Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604 to 1651): The Shogun of the Closed Country

Tokugawa Iemitsu was born on the 17th day of the seventh month of Keichō 9 (1604) in the western enclosure of Edo castle, the second son of the second shogun, Hidetada; his elder brother had died as a small child.¹His childhood name was Takechiyo, and he was brought up by his wet nurse, the woman later known as Kasuga no Tsubone.¹His parents, Heibonsha's encyclopedia says, preferred his younger brother, and tradition holds that his grandfather Ieyasu settled the succession on Iemitsu by the rule of the elder line.¹

He inherited, among much else, Ieyasu's ban on Christianity. Our page on Ieyasu tells how the orders of 1612 to 1614 became the founding law of the Tokugawa prohibition, and how under Iemitsu it was enforced more harshly still.⁷The dictionaries agree on the outline. The Digital Daijisen says he "suppressed the Kirishitan and strengthened the closed-country system"; the Kodansha dictionary says that after putting down the Shimabara rising he tightened the control of Christians and of trade and "completed the closed country."¹

In 1623 Iemitsu went up to Kyoto with his father and received the title of shogun.¹In Edo the change of reign was the occasion for a search. The Catholic martyrologist Louis Profillet, compiling the Jesuit and Franciscan accounts in 1895, writes that "the investiture of the new shogun" brought many martyrdoms.⁵Two priests were then in hiding in the city: the Sicilian Jesuit Girolamo de Angelis, who had worked in the north of Japan for years, and the Spanish Franciscan Francisco Gálvez.⁵When he heard that his hosts were being tortured to make them reveal where the priests had stayed, de Angelis resolved, Profillet writes, "like a good shepherd" to give himself up, since his capture would end the search. He put off his Japanese clothes, put on his religious habit and presented himself to the governor, with his catechist of twenty years, Simon Yempo. Asked who he was, he answered: "I am a priest, a religious of the Society of Jesus, born in Sicily. Knowing the happy nature of the Japanese people and its desire for salvation, I left everything to come among them and teach them the truth. I have taken up the customs of its people and made myself one of them."⁵Gálvez, who had hidden at Kamakura, was caught as he tried to get away by boat.⁵In prison they found Hara Mondo, a samurai who had served Ieyasu and lost his post under the 1612 ban; Profillet says Ieyasu had had his fingers and toes cut off and a cross branded on his forehead in 1615.⁵⁶The prisoners numbered about fifty.

Profillet reports, from the missionaries' letters, that when the governor of Edo referred the case to the retired shogun Hidetada, Hidetada sent him to his son, and that Iemitsu answered in fury: "A revolt of the whole empire would not touch me as much as the presence of two religious in my capital." He ordered the two priests and Hara Mondo to be led through the streets and burned, and when asked about the others replied, "They shall all be burned."⁵The quotation comes to us through the Catholic accounts and cannot be checked against a Japanese record (Unverified as verbatim).

On the 13th day of the tenth month of Genna 9, which by the national observatory's calendar tables was 4 December 1623, the fifty were burned alive at Shiba in Edo, on the high road to Kyoto.⁵⁶¹³Profillet says the lords who had gathered in Edo for the new shogun's investiture were among the crowd; that Hara Mondo spoke from his horse, showing his mutilated limbs as witnesses to Christ; that a lord rode up, declared himself a Christian and asked to share their fate, and that the shogun ordered him added to them.⁵In the flames, Profillet's sources say, de Angelis turned first towards the city as if praying for it, then preached to the crowd until he died, and his body sank to its knees. On the third day the Christians gathered and carried away what relics they could.⁵In prison Simon Yempo had converted forty fellow prisoners held for other crimes, and de Angelis had baptized the eight non-Christians in his cell.⁵The Church has since honoured them in two steps. Pope Pius IX beatified Girolamo de Angelis, Francisco Gálvez and Simon Yempo on 7 July 1867, and Profillet, writing in 1895, lists the two priests as Blessed.⁵¹⁵John Hara Mondo was not among them: he was beatified only on 24 November 2008, at Nagasaki, with Peter Kibe and his 187 companions.¹⁴¹⁵Our page on the great martyrdom of Edo tells the story in full.

For nine years Hidetada, as retired shogun, held real power beside his son. When Hidetada died in 1632, Iemitsu ruled alone.¹Heibonsha says that from then on the two centres of government became one, and that the saying attributed to him, "I am shogun by birth," fits what he made of the office.¹He removed rivals, among them his own younger brother Tadanaga, who was driven to suicide, and organised the senior councillors, the junior councillors and the commissioners into the offices that ran Japan for two centuries.¹

The ban on Christianity was built into that machine. Each year from 1633 to 1636 the shogunate sent orders to the magistrates of Nagasaki. Yamakawa's dictionary of Japanese history summarises them: the search for and arrest of Christians; rewards for informers; from 1633 to 1634 a ban on Japanese ships going abroad without a licence and limits on the return of Japanese living overseas; in 1635 a total ban on Japanese ships leaving and on overseas Japanese returning; in 1636 the expulsion of children of mixed Portuguese and Japanese birth.²The first order offered a hundred pieces of silver to anyone who denounced a priest.²The purpose, Yamakawa says, was above all to stop missionaries slipping in and to stop Japanese becoming Christians abroad.²

At home the controls tightened in the same years. The fumi-e, the treading of a holy image, began in Nagasaki around 1629.³⁸In 1635 the shogunate set up a commission for temples and shrines and ordered lords and their vassals to carry out inspections based on temple registration; from the 1630s every household was required to prove, through its Buddhist temple, that it was not Christian.³⁹Nipponica notes that the religious inspection served at the same time as a system of control over the whole population and as a register of the people.³

In the tenth month of 1637 the farmers of Shimabara and Amakusa rose. Nipponica's historian of Iemitsu writes that the burdens laid on the lords had been passed on to the peasants, and that the discontent "exploded, entangled with religion," in the Shimabara rebellion.¹Our page on the rebellion tells its story; it ended in the spring of 1638 with the fall of Hara castle and the death of almost all its defenders.¹⁰Nipponica says it raised the standing of Iemitsu's close advisers and led to still stricter control of Christians.¹

The next year came the last of the great orders. In the seventh month of 1639 the senior councillors issued in Iemitsu's name the decree that ended Portuguese voyages to Japan. Its preamble gives the reasons: that the Portuguese, knowing the Christian religion to be forbidden, still secretly brought those who spread it; that its believers formed bands and plotted evil; that they sent supplies to priests in hiding. Any Portuguese ship that came again would be destroyed and those on board beheaded.²The order bears the names of seven councillors, among them Matsudaira Nobutsuna, the close adviser whom Iemitsu had sent to command the siege at Shimabara.¹²In 1641 the Dutch trading post was moved from Hirado to the little island of Dejima at Nagasaki.¹¹¹

In 1640 Iemitsu gave the hunt for Christians a permanent office. Inoue Masashige, a senior inspector who had served at Shimabara, was made the first commissioner of religious inspection (shūmon aratame yaku).⁴For the next twenty years, Heibonsha says, Inoue directed the suppression of the Christians with great skill; in 1646 he set up a prison in his own residence at Kohinata in Edo, the place later called the Kirishitan yashiki.⁴Our page on Inoue tells the story of his office.

Iemitsu revered his grandfather to the point that, Nipponica says, he seems to have believed himself Ieyasu's reincarnation. From 1634 to 1636 he rebuilt the Tōshōgū shrine at Nikkō on a lavish scale, and went there ten times in person.¹He died at Edo castle on the 20th day of the fourth month of Keian 4 (1651), aged forty-eight, and was buried at Nikkō under the name Taiyūin.¹

The system he completed outlasted him by more than two centuries. The Japanese dictionaries count the closing of the country and the suppression of the Christians among the foundations of the Tokugawa state.¹For the Church it was the age of the hidden Christians: communities without priests, keeping the faith in secret within the very registers that were meant to prove its absence. The public notice boards against Christianity that the regime set up came down only in 1873.¹²