The Expulsion of the Portuguese, 1639

In 1643 a small book was printed at Lisbon. Its title, in the Portuguese of the time, reads: Report of the glorious death of four Portuguese ambassadors from the city of Macao, with fifty-seven Christians of their company, all beheaded for the faith of Christ at Nagasaki, a city of Japan, on the third of August 1640. Its author was the Jesuit António Francisco Cardim.¹A Latin edition followed at Rome in 1646; after the story it lists the sixty-one dead, with their origins and ages.²

The four ambassadors had come to ask for one thing: that the ships from Macao might be allowed to sail to Japan again. A year earlier the shogunate had forbidden them. This page is the story of that order, the last of the great orders of the 1630s, and of what it cost.

The Portuguese had been coming since 1543, and from 1571 their ship came to Nagasaki every year.³⁴The trade and the mission had always travelled together; Nipponica's article on the southern trade says plainly that Portuguese trade was always closely bound up with the Jesuit mission, and that the ships chose the ports of lords who protected Christianity.³Our page on the great ship tells that story.⁵

From 1633 the shogunate tightened its grip. Each year from 1633 to 1636 it sent orders to the magistrates of Nagasaki. Yamakawa's dictionary summarises them: the search for and arrest of Christians; rewards for informers; a ban on Japanese ships going abroad without licence, and then on all of them; a ban on Japanese abroad coming home; trade limited to Nagasaki and Hirado; and in 1636 the expulsion of the children of Portuguese fathers.⁶In 1634 the shogunate ordered twenty-five Nagasaki merchants to build a small fan-shaped island off the shore, so that the Portuguese traders could be kept apart from the Japanese; it was finished in 1636 and the Portuguese were required to live there.⁷Nipponica adds that the Portuguese were kept under close watch, cut off from ordinary Japanese, despite the desperate efforts of the authorities of Macao, for whom the Japan trade was a matter of life and death.³

Then, in the tenth month of 1637, the farmers of Shimabara and Amakusa rose, and by the spring of 1638 Hara castle had fallen and nearly all its defenders were dead.⁸Our page on the rebellion discusses the old question of whether it was a Christian rising or a revolt against taxes.⁸For the shogunate the answer was settled. Nipponica, in the words of the historian Matsuda Kiichi, says that after Shimabara the shogunate at last decided to give up the profits of the Portuguese trade in order to root out the Christians.³

The order was dated the fifth day of the seventh month of Kan'ei 16. The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's calendar database gives that day as 4 August 1639.⁹Nipponica prints its text from the Tokugawa kinreikō.¹⁰

It is short. It gives three reasons. First, that although the Christian religion was forbidden in Japan, the Portuguese, knowing this, still secretly brought over those who spread it. Second, that the believers formed parties and plotted wrongdoing, and had been punished. Third, that supplies were sent from their country to the priests and their followers in hiding. "For these reasons," it goes on, "from now on the voyages of the galeota are forbidden. If any should come hereafter, the ship is to be destroyed, and those aboard are to be beheaded at once."¹⁰

The order's word, kareuta, which Nipponica glosses as gareuta, renders the Portuguese galeota, a type of ship.¹⁰Seven names stand under the order: Abe Shigetsugu, Abe Tadaaki, Matsudaira Nobutsuna, Hotta Masamori, Sakai Tadakatsu, Doi Toshikatsu and Ii Naotaka.¹⁰Matsudaira Nobutsuna was the close adviser whom the shogun Iemitsu had sent to command the siege at Shimabara.¹¹Yamakawa adds that at the same time the lords of the country were ordered to guard their coasts.⁶

Japanese reference works treat this order as the moment the closed country was completed. Nipponica's short entry on the Kan'ei orders says that the policy began in 1633 and "was completed by the 1639 ban on Portuguese ships."¹²The Digital Daijisen dates the closed country from 1639 to Perry's arrival in 1853.¹³The Heibonsha encyclopedia notes that relations between Japan and Portugal were broken off by the order of 1639 and resumed only with the treaty of 1860.¹⁴The Chinese and the Dutch were still allowed to trade at Nagasaki; in 1641 the Dutch trading post was moved from Hirado to Dejima, the island built for the Portuguese.⁷¹⁵

For the Church in Japan the ship had been everything: the road by which priests came, the line along which letters, alms and books travelled, and the link with Macao, where Japanese students had been taught and exiles received.⁵¹⁶Since 1614 the priests in Japan had been working in hiding; now the main road to them was closed by law, and anyone who came that way faced death.

Macao itself was in distress. The Macao Memory archive, a historical reference service of the Macao government, summarises the memorial its envoys carried in 1640, as preserved in the Dutch Daghregister of Batavia: since the ban, it said, the city's people had fallen into misery beyond words, unable to feed their wives and children.¹⁷The memorial also told the shogun that Macao would obey his order, and that on 15 November 1639 the city had sent two men to Manila, where it was ordered that no one should send priests to Japan, on pain of a fine of 4,000 taels.¹⁷

The city's council chose four respected citizens with long experience of the Japan trade: Luís Paes Pacheco, Rodrigo Sanches de Paredes, Gonçalo Monteiro de Carvalho and Simão Vaz de Paiva.¹⁷They sailed from Macao with seventy-four people on board and reached Nagasaki on 6 July 1640.¹⁷Kōdansha's biographical dictionary says Pacheco, born at Cochin in India, arrived in the fifth month of Kan'ei 17, was held in the prison on Dejima, and on the sixteenth day of the sixth month was executed at Nishizaka with the other envoys and the crew.¹⁸The NAOJ database gives that day as 3 August 1640, the date in Cardim's title.¹⁹

The Macao Memory account, drawing on the Batavia diary, says that on 2 August two officials sent from Edo, Kagazume Tadasumi and Nonoyama Shinbei, arrived and summoned everyone; the Portuguese were glad, thinking they would be well received.¹⁷Instead the four envoys and fifty-seven of their company were put to death, and the ship was burned.¹⁷Thirteen men, sailors, a doctor and servants, were spared and sent back to Macao in a small boat to carry the news.¹⁷

The message they carried survives in the shogunate's own compilation of foreign relations, the Tsūkō ichiran.¹⁷It accused the people of Macao of revering the Lord of Heaven and of trying to spread his teaching in Japan; it recalled that envoys had been told the year before never to come again; and it declared that since they had come back to beg for peace against that strict command, their ship was destroyed and their company executed, while the sailors and the doctor, whose fault was lighter, were sent home so that their country should know.¹⁷

Nipponica's Matsuda closes his article with this embassy: with it, he writes, the southern trade of a century came to its end.³For Cardim, writing from Macao, the sixty-one were not only envoys but Christians who died for the faith.¹

Portugal tried once more. In 1640 it had regained its independence from Spain, and King João IV sent an ambassador, Gonçalo de Siqueira de Sousa, to announce his accession and ask for trade to be restored.¹⁹Two ships reached Nagasaki in the sixth month of 1647. The Fukuoka City Museum describes what followed: the magistrate sent word to Edo and called up the lords of Kyushu; the Fukuoka domain alone brought 11,730 men and 300 boats; with the others, there were some 50,000 men and 700 boats, and the harbour was sealed until Edo replied.²⁰About a month later Iemitsu's refusal arrived, and the Portuguese were given the reply, water, rice and provisions and sailed away.²⁰Kōdansha's dictionary says they left in the eighth month and that the event was remembered as the "black ships of Shōhō".¹⁹

The ban did not end the attempts of missionaries to reach Japan. Our page on Macao tells how the Jesuit Visitor Antonio Rubino resolved to go himself after the envoys were killed; his group was taken in Satsuma in 1642, and a second group, with Giuseppe Chiara, in 1643. They went knowing what had happened to the envoys.¹⁶In 1708 the Italian priest Giovanni Battista Sidotti landed alone; he was questioned at Nagasaki with the help of the Dutch and taken to the Christian prison, the Kirishitan yashiki, in Edo.²¹

In the villages, the hidden Christians of Sotome, Urakami and the Gotō islands handed down Bastian's prophecy that after seven generations confessors would come in great black ships.⁵Nipponica notes that even after Japan opened its ports in the 1850s the ban on Christianity, the heart of the closed-country orders, was still enforced, and was resolved only some years after the Meiji government took power.²²In 1873 the notice boards came down.²³

The island built to hold the Portuguese is now the restored Dejima, and the hill where the sixty-one died is Nishizaka, where the twenty-six martyrs had been crucified in 1597.⁷²⁴The order of 1639 ended the ships, but the envoys of 1640 came anyway, carrying their city's plea, and died on the martyrs' hill. Their deaths are part of the story of how the Church in Japan was cut off, and also of how it was not forgotten.