Life
His origins are uncertain. Heibonsha says he was from Nagoya (other accounts say Hiroshima or Hakata), and came to in the Tenshō era (1573 to 1592) under the protection of Suetsugu Kōzen, father of Suetsugu Heizō.Britannica adds that his original name was Itō Koshichirō, and that he drifted to Aki before reaching Nagasaki.Heibonsha also says he was clever and a fine talker, and well versed in Western-style sweets and cooking.
He probably reached Nagasaki in the late 1570s or early 1580s, having risen from servant boy of a Hakata merchant, possibly Suetsugu Kōzen.In 1586 he married into the powerful Nishi family of Ōura.
His rise came through . In 1592 (Bunroku 1), during the Korean campaign, he was sent as Nagasaki's representative to Hideyoshi at Nagoya in Hizen, caught his eye, and on his advice is said to have changed his name from 安東 (a rendering of Antonio) to 東安.The City of Nagasaki also dates his appointment as daikan to that meeting at Nagoya Castle in 1592.Britannica dates his time as daikan only from about Keichō 7 (1602), governing the lands outside the 23 inner wards of Nagasaki (sources differ: 1592 or about 1602). Nakamura Tadashi explains the post: Hideyoshi's governor Terazawa Hirotaka used the Nagasaki townsman Murayama Tōan as daikan to collect the rice tax from the surrounding lands, and kept the arrangement.Tōan lived in the old Shinmachi ward, now Kōzen-machi.
The first contemporary record of him is a Jesuit letter of 1593: the governor Terazawa stayed at his house whenever he came to Nagasaki, so he went with Brothers João Rodrigues and Cosme Takai to Nagoya to reconcile the governor with the Jesuits.At the Japanese New Year of 1603 he and Father João Rodrigues visited Ieyasu as Nagasaki's representatives.Terazawa was then removed, and Tōan was put at the head of a council of Christian men governing the city.As daikan he governed up to forty-six streets of the Outer Town (Sotomachi), while the governor Hasegawa Sahyōe ruled only nineteen in the inner town.
He was credited with originating the bulk purchase of silk by privileged merchants.He kept good relations with the forty-six street elders of the Outer Town, and worked with the anti-Christian Sahyōe because the governor's presence kept the Jesuits off his ground.He became immensely rich: the English merchant Richard Cocks called him "the richest man in Japon & com vp of base parentage by his subtill & craftie wyt".
He was a generous Christian. He gave large alms to churches and religious orders, and helped the Dominicans in particular.In 1609 the Dominicans took down their church at Kyōdomari in Satsuma, shipped the timber to Nagasaki, and built the Santo Domingo church on land donated by the Nagasaki daikan Murayama Tōan; it was destroyed only five years later, under the .Its excavated remains are shown today at the Santo Domingo Church Site Museum at Sakuramachi Elementary School.
In January 1610, during the three-day stand-off over the Portuguese carrack Nossa Senhora da Graça, Arima Harunobu and Hasegawa Sahyōe held their talks at his residence.The Jesuits held him chiefly responsible for the plot against the ship, which André Pessoa blew up that year, and a Jesuit later wrote that it was Tōan who persuaded Sahyōe to get Ieyasu to order the attack.That year João Rodrigues was forced to leave Japan, and the daikan turned against the Jesuits.
The fall came in stages. The failed Taiwan expedition of Genna 2 (1616) set off criticism of his faith and a feud with Suetsugu Heizō that ended in a lawsuit.Heizō accused him of misconduct in office, and then more came to light: his eldest son, Blessed Andrés Tokuan,had hidden missionaries; he had hidden his third son Francisco, a priest who had been exiled; and in the Osaka campaign he had supplied provisions and ammunition to the western side, where that son was among the defenders.Nakamura Tadashi puts it as an accusation that he was a Christian who had secretly sided with Toyotomi Hideyori.
The expedition of 1616 was led by a son of his, who sailed with thirteen barks laden with soldiers to take Taiwan.It must have cost him much of his fortune, and it left him weakened and out of favour with the court of Tokugawa Hidetada after Ieyasu's death in 1616.He tried to present it as an embassy, and sent an envoy, Dōyū, back to China to seek trade and a Ming letter in his praise, but the Ming refused.Even so, a Dominican friar put his fortune at around 100,000 ducats.
His rival also accused him of murdering seventeen or eighteen people, among them a family that had refused him their daughter.Before two senior councillors (rōjū), Tōan answered that Heizō was himself a Christian who wanted the office in order to shelter the Jesuits; asked whether they were Christians, Heizō denied it and Tōan said he was.The forty-six elders of the Outer Town sent a petition to Edo on his behalf, but it arrived too late.He lost the case, his goods were confiscated, and in early December 1618 he was sent into exile, to Kai or to an island near Edo.As a last attempt to save himself, he gave the shogunate a list of hidden priests compiled by apostates, among them Fabian.
His priest son, Francisco, was said to have led 400 Christian soldiers into Osaka castle for Toyotomi Hideyori, and died at its fall in 1615.
Kōdansha gives the date of his death: he was executed with his family on Genna 5.10.26 (December 1, 1619).Heibonsha says he was beheaded in Edo, and thirteen members of his family were executed in Nagasaki.The man who succeeded him as daikan was Suetsugu Heizō, who had accused him.
He and his son Shūan had been recalled to Edo only in the autumn of 1619, after the Nagasaki governor Hasegawa Gonroku visited Edo with a new informer, Araki Thomé.The death sentence named three crimes: aiding Hideyori with four hundred soldiers, great frauds against the shogun's treasury, and bringing back his priest son, banished by Ieyasu, and sending him to Osaka.He was beheaded in Edo on December 1, 1619, together with his third son; his eldest son, Andrés Tokuan, had been burned alive in Nagasaki on November 18 for sheltering missionaries.Two younger sons, Pedro and Paulo, were executed in Kyoto later that December.On July 24, 1620, three of Tokuan's sons and one of Shūan's were beheaded at Nagasaki.
The family's property, worth more than 100,000 ducats, was confiscated.
Churches and penance
He was baptized Antonio by the Jesuits and at first supported them, but when the Dominicans came to Nagasaki in 1608 he became their greatest supporter.He urged the friars to reserve the Blessed Sacrament permanently in their church and paid for the tabernacle, monstrance and lamp, a challenge to the Jesuit church of the Assumption, until then the only place in Nagasaki where the Sacrament was always present.In 1607 he built a church of St Anthony in Moto-daiku-machi, probably in honour of his own baptismal name, and his son Francisco, a diocesan priest, became its parish priest.In 1611 a respected and well-to-do Japanese, then governor of the city and probably Tōan, built the large church of St Peter in Imamachi and endowed a perpetual stipend for its pastor.
His private life was less edifying: the Jesuit sources say he kept many women, which caused trouble with his wife and sons.When the persecution of 1614 began he was at his country house at Mogi; to general surprise he dismissed the women with dowries, confessed, made peace with his family, and offered his wealth and his life for the faith.In the penitential processions of May 1614 he carried a heavy cross until his shoulders bled, and on May 14 his wife walked barefoot with a crucifix, crowned with thorns, with their two daughters and five sons.He was probably party to the plan by which small boats met the ship for Manila two leagues out and brought back two Dominicans, two Franciscans and two Japanese priests, one of them his son.After the churches were destroyed, the family hid missionaries: Fr Alonso de Mena stayed two years in Tōan's main residence in Katsuyama-machi, and Fr Francisco de Morales lived in his eldest son's house.
Family
Tōan's wife, Justa, came from the Nishi family.Their children included Andrés Tokuan, Juan Shūan, the priest Francisco, Pedro (1599 to 1619), Paulo (1601 to 1619) and a daughter, Antonia.The eldest, Blessed Andrés Tokuan, was arrested in March 1619 with Fr Francisco de Morales, whom he had hidden in his house, and was burned alive at Nagasaki on November 18, 1619.His wife, Maria, was beheaded at Nagasaki in the Great Martyrdom of September 10, 1622, aged 33.In July 1620 the widowed Justa, who had been under house arrest with some of her daughters, was thrown into the Nagasaki jail for refusing to give up the faith, with her daughter-in-law Catharina, Shūan's wife, and three grandchildren.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Birth year. Heibonsha gives 1566, Britannica about 1568, and Kōdansha gives none.
- Start of his time as daikan. Heibonsha and the City of Nagasaki give 1592; Britannica gives about 1602.
- Year of Suetsugu's accusation. Heibonsha gives 1616, Kōdansha Genna 4 (1618).Heibonsha's entry on the daikan office also has Suetsugu becoming daikan in 1616.
- Disputed: where the family died. Kōdansha says he was executed with his family; Heibonsha says he was beheaded in Edo and thirteen of the family died in Nagasaki.
- Unverified: the details of the Taiwan expedition (thirteen ships under his second son Murayama Shūan, scattered by a storm). No opened source gives them.
- Unverified: Francisco ordained in 1602 as parish priest of Nagasaki, and the San Antonio church built for him. Heibonsha confirms only that Francisco was a priest who had been exiled.
- Unverified: the City of Nagasaki's wording ties his secret support for Osaka to "the battle of Sekigahara".That conflicts with Heibonsha's account, which places it in the Osaka campaign.
- Origins and name. Hesselink makes him a servant boy of a Hakata merchant; Ávila Girón says he was from Hakata and was named at Hideyoshi's court about 1594, not at Nagoya in 1592; Cooper makes him a native of Nagoya in Owari and says Hideyoshi found "Antonio" hard to say.
- Birth year, further views. Álvarez-Taladriz and Morris give 1562; Hesselink gives 1566.
- Start of his time as daikan, further views. Tronu has him daikan under Hideyoshi and confirmed by Ieyasu; Anesaki gives 1592 to 1616 in one place and 1592 to 1612 in another. Hesselink thinks the Hideyoshi appointment unlikely, puts his first post in 1603, notes Morales's fourteen years in office ending in 1617, and suggests Edo-period writers backdated it because executing an appointee of Ieyasu was taboo.
- Year of the accusation, further views. Morris, Cary, Pagès and Cocks's diary all point to 1618; Morales has him losing office in 1617.
- Was he an apostate? Bartoli says he told the bugyō he had abandoned the faith seven years before; Murdoch dates his apostasy to 1615; Pagès calls both Tōan and Heizō apostates; Bartoli reports that processes at Manila in 1630 proved his apostasy and unrepentant death; Spinola called him worse than an idolater. Against this, Couros (via Hesselink) says he affirmed at the trial that he was a Christian, the Dominican writers say he died almost a martyr, and a relation by Carrero printed him among the martyrs, which Bartoli thinks confused him with his son. Cooper notes that Jesuit and Dominican reports seem to describe two different men.
- His end. Tronu says in one place that he was executed in 1618 and in another that he was exiled; Hesselink and Elison give beheading at Edo on December 1, 1619; Profillet says near Edo in November 1619. His place of exile is Kai in Bartoli and an island near Edo in Hesselink and Tronu.
- Where Shūan died. Hesselink says in Edo with his father; Profillet, Delplace and Pagès say near Kyoto.
- How many sons were killed. Morales says the father and six brothers of Tokuan; Bartoli six sons and a grandson, or more grandsons and fewer sons; Wilberforce names five sons; Cooper says seven sons died in 1619 to 1620.
- Order of the sons. Hesselink calls the priest the second son and Shūan the third, where the page calls Francisco the third.
- Osaka. Hayashi Razan (1654) and the Jesuit Visitor Vieira (1619) both say he sent help to Hideyori, supporting the Osaka campaign over Sekigahara.
- Taiwan expedition. Cocks's diary, as read by Murdoch, confirms thirteen barks of soldiers under a son of Tōan, without naming which son.
- Francisco and the church of St Anthony. Tronu says Tōan built the church in 1607 and Francisco became its parish priest; Cooper's Dominican sources praise him for building a church for his priest son. The ordination year is still unconfirmed.
- The informer Fabian. Bartoli says Fabian and the catechist Simon sold Tōan the names of the Jesuits and their hosts; the Dominican Orfanel records Fabian's testimony in his favour.
- His residence. the page gives Shinmachi; Hesselink gives his main residence in Katsuyama-machi; Tronu says he lived in Kane-machi.