A soldier who changed sides
Matsukura Shigemasa, Bungo-no-kami, was a former vassal of the Taikō who went over to Ieyasu at the time of Sekigahara.Married to a daughter of Shima Sakon, he served the new ruler at Osaka and distinguished himself there in 1615.In about 1616 he was moved from Gojō in Yamato to Shimabara.The domain was rated at 43,000 koku, later 60,000, and he was given 3,000 matchlockmen and freedom from dues.He first lived in the Arima family's Hinoe castle and soon built a new castle at Shimabara, to the north.
Years of tolerance
For his first years the new lord left the Christians in peace.He was an idolater, but well disposed to the faith, which Jesuits had explained to him at Suruga.In 1617 five Jesuits worked secretly in Arima, and he tried mildness after seeing that his predecessor's tortures had failed.In 1621 his domain was the only calm place in the Shimo, and he pretended not to know of his ten thousand Christian subjects and the five Jesuits who served them.When the governors of the realm rebuked him, he proclaimed on August 23, 1621 rewards for revealing a priest and death for hiding one, then let the matter drop.In those years he "did everything he possibly could to protect the foreign priests and their converts".
The prisoner Navarro, 1622
In 1622 the arrest of Fr Navarro in his lands dismayed him, for he had just boasted before the shogun that no religious lived in his domain.He sent the priest fruit by a page and said that he would have looked away, as he did with more than ten other Fathers whose hiding places he knew.He would have freed him, he said, if religion had not been made a matter of state reserved to the shogun.He often had the Jesuit brought from prison to his palace, on the pretext of questioning him, to talk of religion.Asked why a good God did not save all men, the priest answered with free will, and the lord replied, "It is so. You are right." (translated).The chapter of the priest's apology on the conquest of kingdoms troubled him most, for this, he said, was what pierced the shogun's heart.At parting he bowed with hands and forehead to the floor, and he later wept when told that the priest had thanked him before his execution.
The turn to persecution
The change came in the mid-1620s.After the Jesuit Provincial was arrested at Kuchinotsu in 1625, Matsukura ordered strict enforcement of the laws.He went to court at Edo in April 1626 and stayed nearly a year, and seeing the shogun's hatred of the faith he feared for himself.Denounced for having three religious in Kuchinotsu and Shimabara, he kept his favour only by swearing to exterminate Christianity.In January 1627 he had every Christian entered on a register, even babies born the day before, and had irons made to brand the word kirishitan on the forehead and both cheeks.He hammered the fingers of the confessor Leonard Matsuda himself.
Unzen, the saw and the straw coat
He became known as the most successful extorter of recantations that Japan had yet seen.Christians who would not give way were made to kneel on hot coals, hung from trees, branded, or half-drowned again and again in the sea.Apostates who tried to take back their pledges had their necks sawn with a bamboo saw.The lord attended the first neck-sawing in person and came back each day with new cruelties.He also used the near-boiling hot springs at the foot of Unzen to torture Christians.A Dutch witness, the head of the factory at Hirado, wrote that those who could not pay his heavy rice taxes were dressed in straw raincoats that were then set alight.In the missionaries' judgement, his methods brought more falls than martyrs and left that Christianity in ruins.About 1630 he asked Edo for leave to invade Luzon, which he said Spain ruled, and sent two retainers to Manila disguised as merchants.
Death at Obama
Matsukura Shigemasa died in December 1630 at the hot baths of Obama, at the foot of Unzen.At the end of August he had visited Takenaka, the governor, in Nagasaki to plan the end of Christianity in Kyushu.On the road home he fell into a fever and raved that a Christian was threatening him.He mixed more than twenty remedies into one draught, and his teeth fell out.Cries and blows were reported in his palace.At Obama, it was said, he refused to let the scalding water be cooled.Catholic writers told his death as a judgment, for he died at the springs he had used for torture.His death brought a short easing of the persecution.His son, Nagato-no-kami, succeeded him, and the son's oppressions were one cause of the Shimabara uprising.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- When he came. Oike gives the 6th month of Genna 2 (1616), Solier and Murdoch 1617, and Delplace 1620; Murdoch also calls him lord of Arima only from 1627.
- Why he came. Japanese writers say he was moved to Shimabara to stamp out Christianity, while the missionaries say he took no harsh steps until orders came from Edo in 1625.
- The story of his death comes from Catholic writers (Charlevoix, Bartoli, Caddell) and carries supernatural colour; Delplace's text prints the year as 1620.
- The mino dance is known through Cary's quotation of the Dutch factory head Koeckebacker.
- Pagès also calls him Matsouwoka, an error.