Story
A prince at Funai
Ōtomo Yoshishige, the man the missionaries would one day call Don Francisco, was born in 1530 at , the capital of Bungo province and today the city of Ōita. He was the eldest son of Ōtomo Yoshiaki, the twentieth head of a house that had ruled Bungo since the end of the twelfth century.His path to power was violent. In 1550 his father, who had planned to pass him over, was killed by senior retainers in the affair later called the Nikai-, and Yoshishige succeeded him.
He grew quickly into one of the strongest lords in Kyushu. When his younger brother, who had been made head of the Ōuchi house at , was destroyed by the Mōri in 1557, Yoshishige moved against the lords of Buzen and Chikuzen who had sided with them. By 1559 he held the office of military governor of six provinces, Bungo, Buzen, Chikuzen, Chikugo, Higo and Hizen, and the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru named him Kyushu tandai.In 1562 he shaved his head under the Zen master Iun and took the Buddhist name by which history knows him, Sōrin.He traded with Korea, with Ming China and with the Portuguese, and his port at Funai became one of the places where the great ships called.
Xavier at the court of Bungo
Sōrin first met the Church in the person of its greatest missionary. In the autumn of 1551 , hearing that a Portuguese ship under Duarte da Gama lay at Hiji in Bungo, left Torres and Fernández in charge of the young Church at Yamaguchi and crossed over to Bungo. Sōrin had already invited him, and Xavier entered Funai escorted by the Portuguese in all their finery.He stayed from September to November.The young lord received him courteously, and before Xavier sailed he obtained from Sōrin a promise to ask his brother, the new lord of Yamaguchi, to protect the two missionaries left there. Murdoch notes that Sōrin kept his word.
Xavier made few converts in Funai, and Sōrin himself was not one of them.Murdoch counts some twenty-seven years between that meeting and the day the prince asked for baptism.Those years were not empty. Bungo became a home for the mission. The Portuguese merchant , who had qualified as a surgeon at Lisbon, gave his fortune to the work, entered the Society of Jesus (in 1555 according to Japanese dictionaries, in the spring of 1556 according to the Jesuit documents; see Disputed),and opened a hospital for lepers and a general hospital at Funai, where he treated patients and trained Japanese assistants in European medicine.He also brought European methods of diagnosis, such as taking the pulse and examining urine, into his practice.
Usuki and the long road to baptism
In 1562 Sōrin built a new castle on the island of Nyūjima at Usuki, a sea castle on the Bungo coast, and in 1563 he moved there, leaving his eldest son Yoshimune at Funai.Usuki became a second centre of the mission. , called down from in 1576, spent the next four years mostly at Usuki, "the residence of the famous Otomo Sorin," and his letters are an eyewitness account of those years.Cieslik writes that during this time Christianity "attained to a predominant position in Bungo," and that a number of the nobles were converted, "often after dramatic discussions and disputes with their Buddhist relatives or retainers."
Around 1575 or 1576 Sōrin handed the headship of the house to Yoshimune, though he kept real power.His family life was in turmoil. His first wife opposed the Christians, and a quarrel inside the household over the conversion of his second son widened the breach. According to the annual letter of 1579, as Murdoch summarises it, Sōrin then put her aside and married a woman who was already a catechumen. He attended her instruction, and one day sent word to Francisco Cabral, the mission superior, that he too was ready to be baptized. He said that he had esteemed Christianity from the first, and that he had waited only to be fully persuaded and until he had retired from the government of his states.Cabral baptized Sōrin and his new wife on 28 August 1578.He took the name Francisco.Japanese reference works agree on the year 1578 and note that he was baptized after he had retired.
Mimikawa
Only weeks later the convert prince marched to war. In 1577 the Shimazu of Satsuma had driven the Itō family out of Hyūga, and the Itō had fled to Bungo.In October 1578 Sōrin sailed for Hyūga with his wife, his Christian son, Cabral, Almeida and a party of Christians, intending to found a new town there.The annual letter says he meant it to be a Christian town, and that as he took possession of the province he burned and wrecked the temples.(The historian Kimura Tadao questions the missionary reports of temple burning; see Disputed.)The Bungo army, swelled to some seventy thousand men, laid siege to the Shimazu fortress of Taki, with the old prince following more than a day's march behind.Shimazu Yoshihisa came to its relief, and on the field near the Mimikawa river the Bungo army was broken.
The defeat at Mimikawa was the turning point of Sōrin's life. Vassals fell away one after another, and the power of the Ōtomo went into rapid decline.In 1580 Sōrin came back into public affairs, first ruling jointly with Yoshimune and later guiding him.
The Church in Bungo at its height
Political decline did not mean the decline of the mission. The Visitor reached Bungo in September 1580 and held a meeting of the missionaries at Usuki, where he laid down the general policy for the whole Japan mission.At Sōrin's suggestion he studied the courtesy of the Zen monasteries, and used it to write a ceremonial of Japanese manners for the missionaries.On Christmas Eve he opened a novitiate at Usuki with six Japanese novices and six Portuguese, to train Japanese members of the Society.Back from Kyoto in October 1581, he blessed a church in Usuki.Classes in philosophy began in the college at Funai in 1583 and 1584, and the first course of theology there in 1585.A third seminary for boys was planned for Bungo, but the wars kept it from opening.
Conversions multiplied. Murdoch, working from the annual letters, records some five thousand baptisms in Bungo in 1581 alone, and reckons that the number of Christians there had grown fivefold since Sōrin's baptism, though they were still a small share of his subjects.Sōrin also gave part of Hakata to the Church as Church land.
The embassy to Rome
In 1582 four boys from the sailed for Europe with Valignano. Itō Mancio, a kinsman of Sōrin, went as the envoy of the lord of Bungo, and Chijiwa Miguel went for Ōmura and Arima.The letter in Sōrin's name that the boys carried to the Pope has been questioned by some modern historians; that debate is set out under Disputed.In Rome the boys were received by in 1585, and they did not return to Japan until 1590, by which time Sōrin was dead.
1586: the last campaign
The Shimazu advance did not stop. In 1586, with his domains collapsing, Sōrin went up to Osaka himself to beg for help.The letters he sent home from Osaka still survive. They describe Osaka Castle, the way he was entertained, and Hideyoshi and his attendants in lively detail.Hideyoshi sent envoys to order the Shimazu to stop, but they did not stop.
Late in 1586 the Satsuma army marched on Usuki. Murdoch, following the Jesuit letters, says that they captured and burned the town, its church and its novitiate, and that Sōrin, who lived near Usuki "with a Jesuit as his constant companion," barely had time to escape into his island fortress.Funai fell, and before the end of 1586 the whole of Bungo except Sōrin's island castle was in Satsuma hands.On 19 January 1587 Hideyoshi's half-brother Hidenaga arrived in Bungo with the vanguard of the army that would subdue Kyushu.
A Christian death
The campaign of 1587 broke the Shimazu, and Hideyoshi gave Bungo back to Yoshimune. To Sōrin he offered Hyūga. Sōrin declined it.Yoshimune had himself been baptized on 27 April 1587, taking the name Constantino.
Sōrin did not live to see what followed. He died of illness at Tsukumi, on the Bungo coast, on the twenty-third day of the fifth month of Tenshō 15, which is 28 June 1587.He was fifty-eight by Japanese reckoning.Less than a month later, on 24 July 1587, Hideyoshi issued his edict ordering the missionaries out of Japan.Three months after his baptism Yoshimune gave up his new faith in the face of the edict. He was reconciled with the Church in 1591, but in 1593 Hideyoshi took Bungo from him for his conduct in Korea and sent him into exile.
So Sōrin's life spans the whole first chapter of the Japanese Church: he was the young lord who received Xavier, the old man who asked for baptism after twenty-seven years, and a Christian at his death, a few weeks before the first great edict. The house he led did not keep the province, but the novitiate, the college and the hospitals at Usuki and Funai had already made Bungo one of the first homes of Catholic learning in Japan.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Birth date. The Yamakawa dictionary gives two days, Kyōroku 3.1.3 or 5.4. Britannica gives 5.4 with a question mark.Disputed.
- Why he favoured the Church. Kimura Tadao (Heibonsha) holds that Sōrin's motive was "clearly" trade. In the annual letter of 1579, Sōrin is reported as telling Cabral that he had esteemed Christianity from the first.Disputed; both views are attributed.
- Temple destruction. The annual letter of 1579 (via Murdoch) says that Sōrin burned and wrecked temples in Hyūga in 1578.Kimura writes that many such missionary reports and legends exist, but that nothing of the kind appears while Sōrin was the ruling , and that most later cases were acts of Yoshimune or damage from war that were wrongly attributed to Sōrin.Disputed.