Hosokawa Gracia (1563 to 1600): The Lady of Tango

Tama was born in 1563, a daughter of the general Akechi Mitsuhide.¹At the wish of Oda Nobunaga she was married to Hosokawa Tadaoki, eldest son of Hosokawa Fujitaka (Yūsai); the Japanese dictionaries date the marriage to 1578 or 1579.¹²The young couple lived in Tango, and from 1580 at the castle of Miyazu, where, the encyclopedia Nipponica says, the gifted young wife studied Zen.¹³She bore Tadaoki several children.¹

In the sixth month of 1582 her father killed Nobunaga at the Honnōji in Kyoto. Overnight she became the daughter of a traitor. The Hosokawa refused Mitsuhide's call to join him, and Tama was sent away and confined in the mountains of Tango, at Midono.¹³Kyōtango city, which protects the site, says she lived there for about two years, from 1582 to 1584, in a house on a hill now called the "women's fort," with her guards across the valley at the "men's fort."³The local tourist association adds that she was separated from her two small children, and that her lady-in-waiting Kiyohara Maria went with her.⁴The site was marked in 1936 with a stone reading "the place where the wife of Hosokawa Tadaoki lived in seclusion."³⁴The Japan Tourism Agency's notice explains that the identification rests on a war chronicle written about a century after her death and on the oral history of Midono village, and that little of her time survives there beyond two levelled terraces.⁵The tourist association sees in those years the root of what followed: alone in the mountains, facing death, she had time to think about what it means to live, and it judges that her later baptism is hard to imagine without the Midono years.⁴

With Toyotomi Hideyoshi's leave she returned to her husband.¹²When Hideyoshi began building Osaka in 1583, he required the great lords to build residences there and to keep their wives and children in them. The Osaka Museum of History has shown that Tadaoki was one of the first to build, and that by 1585 at the latest Tama was living in the Hosokawa residence at Osaka.⁶

Here, the dictionaries agree, she first heard of Christianity indirectly, from her husband, who repeated what his friend Takayama Ukon said about the teaching of the Church.¹²It caught her mind. Early in 1587, while Tadaoki was away with Hideyoshi's army on the campaign in Kyushu, she slipped out of the residence and went to the Jesuit church at Osaka.¹²The museum's study dates the visit precisely: it was Easter Day, the 21st day of the second month of Tenshō 15, which was 29 March 1587.⁶Luís Fróis, in his History of Japan, describes how six or seven of her closest attendants offered to surround her so that she could not be seen, and how she went out not by the guarded front gate but by a small side gate to which she held the key.⁶At the church she listened to the catechist's instruction.²It was the only time in her life that she entered a church.⁶

She could not be baptized that day. Afterwards she went on learning through others. Heibonsha's encyclopedia says she deepened her faith through writings, and had her ladies-in-waiting go to the church and be baptized.²Fróis even records that she thought of having herself carried out of the house hidden in a leather basket to reach the church a second time.⁶

On the 19th day of the sixth month of Tenshō 15, which was 24 July 1587 by the national observatory's calendar tables,¹¹Hideyoshi issued his edict expelling the missionaries.⁶It was then, soon after the edict, that Tama was baptized. Since she could not go to the church, the superior of the Kyoto region, Father Organtino, directed that she be baptized at home by her lady-in-waiting Maria, Kiyohara Ito, a daughter of the Christian court scholar Kiyohara Edakata.⁶⁷Maria, known at court as Kojijū, had followed her father into the faith and had been baptized herself that same year, under the ban.⁷She took the name Gracia, "grace."¹²⁶Heibonsha adds that she had her two sons and two daughters baptized as well, and that she was remembered as a fervent believer.²

A letter of hers, dated 7 November 1587 and printed in Fróis's annual report, shows that faith at work. Her second son, three years old, was so ill that there was no hope for his life. "I grieved deeply that his soul would be lost," she wrote, and asked Maria what to do; they decided that the best course was to entrust him to God who made him, and Maria baptized him secretly with the name João.⁶In the same year she wrote to Organtino.⁶

The French Jesuit historian Charlevoix, writing in the eighteenth century from the Jesuit letters, says that for twelve years she was "the ornament" of the Church of Japan. He praises above all her patience under the harshness of her husband, whom he describes as a zealous pagan and the most jealous of men; that is Charlevoix's judgement, and it is his.⁸He adds that after her penances and prayers her chief occupation was to have the children of the poor and orphans brought to her; she washed them, cared for them, taught them the mysteries of the faith and made fervent Christians of them. She loved reading, and to read more she had learned Latin and Portuguese.⁸

When Hideyoshi's men drew up lists of Christians at Osaka in the persecution of 1596 to 1597, Charlevoix says, the "queen of Tango" was found sewing fine clothes with her ladies so as to appear more splendid on "the day of their triumph," which was what they called the day of their death.⁸That day did not come for them then. It came three years later.

After Hideyoshi's death the great lords split. Tadaoki sided with Tokugawa Ieyasu and marched east with him in 1600.¹⁹In Osaka the opposing party under Ishida Mitsunari moved to take the wives and children of Ieyasu's allies into Osaka castle as hostages, and they began with the Hosokawa.¹⁶

Gracia refused to enter the castle.¹²On the 17th day of the seventh month of Keichō 5 (25 August 1600 by the national observatory's calendar tables) Ishida's troops surrounded the residence.⁶¹¹What followed is known from several accounts, among them the memoir written in 1648 by her former maid Shimo, who was there.⁶Gracia did not take her own life with her own hand, which as a Christian she would not do. Nipponica says she ended her life "by the hand of a retainer"; the museum's study names him, Ogasawara Shōsai, who then scattered gunpowder and set the house on fire.¹⁶

Charlevoix tells the scene as the Jesuits told it. Tadaoki had left orders that if Osaka fell, his steward was to put his wife to death and burn the house rather than let her be taken. The steward came to her in tears with the order. Gracia sent her ladies out of the house, went into her oratory to pray, and then told him he might carry out his lord's command. She knelt, drew down the collar of her robe herself, and, saying the holy names of Jesus and Mary, received the stroke.⁸Then the house was fired.⁶⁸Shimo's memoir, as the museum study reads it, has Ishida's men pressing against the front gate, which the retainer Inatomi Naoie was guarding, and has the surviving women leave by that same gate, where a great crowd had gathered to watch the residence burn.⁶

The Christians gathered what remains they could find and took them to Father Organtino, who was then in Osaka, and he gave her a solemn funeral.⁸When Tadaoki came back, Charlevoix says, he was so moved that he paid for a second service, which he attended with many of the great lords then in Osaka, and declared that beside the Church's ceremonies those of the Buddhist monks seemed like children's games.⁸Heibonsha confirms that the first anniversary of her death was observed at the church in Osaka.²In the years after 1600 Tadaoki, ruling in Buzen, protected the Christians there and brought in Father Gregorio de Céspedes, who, Charlevoix says, had instructed his late wife.⁸

Japanese reference works describe her death as dying for principle (殉節), and for centuries she was remembered simply as the wife of Hosokawa Tadaoki who would not be taken.¹Catholics remember her as a Christian woman who kept her faith in secret under the ban and met her death praying. The well called Echū-i, said since the late eighteenth century to have been the kitchen well of the Hosokawa residence, stands near Osaka's Catholic cathedral at Tamatsukuri, where a monument carries her farewell poem and statues of Gracia and of Takayama Ukon stand on either side of the forecourt.⁶¹⁰The museum's study suggests that the residence itself lay a little to the north, close to the southern edge of the castle's second enclosure, and that the church she visited stood near today's Kita-Ōe park.⁶