From Porto to the Gotō islands
Gaspar Coelho was born in Porto, in the north of Portugal, probably in about 1529.He joined the Society of Jesus in 1556, at in India.He reached Japan in 1572.His superior, Francisco Cabral, sent him first to the islands to learn the language.
He never learned it well. A report of 1579 says plainly that he did not speak Japanese.But he had energy, and he worked for years among the Christians of the Shimo, the western half of Kyushu around and Ōmura, where he was superior of the mission.He baptised Arima Yoshisada on 15 April 1576.
Those were the years of the great conversions in Ōmura. In 1575, when Lord urged his people to the faith, Cabral reported seventeen or eighteen thousand baptisms, and named Coelho and Fr Giovanni Francesco to the work, with Japanese catechists. When one of Sumitada's castle lords asked for a missionary for his own people, Coelho went to Ōmura himself and sent Francesco on to Nagasaki and the villages around it, then called him back to help with the Buddhist monks of Kōri, who were asking for baptism too.It was harvest time in Ōmura, and the Japanese catechists did much of the reaping.
The head of a growing Church
When the Visitor reorganised the mission in 1581, Japan became a vice-province of the Society, and Coelho was named its first vice-provincial in place of Cabral.He took office in September 1581, and when Valignano left Japan in February 1582 Coelho was left in charge.The Japanese historical dictionary published in Paris credits him, beside Valignano, with laying the foundations of the mission's expansion.
These were years of growth. On 20 February 1582 four Japanese boys whom Valignano was sending to Rome, the , sailed from Nagasaki.
Half a tatami mat from Hideyoshi
On 6 March 1586 Coelho left Nagasaki for the capital region to meet the new master of Japan, .On 4 May 1586 he was received at Osaka Castle.He came with more than thirty companions, priests, brothers, dōjuku and boys; interpreted, and the Japanese brother was among them.
It was a remarkable day. Hideyoshi showed them round the castle himself, spoke of his plan to send an army to Korea and China, and promised to favour the Christians.At one point he came and sat beside Coelho and Fróis, so close that not more than half a tatami mat separated them.The dictionary says that never before or after was the Society treated so well by a ruler of Japan.
Here Coelho made the mistake for which he is most remembered. Hideyoshi spoke of invading Korea and China and asked the Jesuits to obtain two Portuguese ships for him. Valignano had told the Jesuits to keep out of Japanese politics; Coelho agreed to the plan, and promised as well that the Christian lords would help Hideyoshi against the Shimazu and the Ryūzōji in Kyushu.He had also had a Portuguese-style warship, a fusta, built for the mission.
Hakata, July 1587
In the summer of 1587 Hideyoshi came to Kyushu at the head of his army and defeated the Shimazu. On 15 July he visited Coelho's fusta in the harbour at Hakata and was entertained on board.Hideyoshi's Christian retainers, and , were worried. They advised Coelho to offer the ship to Hideyoshi at once; Coelho did not.On 22 July Ukon came to the fusta and told him to prepare the padres and the Christians for a great trial.
On 24 July Coelho visited Hideyoshi at Hakozaki to congratulate him on his victory, and was received kindly. That same night Hideyoshi sent envoys to him with sharp questions.Why did the padres go about the country making converts? Why did they eat horse and beef? And why did the Portuguese, the Siamese and the Cambodians buy Japanese and carry them off as slaves?
Coelho's answers are worth hearing. The priests travelled, he said, because they were foreigners and the faith was new in Japan. Those working in the capital region already ate as the Japanese did. As for slavery, it was one of the very things he had wanted to raise with Hideyoshi. He asked for a severe prohibition, not only of sales to the Portuguese but of the trade among the Japanese themselves, which he called "a great discredit and humiliation to a people of such excellence and honour". The priests, he said, had worked hard to stop it and had failed; the law should be aimed at the local lords who allowed it.The envoys then showed him a sentence against Ukon. The next day they asked why Christians had destroyed temples, and Coelho answered that he could not restrain every zealous convert. Then they told him the padres had twenty days to leave Japan.The edict is dated 23 or 24 July in different sources.Ukon lost his lands rather than give up his faith.
Coelho fought for his flock with the weapons he had. He begged for more time, since one Portuguese ship could not carry every missionary. He wrote to the Christian lords, and even to Hideyoshi's wife, asking them to plead for the Church, though no one dared.From Hakata he sent a runner ahead to Nagasaki to warn the Jesuits to save what they could before Hideyoshi's officers arrived, and he told the Christian families to hide their young daughters.Hideyoshi took Nagasaki, Mogi and from the Society.
The last years at Kazusa
The missionaries did not leave. They gathered first at , as Hideyoshi had ordered; then, once Coelho had won leave to put off their departure, they scattered into the countryside under the protection of the Christian lords.The schools moved west: the seminary of the capital region and the college and novitiate of Bungo were brought to western Kyushu, so that by 1589 more than 115 Jesuits were living in the residences of Arima, Ōmura and Amakusa. Only stayed hidden near .In Nagasaki the Jesuits left their church on the Morisaki cape for the outlying church of All Saints, while two priests lived hidden in the house of the Misericordia, the town's of mercy.Coelho himself hid at Kazusa, on the Arima coast of the Shimabara peninsula.Then he made his second great mistake. He planned to arm Nagasaki, stand a siege and wait for help from the Philippines. He asked the lord of Arima to rally the Christian lords, without success, and wrote to , and Goa for two or three hundred soldiers and firearms.He did not act alone: most of the senior Jesuits he consulted backed the idea; only Organtino opposed it.The Church itself said no. Valignano was dismayed when he heard of it in Macau in 1589, and the Jesuit superior in Manila condemned the plan and sent Coelho a letter of reprimand. No army ever came.
The dictionary in Paris gives another side of those years. Thrown suddenly into a crisis, it says, Coelho followed a wise policy and kept the persecution down as far as he could; the renewal of the mission after his death was surely the fruit of his good management of the Society in Japan and of the way he led the priests.
Coelho died at Kazusa on 7 May 1590.
The thread
Coelho is not a hero in the usual sense. He never mastered Japanese, and his warship, his words at Osaka and his call for soldiers did the Church no good; the Church's own superiors told him so. But he spoke up for enslaved Japanese before the most powerful man in the country, he gave his last eighteen years to Japan, and when the storm broke over the Church, he did not run. He stayed, hidden on the Arima coast, and kept the shepherds with their flock. The Church that survived 1587 owed something to him.