Tokugawa Hidetada

The Japanese encyclopedias agree that history has been unfair to Hidetada. Nipponica's Takagi Shōsaku writes that the stories told of him mostly stress his honesty and dutifulness, and that his place in the government has been overlooked in the shadow of his father Ieyasu and his son Iemitsu; but the strength with which he spread the order of the shogunate through society, he says, deserves more credit.¹Among the measures by which he did so, Takagi lists, alongside the punishment of great lords and the control of the court and the temples, "the suppression of the Christians."¹Heibonsha's Asao Naohiro, too, counts among his achievements a foreign policy that "joined the strengthening of the ban on Christianity to the control and management of trade."¹

For Japan's Catholics, then, Hidetada is not a minor figure. The great persecution that began in 1614 was carried on for most of its first decade in his name.

He was born on the seventh day of the fourth month of Tenshō 7 (1579) at Hamamatsu castle, the third son of Tokugawa Ieyasu; his mother was Lady Oai of the Saigō family.¹His eldest brother Nobuyasu had taken his own life and his second brother had been adopted by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, so Heibonsha says the position of heir fell to him naturally.¹In 1590 he came of age at Hideyoshi's Jurakudai palace and received the character "Hide" from Hideyoshi's name.¹Hideyoshi also arranged his marriage to Oe, the third daughter of Azai Nagamasa and the younger sister of Yodo-dono.¹

At the decisive battle of Sekigahara in 1600 he led a separate army along the Nakasendō, but was held up besieging Sanada Masayuki's castle at Ueda and arrived too late, and his father was angry.¹In 1605 Ieyasu handed him the office of shogun; but real power stayed with the retired Ieyasu at Sunpu.¹²Under this double government, Heibonsha says, Hidetada kept charge of the lords of eastern Japan from Edo, while his father ruled from Sunpu.¹After the fall of Osaka in 1615, Yamakawa adds, the codes for the warrior houses and for the court were issued under his rule, though still under his father's influence.²

Christianity had been tolerated, uneasily, in the first years of Tokugawa rule. Then came the Okamoto Daihachi affair, a bribery scandal involving a Christian retainer and the Christian lord Arima Harunobu.³¹⁶On the twenty-first day of the third month of 1612, Heibonsha says, the shogunate proclaimed a ban at Sunpu, Edo and Kyoto, ordering churches destroyed and preaching stopped. It was meant for the shogun's own lands, but the lords took it as a law for every province.³Then in the twelfth month of Keichō 18 Ieyasu ordered a new edict, and the Zen monk Konchiin Sūden drafted it overnight at Edo; by the observatory's calendar the drafting fell on 31 January 1614 and the presentation the next day.⁴⁵It was proclaimed across the country under Shogun Hidetada's red seal, Heibonsha says.³⁴It called Japan "the land of the gods and the land of the Buddha," and unlike Hideyoshi's edict of 1587 it outlawed the faith itself, not only the missionaries.⁴⁵

In Kyoto it was proclaimed to the sound of trumpets. Every lord was to send the religious in his lands to Nagasaki; the churches were to be destroyed and the Christians made to renounce their faith.⁴That autumn the missionaries and leading Christians, among them Takayama Ukon (see his page), were shipped from Nagasaki to Macao and Manila.⁴⁶Heibonsha notes that the orders together kept forty-six missionaries behind, hidden in Japan.³

Ieyasu destroyed the house of Toyotomi at Osaka in 1615 and died at Sunpu in the fourth month of 1616.⁵⁷From then on, the dictionaries say, Hidetada governed directly.²

His first great act of policy concerned the Church. In the eighth month of 1616, Heibonsha's article on the closed country says, Hidetada ordered that the ban on Christianity be enforced down to the level of the farmers, and that Portuguese and English ships be allowed to trade only at Nagasaki and Hirado, not freely in the lords' domains; Chinese ships were exempt.⁸Heibonsha calls the order a turning point, because it set trade inside the framework of the ban.⁸Its article on the ban adds that after this concentration of European shipping at Hirado and Nagasaki it became hard for the foreign missionaries, moving in disguise, to keep up their work.³

In 1619 Hidetada came to the capital. At Fushimi, the Japanese bishops' committee and the city of Kyoto's monument record say, he learned that Christians were still held in the Kyoto prison, and in anger ordered that they be burned, young and old, men and women alike, including those who had already been allowed to go home; he is said to have decided the manner of execution himself.⁹

On 6 October 1619 fifty-two Christians of Kyoto, all lay people and eleven of them children, were carried through the city on carts and burned on crosses on the bank of the Kamo River.⁹A crier went in front proclaiming: "The Shōgun, emperor of all Japan, wills and commands that all these persons be burned alive as Christians." The martyrs answered, the French historian Léon Pagès writes from the Jesuit letters, "It is true, we die for Jesus! Long live Jesus!"⁹Among them was Tecla Hashimoto, who was expecting another child; she was bound to her cross with three of her children, the youngest, a little girl of three, in her arms, and her other two children were on the next cross. When the fire was lit at dusk, the mothers stroked their children's faces to quiet their cries.⁹They were beatified in 2008.⁹After 1619, the city's monument record says, Christians never again appeared openly in the history of Kyoto.⁹

The persecution grew harsher year by year in the Genna era.¹⁰In 1620 English and Dutch ships seized a Japanese ship captained by Hirayama Jōchin and found two friars aboard, the Augustinian Pedro de Zúñiga and the Dominican Luis Flores; in the summer of 1622 they and Hirayama were burned and the crew beheaded, and this affair, the historian Murai Sanae writes, opened a great persecution.¹⁰

On 10 September 1622, at Nishizaka in Nagasaki, fifty-five Christians died in one day, twenty-five burned and thirty beheaded; among them were the Jesuit Carlo Spinola, the Japanese priest Sebastian Kimura, and women and children who had sheltered priests or lived beside those who did.¹⁰This was the Great Martyrdom of Genna.

In the summer of 1623 Hidetada handed the office of shogun to his son Iemitsu.²¹¹He did not retire from power. As ōgosho he lived in the western enclosure of Edo castle, and Nipponica says real power still lay with him.¹That autumn the Christians of Edo were betrayed. Hidetada returned to Edo at the end of October and, the Jesuit historian Hubert Cieslik writes from the annual letter, left the decision to his son.¹¹On 4 December 1623 fifty Christians were burned at Fuda-no-tsuji, beside the Tōkaidō at the very entrance to Edo, where the city's notice boards stood, at a moment when many lords were in the capital. Among them were the Jesuit Girolamo de Angelis, the Franciscan Francisco Gálvez and the samurai John Hara Mondo, who had once served Ieyasu himself.¹¹¹²Three weeks later the wives and children of the martyrs, with others who had sheltered Christians, were executed near the same place, and Cieslik writes that the persecution spread across Japan as lords who had seen the burnings went home to their own domains.¹¹

In 1624 Japan broke off relations with Manila.¹³The road by which the friars had come was closed.

In 1626 Hidetada went up to Kyoto with Iemitsu and was made Chancellor of the Realm (daijō daijin).¹²Through the purple robe affair of 1627 he forced the emperor Go-Mizunoo to abdicate, Britannica says.²He died in the western enclosure of Edo castle on the twenty-fourth day of the first month of Kan'ei 9, which the National Astronomical Observatory's calendar database gives as 14 March 1632, and was buried at Zōjōji in Shiba.¹¹⁴Heibonsha notes that he loved camellias, was said to be a fine marksman, and that when his tomb was excavated in modern times a favourite gun was found buried with him.¹

Kōdansha's dictionary records a saying attributed to him: "In employing people, do not cast them off for a fault; allow them to make a fresh start."¹⁵

Zōjōji, where he lies, stands in Shiba in Tokyo.¹On the Kamo River bank in Kyoto a monument now recalls the fifty-two of 1619, and Nishizaka in Nagasaki is the hill of the martyrs of 1597 and 1622.⁹¹⁰The faith that Hidetada's edicts forbade was kept alive in hiding, and the people he condemned are now venerated by the Church as Blessed.⁹¹⁰¹¹