A borrowed heir
Sumitada was not born an Ōmura. He was the second son of Arima Haruzumi, lord of the Shimabara peninsula, and in 1538, when he was five, he was adopted as heir to Ōmura Sumisaki, sealing an alliance between the two houses. He did not actually move to Ōmura until he was seventeen or eighteen, and he became head of the house in 1550.Sumisaki had a son of his own, Takaaki, who was adopted out into the family of Takeo; Ōmura City's own account of Sumitada notes that Takaaki, born an Ōmura and pushed aside for him, was his enemy for the rest of his life.
So the young lord began with a divided house, hostile neighbours (the Ryūzōji of Saga, the Matsura of , the Gotō of Takeo), and a small domain wrapped around Ōmura Bay.
A harbour called Our Lady of Help
In 1561 a brawl in the port of Hirado left fourteen Portuguese dead, and the Portuguese began looking for another harbour.Brother , a merchant who had become a Jesuit, sent a Christian from the capital, Gonoe Bartolomeu, with the pilot of the Portuguese ship to sound the bay of Yokoseura, at the northern tip of the Sonogi peninsula, in Sumitada's lands.It was deep enough. Gonoe went on to Ōmura and put the case to Sumitada: if he befriended the padres, the ship would come to his port every year.
Sumitada agreed. Portuguese merchants were to pay no duties for ten years, the Jesuits were given land around the harbour, and no non-Christian was to live there without the padres' leave.The Japan Tourism Agency's text gives the grant as two leagues, about 11 kilometres; Hesselink, reading the Jesuit letters, gives the hamlet "and two miles of land around it."The port was given a Portuguese name, Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, Our Lady of Help.
The ship came in 1562. A church went up on the site of a former Buddhist temple, and Christians from Bungo, Hakata, and the capital poured into the new town.
The painting at the altar
In the spring of 1563 Sumitada came to Yokoseura himself. , the superior of the mission, gave him the best meal the Jesuits could prepare, with Portuguese merchants waiting at table, and then led him to the altar, which had been made ready as if for a feast day, with a painting of Our Lady of Grace. The Jesuit letter says "the Japanese lord was very happy to see" it.
Not long afterwards he came back with twenty or thirty retainers and asked for baptism.He was frank about one limit: his elder brother, the lord of Arima, would not let him burn the Buddhist temples in his lands. Torres accepted his promise to give the temples no support, and baptised him the next morning, with the retainers who had come with him. Before the water was poured, the letter says, Sumitada had them recite the Christian doctrine aloud.He took the name Bartolomeu (Dom Bartolomeu in the Jesuit letters), and became the first Christian lord in Japan.The Prefecture record dates the baptism to early June 1563.
The same letter ends with a small request. When a larger painting arrived from India, could he have the little Our Lady of Grace from the Yokoseura altar? It was small, he said, and so just right to carry with him on campaign, so that he could pray before it every day.
Fire, and a third harbour
The price came quickly. That summer he burned the memorial tablet of his adoptive father Sumisaki, a public break with the old rites; to Sumisaki's old retainers it was an unfilial and sacrilegious act.By the end of 1563 Yokoseura had been burned to the ground and its Christians scattered.Who did it is told differently. Ōmura City's history names Gotō Takaaki; the Japan Tourism Agency says the anti-Sumitada faction among his retainers; the prefecture says simply forces opposed to Sumitada; Hesselink's timeline speaks of merchants from Bungo.
Sumitada survived, and kept faith with the padres. He opened Fukuda next, on the open sea coast, but it was exposed, and in 1565 ships from Hirado attacked the Portuguese carrack there.Meanwhile the Jesuits worked among the lesser lords of his domain. In 1567 Almeida baptised about two hundred of the leading men of Nagasaki village, whose lord, Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage, was already a Christian; in 1569 turned a temple there into the church of All Saints, Todos os Santos.In 1571 the first Portuguese ship entered Nagasaki Bay and Sumitada opened Nagasaki as his new port (some accounts give 1570 for the first ship, which was probably the year the site was surveyed; our The Founding of Nagasaki, 1571 page sets out why 1571 is preferred).
The hard years
The 1570s were years of war. Nagasaki, a new town on a promontory, was attacked by the Fukabori and Saigō and fortified itself.
This page has to record the hardest fact about him. Around 1574 Sumitada ordered the Buddhist temples of his domain pulled down. The Jesuit historian Charlevoix tells it as the Church remembered it. After a victory over the lord of Isahaya that his people credited to the protection of Heaven, Sumitada announced at the New Year audience, before his court and the chief monks, that he meant to end the worship of idols in his lands, and he spoke to them so earnestly about their salvation that they promised to be instructed. He sent for the fathers and Melchior de Figueiredo, who came with a band of catechists; in less than two years, Charlevoix writes, they baptised sixty thousand people, built forty churches, pulled down the temples and broke the idols. Most of the monks, he says, became Christians themselves, and a few went elsewhere.The Jesuit letters and the Ōmura family chronicle Gosonki, as Hesselink summarises them, count eight temple complexes destroyed, and record that those who would not convert had to leave the domain and that the grave of Sumitada's adoptive father was opened and the bones thrown into the river.These are hard things to read, and this page does not hide them.
Giving away a city
At the end of the decade the Ryūzōji of Saga were pressing hard on Ōmura. In 1579 the Visitor of the Jesuits, , arrived, and that autumn Sumitada went to meet him at Shimabara.There he made an extraordinary offer: he would cede Nagasaki, and the harbour-hamlet of Mogi on the other side of the peninsula, to the Society of Jesus.He made the offer formally on 9 June 1580, and on 24 June Valignano was already giving orders for the defence of the two towns.Ōmura City's history states it plainly: in Tenshō 8 (1580) he donated Nagasaki and Mogi to the Jesuits, and Nagasaki, until then little more than a poor village, grew rapidly into one of the great centres of the mission.
Why he did it is argued over. Valignano, reporting to Rome on 15 August 1580, gave Sumitada's reasons as he understood them: fear that the Ryūzōji would seize the town, the wish to keep the Portuguese ship coming, and a safe refuge for himself; the Jesuit annual letter of 1580 adds his wish to repay the fathers for their kindness.The Jesuit historian Hubert Cieslik grants that the gift also brought Sumitada political and economic advantage.Edo-period Japanese accounts later said Nagasaki had been pledged to the Jesuits as security for loans of money or arms; these are late works hostile to Christianity, and the deed itself speaks of a free gift.The deed and its terms are on the Nagasaki page.
Sumitada also sent young Japanese to Rome in the , the first official Japanese mission to Europe; Ōmura City counts it among his great works.According to the memoir of Afonso de Lucena, a Jesuit who lived close to Sumitada, Valignano asked Sumitada's advice about the plan, and Sumitada took it as a gift from heaven. Two of the four boys, Hara Martinho and Nakaura Julião, came from Ōmura, and a third, Chijiwa Miguel, was his nephew. The party sailed from Nagasaki on 20 February 1582, and the letters Sumitada sent with them are dated 27 January 1582.
A bird let go
His last years were spent in retirement at Sakaguchi, near Ōmura, in a house that had belonged to one of his senior retainers, after Ryūzōji pressure forced him to give up the headship.Ōmura City says he lived there fighting illness and devoted to his faith.When came into Kyushu in 1587, Sumitada and his son Yoshiaki submitted to him.
He died at Sakaguchi on the eighteenth day of the fifth month of Tenshō 15 (1587), aged fifty-five.Ōmura City's history retells a story from . The day before he died, Sumitada asked one of his women attendants to let the little birds out of their cage. She handled them roughly, and he was angry; then, calming himself, he apologised to her, gave her a sash, and said: "These little birds were made by Deus, and so I love them. I ask you to treat them with love from now on."Fróis says his funeral was large, and that the Jesuit priests offered Mass for him.
He died about a month before Hideyoshi's edict expelling the missionaries (Tenshō 15.6.19), and, as Ōmura City notes, without seeing the boys he had sent to Rome come home.He was buried at Hōshōji below Sanjō castle, moved later to the church at Kusaba and then, it is said, to Honkyōji; by the end of the Edo period the grave could no longer be found there, and today no one knows where it is.
The thread
Sumitada was a small lord in a dangerous corner of Kyushu, and he needed the Portuguese ships; the sources do not hide that. But the details they keep are about his faith. A lord who asked for the little painting of Our Lady to carry into his wars; a dying man apologising to a servant over some birds. And the town he gave away became Nagasaki, the city where, three centuries later, Japan's would come out of hiding.