Story
A trusted vassal
Inoue Masashige was born in 1585 in Tōtōmi province, the younger brother of Inoue Masanari, who rose to be one of the shogun's senior councillors.His common name was Seibei; later he held the title Chikugo no kami, and the missionaries and the Dutch knew him as "Chikugo."He served the second shogun, , and then , first as an inspector (metsuke), and in 1632 he was made one of the first great inspectors (ōmetsuke), with a stipend of 4,000 koku.He had a part in the reception of the Korean embassy and in the of 1637 to 1638, where the Kodansha dictionary says he worked to pacify the region.
There is an old report, recorded in Heibonsha's Mypedia, that he had once been a Christian himself and later renounced the faith.It is only a report ().
The office of religious inspection
In 1640 Iemitsu gave him charge of the inspection of religion, and with it a fief of 10,000 koku, later 13,000, which made him a , the first lord of Takaoka in Shimōsa.Yamakawa's dictionary explains that Inoue in practice held the office of commissioner of religious inspection (shūmon aratame yaku) from 1640, that it was formally created only in 1657, and that in 1658 the great inspector Hōjō Ujinaga took over from him.The historian Martin Nogueira Ramos stresses how far his powers reached: from 1638 to 1658 he was responsible for the fight against Catholicism on a national scale, beyond the shogun's own lands, and he urged the lords to set up regular inspection of the religion of their subjects.For twenty years, Heibonsha's encyclopedia says, he "wielded great skill" in the suppression of the Christians.
A different aim
What set Inoue apart was his aim. The Tokyo archdiocese's pilgrim guide to the martyrs of Edo puts it simply: rather than make martyrs of the missionaries he held, he questioned and tortured them so as to make them apostatize.The Jesuit historian Hubert Cieslik, writing in Monumenta Nipponica, explains the reasoning. The officials, he says, wanted the greatest possible psychological effect on the faithful, and so publicized the cases of apostate priests, the korobi bateren. The torture of the pit, in which the victim was hung upside down over a hole, was developed especially under Iemitsu, and Cieslik writes that Inoue Chikugo no kami "introduced various refinements" to obtain the result he wanted.
Cieslik adds a warning that this page follows. The pit, he writes, "rendered clear thinking and genuine moral decision quite impossible within a short period of time; thus the greatest caution must be exercised in making a moral evaluation of so-called apostasy in the pit." What showed a prisoner's true mind was his attitude after he was released.Inoue's methods did not end with the pit. Cieslik records that officials pressed the Jesuit provincial , after his fall at in 1633, to marry, to undermine his sense of himself, and that "the same strategy was later used by Inoue against and his companions."
Pedro Kasui Kibe, 1639
The prisoner Inoue could not break was Japanese. Pedro , born in Bungo, had been exiled to in 1615, crossed Asia on foot to Jerusalem and Rome, was ordained priest in Rome on 15 November 1620, and entered the Society of Jesus. The leaflet's chronology follows his road home: he sailed from Lisbon in March 1622, wintered at Mozambique, reached , Malacca, and Macao, was attacked by a Dutch ship on the way to Siam, waited at Ayutthaya, and at last crossed from Luban island with Fr Miguel Matsuda in June 1630. After a shipwreck near the Shichitō islands he came ashore at Bōnotsu in Satsuma around July 1630.He worked first at Nagasaki and then in the Kantō, and finally in the northeast. On 12 January 1639 a man named Chōzaburō denounced the couple at Mizusawa who had given him lodging, and between late May and mid June he was taken in the Sendai domain and brought to Edo.
There Inoue questioned him. He was tortured and hung in the pit, by the reading of the CBCJ leaflet on open ground near the Matsuchiyama Shōden temple at Asakusa (other Church sources place it inside the Denmachō prison: Disputed), and he died in the pit at fifty-two without giving up his faith; that fire was finally applied to his belly comes from the Dutch chief's second-hand report (Disputed; see our Kibe page).Cieslik judges it "quite certain" that in Edo Kibe was brought face to face with the fallen Ferreira, and Kibe's early biography says he urged his old superior to repent, though the words it gives him are of uncertain origin.Kibe himself did not deny the faith. The government's own notes, the Kirisuto-ki compiled from Inoue's papers, record it in a single line: "Kibe Peitoro did not apostatize. He was hung until he died."At the Pedro Kasui Kibe memorial park in his home country, a statue shows Inoue Chikugo no kami with the captured priest.Kibe was beatified at Nagasaki with 187 companions on 24 November 2008.
The last Jesuits, 1643
Ferreira's fall drew volunteers from Macao who hoped to bring him back. Cieslik records that Fr Antonio Rubino "had gone to Japan expressly to meet Ferreira and persuade him" to return, and that Rubino and his companions were arrested in 1642 as they tried to land in Satsuma and were taken to Nagasaki.On 27 June 1643 a second group, the Jesuits Pedro Marquez, Alfonso Arroyo, Francisco Cassola and Giuseppe Chiara with six companions, landed on Ōshima in Chikuzen and were arrested at once. They were sent to Edo on 27 July. "Such is the irony of fate," Cieslik writes, "that Ferreira, for whose conversion the group had come to Japan, was to act as interpreter at their trial."The prisoners reached Edo on 27 August, and there, Cieslik writes, "they were frequently questioned by the supreme court and even by the shogun, Iemitsu, himself. They were condemned to the torture of the pit, where, according to the report of the inquisitor Inoue Chikugo-no-kami, they all apostatized." They were then sent to Inoue's country house at Kohinata and confined there until their deaths.Chiara was given the Japanese name Okamoto San'emon and a Japanese wife, lived the rest of his life in the compound and worked for the religious inspection office; he died in Edo in 1685.We have only Inoue's word for what the prisoners said in the pit, and Cieslik's warning applies to them.
The Kirishitan yashiki
From about 1646 Inoue's lower residence at Kohinata in Koishikawa held a prison for Christians, which came to be called the , the "Christian mansion," or the "mountain mansion."The Mypedia says that Christians were questioned and executed there, and that apostate priests such as Okamoto San'emon worked there.It remained in use long after Inoue: in 1708 the Italian priest was brought there after landing in Japan, and was questioned by Arai Hakuseki. The prison was abolished in 1792.A fire struck the compound in 1724.Only a stone monument marks the site today, in a quiet residential street near the slope still called -zaka.
Inoue's notebook
When Inoue handed over his office, his notes, orders and records of interrogations passed to his successor Hōjō Ujinaga, and were later edited, in 1797, as the Kirisuto-ki.Heibonsha calls it an extremely valuable record of the ban kept by the government itself; it contains the oaths of the inspectors, methods of questioning suspects, numbers arrested by region, the relevant laws, and accounts of the Church's organisation and teaching.
It also shows the faithful through their persecutor's eyes. Nogueira Ramos quotes Inoue's observation that "among the lords, some carefully control Christianity; others do not," and he warned that in some domains, once farmers, merchants and craftsmen had sworn their oaths and been registered with a temple, nobody checked them again for a year or two: "It is obvious that a lot of Catholics are hiding in places where there is such carelessness."Nogueira Ramos suggests that in the first decades of the ban the authorities and the Christians gradually built up a modus vivendi: the warriors, in most cases, pretended that the threat had faded, while the remaining Christians kept their practice ever more discreet, complying formally with the laws.The inquisitor's own pages thus testify that the faith he hunted did not die. Another note describes what happened when officials made old women and other women tread on an image of God: "their faces turn red; they throw out their headdresses, breathe heavily and sweat." Inoue added that some of the women revered these images far from prying eyes.
The other Inoue
Heibonsha's historian adds that in politics Inoue was called "a protector of the Dutch," and that he was one of the leading receivers of Western learning of his day.Cieslik shows him at work: he sent warm coats to stranded Dutch sailors in Edo in 1643; he gave Ferreira a European book on astronomy to translate; and in 1648 the Dutch diary at Dejima records Ferreira coming to fetch medicines Inoue had ordered and bringing one of Inoue's servants for treatment.
He died on the 27th day of the second month of Manji 4 (1661), aged seventy-seven.His encounters with Ferreira and Chiara became the background of 's novel Silence, in which he appears as the inquisitor Inoue Chikugo no kami.