answer to a Portuguese merchant in the autumn of 1588: the padres preached a law "so hostile to the kami and hotoke" of Japan, and the kami were "none other than the Lords of Japan". Their law, "although it may be good for other countries, is not good for Japan".The Jesuit Pedro Gómez, writing in January 1588, blamed pride: having conquered Japan, Hideyoshi wished to be worshipped. "We prayed for the successful issue of his military campaigns," Gómez wrote, "and we rejoiced when we should have wept."Murdoch, who disliked the Jesuit historians, blamed the whisperings of the physician Seyakuin Zensō as the occasion and Hideyoshi's policy as the cause.Each answer tells us something about the man who gave it.
What is not in doubt is the result. The twenty days ran out, and the missionaries stayed, hidden and patient. The churches stood, then some were pulled down, then some were opened again. Murdoch counts a few Christians put to death in local domains in 1589 and 1591, but none on Hideyoshi's own order for ten years.Then in the winter of 1596 Hideyoshi gave another order, and the road to began.