Story
In the spring of 1612 an exiled lord in the mountains of Kai received officers sent to put him to death. They invited him to kill himself, as a samurai was expected to. He answered that it was forbidden to Christians, but that neither he nor his people would resist the ruler's sentence, and he asked only for time to prepare. Then he had the Passion of Our Lord read to him slowly.
That man was Arima Harunobu, once one of the "pillars of the Church" in Japan. Oliveira e Costa says he was one of its main supports for three decades, 1580 to 1611.His life runs from the first seminary in Japan to the edict that closed the churches. It shows how much the mission of the sixteenth century rested on a few Christian princes, and how a single misstep could cost them everything.
The young lord of Hinoe
Harunobu was born in 1567, the second son of Arima Yoshisada, lord of the Takaku district of Hizen on the Shimabara peninsula. Yoshisada had himself been baptized as André.The young lord's seat was Hinoe castle.The date he took over is given variously as 1571, 1576 and 1577.
His beginning was not promising for the mission. Oliveira e Costa notes that he started by persecuting the Christians.His lands were hard pressed by the Ryūzōji clan of Saga. Then, in 1579, the Visitor landed at Kuchinotsu, the port of Arima.
Baptism and the seminary
Harunobu was baptized by Valignano and took the name Protásio. Cieslik dates his conversion to March 1580. Oliveira e Costa and the Britannica dictionary put the baptism in 1579.Cieslik records the effect on Valignano. The Visitor had been made gloomy by the mission superior Francisco Cabral's pessimism, and he began "to see things in a brighter light especially after the conversion of the of Arima."A rapid growth of the Church in the province followed.
Harunobu gave the Jesuits the grounds and buildings of a former Buddhist monastery, and there the first seminary in Japan opened in 1580.Valignano meant such schools for "talented boys of the better families," who were to learn the humanities and receive "a general training in both Japanese and European culture." They were to train both future priests and the lay leaders of the Church.Nipponica lists what came to Arima: churches in many places, the seminary, and Portuguese ships calling at Kuchinotsu.Among the first seminarians were boys of noble families. In February 1582 four of them sailed for Rome, and one was Harunobu's own cousin, Miguel Chijiwa, sent as envoy of Arima and Ōmura.(See our page on the .) Valignano later wrote his dialogue on the journey as a conversation in which the young ambassadors of Arima and Ōmura told their brothers at home what they had seen in Europe.
Okitanawate and Urakami
In 1584 the Ryūzōji attacked. With help from the Shimazu of Satsuma, Harunobu defeated them.Nipponica adds that he asked the Society of Jesus for help and, as thanks for the victory, gave , now part of , to the Church.When took Kyushu in 1587, he confirmed Harunobu in Takaku with 40,000 koku, but Urakami became Hideyoshi's own land.
The hidden years
Then Hideyoshi . Harunobu hid many of them in his lands, and the Heibonsha encyclopedia counts this among his chief services.Nipponica adds that the college, the Jesuits' higher school, was set up in the Arima lands in these years, and that the press with movable type brought back by the Tenshō embassy printed the Jesuit books of Japan there.Valignano, returning in 1590, judged it prudent to turn the churches of Ōmura and Arima into ordinary houses so as not to provoke Hideyoshi.In 1601 he moved the seminary back to Arima, where the buildings were larger.
In 1596 Harunobu was confirmed and took the name João (John). After that the Jesuits called him Dom João.In the Korean wars he served under .In 1600 he stayed neutral at first. He then sided with , attacked Konishi's lands, and kept his domain. Oliveira e Costa notes that he was one of only two Christian lords whose position was unchanged by the war.
The Christian court of Arima
Pagès, writing from the annual letters, describes Arima in these years as almost wholly Christian. "All the land of Arima was Christian," he writes of 1605, with thirteen Jesuit priests and as many brothers in the college and residences. That year Harunobu and his cousin the lord of Ōmura, Ōmura Yoshiaki, who in 1588 had married Harunobu's sister Catarina, were accused before Ieyasu. They cleared themselves easily, and Ieyasu thought even better of them afterwards.In 1611 the college and seminary of Arima had eight priests and eight brothers and taught Latin and Japanese letters and philosophy. The feast of St Ignatius was kept with great solemnity, for Harunobu was especially devoted to the newly beatified founder, Pagès says, because Ignatius had been a soldier.Harunobu and his wife Justa were "full of fervour and charity." Their son Michel gave a large sum to found a hospital at Arima, and Christians from Higo who had given way under persecution came to Arima to be reconciled.
The Madre de Deus
In 1608, at Ieyasu's order, Harunobu sent a ship to Champa in Indochina. On the way home it stopped at , and some of his crew were killed in a fight there.When the Portuguese great ship Nossa Senhora da Graça, also called the Madre de Deus, came to Nagasaki, Ieyasu ordered Harunobu to seize it and its captain, André Pessoa.In January 1610 the ship was attacked off Nagasaki and blew up.
Harunobu hoped for a reward, above all the return of lands his family had once held. A Christian official named Okamoto Daihachi, baptized Paulo, who served Ieyasu's minister Honda Masazumi, took large sums from him with promises to arrange it.Pagès says he even sent Harunobu a forged copy of a grant.In 1612 the fraud came out. Daihachi accused Harunobu in turn of plotting to kill the Nagasaki governor, Hasegawa Sahyōe.Pagès adds that Harunobu's son Michel, newly married to a great-niece of Ieyasu, had denounced his father's plans.
Ieyasu stripped Harunobu of his lands and banished him to Kai.Daihachi was burned at the stake at Sunpu.Michel received his father's domain.
Good Friday and the end
Pagès says the news of the exile reached Harunobu on Good Friday, and that he took it "piously and in a spirit of penance." Many expected him, by Japanese custom, to cut his belly rather than survive disgrace. But Justa strengthened him, and he went into exile during the days of Easter. In exile he read the Passion and other spiritual books, went over his old sins, and prayed for his son.
But he kept writing to court in the hope of recovering his lands. According to Pagès, this was reported, and a sentence of death came against him.He wrote his son a letter of good advice. He had the Passion read slowly and a short treatise on contrition, and he confessed aloud many of his sins before a crucifix. Then he prostrated himself, prayed for a while, and signed to a servant he had chosen, who struck off his head with a single blow. Justa lifted her husband's head from the ground and kissed it.She cut her hair as a sign that she had left the world. She refused to go and live in with a son of her first marriage, and said she would stay in the place of exile for her three years of mourning and then carry her husband's bones to Nagasaki.
The day was the sixth day of the fifth month of Keichō 17, which was 5 June 1612.Not all sources agree on how he died. The Kodansha biographical dictionary says that he committed seppuku, while Nipponica and the Jesuit sources say he was beheaded.
Afterwards
For Japan as a whole, the affair was a turning point. Gonoi Takashi writes that Ieyasu used it to make his stand against Christianity plain, with bans at Sunpu, Edo and Kyoto in 1612.(See our Tokugawa Ieyasu page.)
In Arima, Michel was ordered to give up the faith and to make his vassals give it up. Pagès says he outwardly took up the Jōdo sect. He reached Shimabara on the eve of Pentecost and set out to root out the faith.Most of his Christian vassals, Pagès writes, stood firm and accepted confiscation and exile. The Jesuits heard confessions from dawn, and children of six and seven came to confession, saying, "It is to die as martyrs."Michel was later moved away to Hyūga.The people of the peninsula, who had been Christian for a generation, stayed. In 1637 they rose with the people of Amakusa in the , in the lands that had once been Arima's and Konishi's.