Nationwide Ban and Expulsion, 1614

Hideyoshi's edict of 1587 had ordered the padres out of Japan, but it had not outlawed Christianity for ordinary people, and it had been enforced only fitfully.²⁶Tokugawa Ieyasu, master of Japan after 1600, was by 1613 listening to other voices. Pagès lists the reasons he says were whispered to the old ruler: that the Christians honoured men put to death by the law as martyrs; that converts gave their goods and their lives for foreign masters; that the priests were the forerunners of conquest, as the Dutch and English, through William Adams, kept telling him.¹Murdoch, a non-Catholic writer of 1903, quotes two letters of late 1613 from Ieyasu's men warning their Christian friends that he had spoken of the faith with horror after Christians knelt in prayer at the crucifixion of a man condemned for dealing in unminted silver.⁴

On 27 December 1613, Pagès says, orders went out to draw up lists of the Christians of Kyoto, Fushimi, Osaka and Sakai.¹

The edict was written in the name of the shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, with the retired Ieyasu behind it.⁵⁶It is known in Japanese as Bateren tsuihō no fumi (伴天連追放之文, "the writing on the expulsion of the padres") or Hai Kirishitan bun (排吉利支丹文, "the writing rejecting the Christians"). The reference service of the National Diet Library identifies its author as the Zen monk Konchiin Sūden and lists the standard editions, including the Dai Nihon shiryō and the Nihon shisō taikei.⁷Murakami Naojirō's 1911 printed edition of the Ikoku nikki, the diplomatic diary kept at Sūden's temple, records that Ieyasu gave the order at the new castle in Edo on the night of the twenty second day of the twelfth month of Keichō 18; the text was written between cockcrow and dawn and presented to him the next day, the twenty third. By the observatory's calendar those days were 31 January and 1 February 1614. The document itself carries only the month, 臘月 (the twelfth month), with the shogun Hidetada's seal.¹⁰⁸The Dai Nihon shiryō prints the same text and note.¹¹

Its argument is different from Hideyoshi's. Murdoch noticed that, where Hideyoshi had appealed to the gods of Japan, the 1614 text weaves Shinto, Buddhism and Chinese philosophy together, and he guessed that the Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan had a hand in it.⁴Its first sentence, in Murakami's printed text, calls Japan "the land of the gods and the land of the Buddha" (日本者神國佛國).¹⁰And it went further than Hideyoshi in practice. Renata Cabral Bernabé points out that the 1587 edict only sent the missionaries away, whereas the 1614 edict outlawed Christianity as a whole: no Christian of any rank could stay in Japan and keep the faith.⁶

On 27 January, Pagès writes, the edict was proclaimed in Kyoto to the sound of trumpets. Every lord was to send the religious in his lands to Nagasaki; after they had gone, the churches were to be destroyed and the Christians made to renounce their faith.¹The registration of the Christians of Kyoto went on for thirty days. Four thousand names were taken down, though the governor, not wishing to anger Ieyasu, kept only sixteen hundred; Pagès thought there were more than seven thousand Christians in the city.¹On 11 February the Jesuits of the capital were ordered to leave for Nagasaki within seven days. Three hid; the rest left on 21 February, their boat steered under a busy bridge that was the usual place of executions, to shame them.¹

With the priests came a handful of Christian nobles sent into exile with their families. The most famous was Takayama Ukon, baptised Justo, who had been stripped of his fief and exiled under Hideyoshi in 1587, and had since lived some twenty years "in honourable poverty" in Kaga, under the Maeda lords. Ieyasu, Pagès says, had found him "invincible on the matter of religion".¹Pagès, followed by Murdoch, tells how before leaving Kanazawa he sent sixty ingots of gold back to the Maeda heir as the revenue of the lands he held of them, since he had had no chance to serve them in war. As he passed, the lord of Kaga shut himself in his castle for fear of a rising; Ukon sent word to reassure him.¹⁴The crowds that came to see him pass, Pagès says, made his road into exile something like a triumph.¹

The exiles reached Nagasaki on 11 March 1614 and were held there through the summer. The bishop, Luís de Cerqueira, had died on 20 February.¹For six months, from April to October, the religious orders of Nagasaki led processions and public penances, hoping that the edict might yet be softened. Public services stopped. Some churches were taken down before any order came, so that they would not be profaned and their timber could be saved; only the Dominican and Franciscan churches stayed open, and the Christians hardly dared to enter them.¹When the Portuguese ship arrived in June, Ieyasu asked more than once whether the trade with Macao would go on once the religious were gone.¹A Portuguese embassy went to Ieyasu at Sunpu with rich gifts. He would not move: if the law spread, he said, his subjects would soon be in open revolt, and he wanted not one padre left in his lands.¹

The ships were few, small and in poor repair. One was to take the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, twenty three Jesuits and the Japanese exiles, Ukon among them, to Manila; two more would carry the remaining Jesuits, catechists and students to Macao. When someone objected that the Manila ship was too small for the women, Pagès records, the answer came back that they could be tied to the outside of the hull.¹The governor of Nagasaki, Hasegawa Sahyōe, warned the townspeople that anyone hiding a priest would die with his wife and children.¹

On 25 October the order came to leave the following Monday. The religious went out to wait for the ships at Fukuda, a harbour about three leagues from Nagasaki.¹Nine days later, on 7 or 8 November, they sailed.¹

One old priest never boarded. Diogo de Mesquita, the Portuguese Jesuit who in 1582 had gone with the four young Japanese envoys to Europe, and for many years had been rector of the college at Nagasaki, asked not to be sent away. He withdrew to a lonely place near the city and died on 4 November, in a fisherman's hut, on a bed of straw, aged sixty one.¹

Not all of them were on board for long. By agreement with the local Christians, boats slipped out from among the islands once the guards had turned back, two leagues out to sea, and took off two Dominicans, two Franciscans and the secular priests, who changed into Japanese clothes on the way back. A few Jesuits got off one of the Macao ships in the same way. The Christians who led the boats, Pagès adds, later died as martyrs, and the boatmen and their families were burned alive four years afterwards for what they had done.¹

Ukon reached Manila on 28 November and was received with great honour by the governor, Juan de Silva, and the bishop.¹

Pagès counts those who left and those who stayed. To Manila went twenty three Jesuits, two Dominicans, four Franciscans, two Augustinians and two secular priests; to Macao, thirty three Jesuit fathers and twenty nine brothers. Hidden in Japan remained eighteen Jesuit fathers and nine brothers, seven Dominicans, seven Franciscans, one Augustinian and five secular priests.¹James Harry Morris, summing up modern counts, gives some 98 of 145 missionaries expelled, with 65 of 250 Japanese catechists and 350 leading Christian families.⁵

One of those who stayed was the Italian Jesuit Carlo Spinola, who hid in Nagasaki under the name Joseph of the Cross. He said, according to Pagès, that being left behind seemed to him a greater grace than his first vocation.¹

The prohibition that began with this edict became, in Bernabé's words, a permanent regime. It ended only in 1873, when the Meiji government took down the notice boards that proclaimed it.⁶