Tokugawa Ieyasu and the Church: Two Years of Hope, Then the Ban

Ieyasu was born at Okazaki castle in Mikawa on the twenty sixth day of the twelfth month of Tenbun 11. In the Western calendar that day fell on 31 January 1543.²⁵As a child he was a hostage, first of the Oda and then of the Imagawa at Sunpu. After Okehazama in 1560 he went home to Okazaki, and he allied with Oda Nobunaga in 1561.²He fought Hideyoshi to a standstill at Komaki and Nagakute in 1584, then made peace and served him. In 1590 he moved to Edo as lord of the eight provinces of the Kantō.²When Hideyoshi died, Ieyasu was the greatest lord in Japan.

For two years the mission lived, in Oliveira e Costa's words, "the last great surge of missionary activities in Japan," and returned for a moment "to the rhythm of the golden years of the Nobunaga period."¹Between February 1599 and October 1600 about seventy thousand people were baptized.¹New residences opened in Buzen under the Christian lord Kuroda Nagamasa, and in Hiroshima and Yamaguchi under Mōri Terumoto. A church went up in Gifu, in the lands of Nobunaga's grandson Oda Hidenobu, a Christian.¹

The letters of these months are full of small signs of the new freedom. In Bizen, the land of the regent Ukita Hideie, Christian nobles such as Akashi Morishige swore their oath of loyalty to their lord in the name of God, not in the name of the Japanese gods.¹When the lord of Hirado drove out eight hundred Christians, the Jesuits fed them at Nagasaki for four months until Konishi Yukinaga gave them a home in his lands.¹The real shortage was of priests. In October 1599 Valignano wrote: "There is no father who does not have ten, twelve, fifteen or twenty villages in his care, enduring the most intolerable labour to assist the sick, and bury the dead and hear confession," and still more than two thirds of the Christians could not get to confession.¹

Ieyasu himself was courteous. In October 1599 Valignano reported that the first meeting between Ieyasu and the Jesuit interpreter João Rodrigues "Tçuzu" had gone well. Ieyasu showed himself "very benignly inclined towards our affairs," though he asked the Jesuits to wait a little longer before they were formally reinstated.¹In February 1600 Valignano wrote that Ieyasu had allowed "that everyone can choose the faith that they thought best" and had given the Christians of Nagasaki leave "to live freely and in peace as Christians."¹Ieyasu had no missionaries in his own provinces, but the annual letter of October 1600 says that "the fathers visit him in much the same way as they used to earlier with Nobunaga."¹

By 1600 Japan had about three hundred thousand Catholics and at least fourteen baptized daimyō, scattered across the country.¹

Then the regents fell out. The Jesuits hoped the balance would hold. Bishop Luís de Cerqueira wrote that when there were many lords Christianity always gained some, but that an absolute lord who was "averse to the law of God" could bring grief "to all of Christianity as was seen with Taycó."¹In October 1600 Ieyasu won the battle of Sekigahara.¹²

The Christian lords had not stood together. Konishi Yukinaga and Oda Hidenobu fought against Ieyasu. Kuroda Nagamasa fought for him, and Kyōgoku Takamoto helped take Gifu from Hidenobu.¹Konishi was beheaded at Rokujō-gawara in Kyoto on the first day of the tenth month of Keichō 5.⁶His southern Higo went to Katō Kiyomasa, whom Oliveira e Costa calls "one of the most ruthless anti-Christian daimyó." Of the tens of thousands so recently baptized there, he says, only a few thousand kept the faith, and that in hard conditions.¹

Oliveira e Costa sums up the larger change. Japan now came under a single lord, "the least desirable political solution from the Jesuit point of view," whose "fixed politico-religious convictions" left no place for Christianity. He adds that this was not yet visible in 1600 and 1601.¹

For more than ten years it did not show. Ieyasu became shogun in 1603, handed the office to his son Hidetada in 1605, and from 1607 ruled as retired shogun from Sunpu.²He wanted trade, with the Portuguese of Macao and also with the Spaniards of Manila. Murdoch, writing from Pagès, tells how the Franciscan Jerónimo de Jesús wrote Ieyasu's letter to the Philippines and meanwhile "built the first church and celebrated the first Mass in Yedo."³Murdoch also tells how Ieyasu, when one of the Nagasaki governor's servants blamed the Jesuits for some bad purchases, looked into the matter, found the Fathers innocent, and gave them a patent to make all his purchases in future.³João Rodrigues was known as the interpreter of the ruler for Portuguese affairs.³

In 1600 too the Dutch ship Liefde came ashore in Bungo, and with it the Englishman William Adams. The Heibonsha encyclopedia notes that through Adams and others Ieyasu gained a new knowledge of the world.²Adams joined the circle of advisers around Ieyasu at Sunpu, alongside the Zen monk Konchiin Sūden.²

The turn came through two Catholics. In January 1610 the Christian lord Arima Harunobu attacked and sank the Portuguese ship Nossa Senhora da Graça, also called the Madre de Deus, at Nagasaki.⁷He hoped for a reward of his family's old lands. Okamoto Daihachi, a Christian (baptized Paulo) in the service of Ieyasu's minister Honda Masazumi, took large sums from him with promises to arrange it.⁷In 1612 the fraud came out. Daihachi in turn accused Harunobu of plotting to kill the Nagasaki governor, Hasegawa Sahyōe. Harunobu lost his domain, was exiled to Kai and was ordered to die. Daihachi was burned at the stake on the Abe riverbank at Sunpu.⁷

Gonoi Takashi, a historian of the Christian century, writes that Ieyasu used this affair to make clear his stand against Christianity. Ieyasu issued a ban at Sunpu, Edo and Kyoto, had his own Sunpu household searched for Christians, and expelled a dozen or more retainers and ladies in waiting.⁷The encyclopedias date the 1612 order differently, to the third or the eighth month of Keichō 17.⁸

In the twelfth month of Keichō 18 Ieyasu ordered a new edict, and 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.⁴It was issued in Hidetada's name, with Ieyasu behind it.⁴It opened by calling Japan "the land of the gods and the land of the Buddha," and unlike Hideyoshi's edict it outlawed the faith itself, not only the missionaries.⁴

What followed is told on our page on the 1614 ban. The Jesuits of Kyoto were sent to Nagasaki. Takayama Ukon, whom Ieyasu had found "invincible on the matter of religion," was sent into exile with his family. Through the summer of 1614 Nagasaki held processions and public penances, hoping the order might be softened.⁴A Portuguese embassy went to Sunpu with rich gifts. Ieyasu would not move: if the law spread, he said, his subjects would soon be in open revolt, and he wanted not one padre left in his lands.⁴In November the ships sailed from Fukuda for Manila and Macao. Dozens of priests stayed behind in hiding.⁴

In 1615 Ieyasu destroyed the house of Toyotomi at Osaka and issued the codes for the warrior houses and the court.²He died at Sunpu castle on the seventeenth day of the fourth month of Genna 2, which was 1 June 1616.²⁵He was buried at Kunōzan and then moved to Nikkō, and the court gave him the divine title Tōshō Daigongen.²

The ban he began did not die with him. Nipponica's historian of the ban, Murai Sanae, writes that the 1612 and 1613 to 1614 orders became the founding law of the Tokugawa prohibition.⁸Under his grandson Iemitsu, the Ōbunsha dictionary notes, it was enforced more harshly still, and the notice boards came down only in 1873.⁸⁴

The Church remembers these years with sorrow, not bitterness. Under Ieyasu the faith had its last open flowering in old Japan. Seventy thousand were baptized in two years, a first Mass was said in Edo, and Christians in Nagasaki were promised that they could live "freely and in peace." Then came the edict. The priests who stayed behind in 1614 began the long underground life of the Japanese Church.