Konishi Yukinaga (Dom Agostinho): Admiral, Protector, and the Block at Rokujō

Konishi was born into a merchant family of Sakai who had traded in medicines for generations. His father was Konishi Ryūsa, baptized Joaquim, and Yukinaga was his second son.²¹His birth year is uncertain. Yamakawa's dictionary gives 1558, Oliveira e Costa about 1555.²¹He was baptized Agostinho (Augustine), and the Jesuits called him by his court title, "Tçunocami," lord of Tsu.²

He served first the Ukita lords of Bizen and then Hideyoshi, whose service he entered in 1577. The city of Uto says he was about twenty one when Hideyoshi took him on as a retainer and made a samurai of him.²¹⁵Hideyoshi put him in charge of shipping from the Shiwaku islands to Sakai, and the Jesuit annual letters call him "the admiral of the sea."²In 1585 he led Hideyoshi's fleet against Kii, and he was given Shōdoshima, the Shiwaku islands and Murotsu.²Oliveira e Costa gives 1583 for his conversion, while Nipponica says only that he was baptized early.¹²

In 1587 Hideyoshi, fresh from his conquest of Kyushu, turned against the missionaries. Only weeks before, at Hakata, Konishi and Ukon had urged the Jesuit superior Gaspar Coelho to make Hideyoshi a present of his oared warship, which Hideyoshi had admired. The ship was not given.⁸When the edict came, Takayama Ukon refused to give up his faith and lost his lands. Konishi was not punished.²⁶Murdoch notes that Ukon was the only Christian officer touched at that moment, and that Konishi and Kuroda Yoshitaka kept their places because Hideyoshi still needed them.⁶The novelist Endō Shūsaku, himself a Catholic, tells the story with sympathy. In his account Konishi, like the other Christian generals, swore to Hideyoshi that he would abandon the faith. Back in the capital region, a missionary rebuked him, and he took back his denial. After that, says Endō, he kept up an outward show for Hideyoshi while in secret he fed and housed the missionaries and protected Ukon in hiding on Shōdoshima.³Endō called this a "double allegiance," and saw in it the same pattern as the hidden Christians who later kept the faith under the ban.³

The Heibonsha encyclopedia confirms that Konishi sheltered Ukon.²Yamakawa calls him "the Church's protector, second only to Takayama Ukon."²

In 1588 Hideyoshi gave him the southern half of Higo, and he made Uto his seat.²⁵He first used the old castle on Nishiokadai, and the next year began a new castle on the hill of Shiroyama to the east.⁵Its main enclosure was about 150 by 130 metres, with second and third enclosures and houses for his retainers around them.⁵Tradition says the main enclosure carried a three storey keep, and one theory holds that it was later moved to Kumamoto castle to become its smaller keep.⁵The city of Uto notes that a canal ran from the castle to the mouth of the Midori river, fitting for the man the Jesuits called the admiral of the sea.⁵Estimates of his revenue vary: 240,000 koku in most encyclopedias, about 150,000 or 175,000 in the city's own pages.²⁵

In 1589 he put down a rising of the five lords of Amakusa, and Amakusa became part of his domain.²¹Amakusa had already been Christian for some years.¹

In 1592 Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Konishi led the first army, landed at Pusan, took Seoul and went on to occupy Pyongyang.²Nipponica's Matsuda Kiichi writes that he soon judged the conquest of China impossible and opened talks with the Ming envoy Shen Weijing to bring the war to a negotiated end.²Yamakawa goes further: in the course of the talks a letter of submission in Hideyoshi's name was forged, and Hideyoshi was offered investiture as "king of Japan." When the peace collapsed at Osaka in 1596, war began again the next year, and Konishi went back to southern Korea.²

Korea also sharpened his rivalry with Katō Kiyomasa, who held the northern half of Higo next to him and shared the vanguard with him in 1592.²Even so, when Katō and Asano Yoshinaga were besieged at Ulsan in the second war, Konishi joined the force sent to relieve them.²Katō was no friend of the Church. Oliveira e Costa calls him "one of the most ruthless anti-Christian daimyó."¹

Many of his soldiers were Catholics, and at his request the mission sent them a priest. The Spanish Jesuit Gregorio de Céspedes and the Japanese Brother Leão Hankan entered Korea on 28 December 1593 and lived in Konishi's fortress.⁴Francesco Pasio reported that Christians from the neighbouring forts came to Céspedes for confession, and that many soldiers were converted.⁴In 1595 Konishi sent the two men home, fearing that his rival Katō Kiyomasa would denounce him to Hideyoshi for bringing in missionaries despite the ban.⁴

One person he brought back from the war was a Korean girl, taken captive in the fighting. She was raised in his wife's household, became a Christian, and as Julia rose to be a lady of the palace of Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Jesuit letters call her "a person of singular good sense and discretion." In 1612 she was banished to an island for refusing to give up her faith.⁴(See our Tokugawa Ieyasu page.)

When Hideyoshi died in 1598, Konishi was, in Oliveira e Costa's words, the most powerful Christian daimyō, and he set out to make his domain a Christian land.¹Between February 1599 and October 1600 the mission recorded about seventy thousand baptisms across Japan. Oliveira e Costa writes that this figure was above all the result of Konishi's "diligent efforts."¹In October 1600 eleven priests and seventeen brothers were working in his lands. Because no reinforcements had come from Macao, Valignano chose to concentrate his men there, close to Nagasaki.¹When the lord of Hirado expelled eight hundred Christians, Konishi gave them a home.¹The Heibonsha encyclopedia adds that he worked for the care of lepers and the relief of orphans.²

The record is not all gentle. The annual letter of October 1600, as Oliveira e Costa reports it, describes the destruction of Buddhist images when villages in his lands were baptized. It also tells of an old woman whose house was burned on the officials' orders because she had secretly put her image back together and worshipped it.¹Oliveira e Costa, a Catholic historian, presents it as an example of how fragile conversions made under a lord's authority could be.¹

After Hideyoshi's death Konishi sided with Ishida Mitsunari against Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Jesuits watched anxiously. Ieyasu had tried and failed to win him over.¹²At Sekigahara in October 1600 the western army broke. Konishi was captured, and on the first day of the tenth month of Keichō 5 he was beheaded at Rokujō-gawara in Kyoto.²His brother Hayato, holding Uto castle for him, was attacked by Katō Kiyomasa, and the castle fell.⁵

A saying attributed to him at the execution is recorded in the Kodansha biographical dictionary. Asked whether he had anything to leave behind in words, he is said to have answered that even if he had a hundred million things to say, he would not confess them now, sitting at the place of execution.²The Heibonsha encyclopedia notes that the Church counted his death as a martyrdom.²

His family scattered. His daughter Maria was married to Sō Yoshitomo, lord of Tsushima, whose baptism Oliveira e Costa thinks had been mainly a gesture to please his father-in-law. After Sekigahara Yoshitomo kept his island, gave up the faith and divorced her, and she took refuge in Nagasaki. She died in 1605.¹

Katō Kiyomasa received southern Higo and persecuted the Christians soon afterwards. Oliveira e Costa writes that of the tens of thousands so recently baptized there, only a few thousand kept the faith, and that under hard conditions.¹Uto castle was rebuilt by Katō, pulled down in 1612, and destroyed again after the Shimabara rising of 1637. The city's historians think it was razed so thoroughly because the former Konishi town still held many Christians.⁵The rising itself broke out in lands that had once belonged to Konishi and Arima.⁷

Konishi Yukinaga is remembered in Japan as a soldier and a diplomat. In Uto he is remembered as the founder of the town. The Church remembers the merchant's son who took back his faith after denying it, sheltered a confessor, asked for a priest for his soldiers, and died at Rokujō as a Catholic.