Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537? to 1598)

The Jesuit historian Charlevoix, writing in the eighteenth century from the mission letters, tells Hideyoshi's early life as a rags to riches story. His birth, says Charlevoix, was "of the most obscure"; he was first called Tōkichirō, and his first job in a gentleman's household was to cut wood in the forest and carry it into town on his shoulders. Oda Nobunaga noticed his wit, took him into service, and promoted him through every rank of the army.²When Nobunaga was killed in 1582, Hideyoshi held the main forces of the realm and used them, in Charlevoix's phrase, "to climb the throne".²Charlevoix adds that in the first years of his rule he greatly favoured the Christian religion.²(These details come from a later Jesuit retelling and should be read as Charlevoix's account.)

Hideyoshi began building Osaka Castle in 1583 on the site of the Ishiyama Honganji. The castle museum notes that he liked to guide visitors round the keep himself, showing off its gold and its treasure.³In the seventh month of 1585 he took the court title of kampaku, regent.¹His year of birth is usually given as 1537, but some sources give 1536 (see Disputed).

Hideyoshi came into Kyushu in 1587 to crush the Shimazu of Satsuma, and the lords of the island submitted one by one. In the Ōmura domain, Sumitada and his son Yoshiaki went to him to submit; Sumitada died in the fifth month of that year.⁴

After the Shimazu surrendered, Hideyoshi moved north to Hakozaki, beside Hakata Bay. A document in his name addressed to Hakozaki, now known through the Agency for Cultural Affairs' database, shows him entering the place on Tenshō 15.6.7 and warning his troops against looting the townspeople.⁵The shrine of Hakozaki records that he camped at the shrine, ordered the rebuilding of war ruined Hakata, and held tea gatherings at which Sen no Rikyū served.⁶

Coelho came up to Hakata to see him. He had his own light warship, a fusta, and Hideyoshi came aboard and toured it.¹⁷The European accounts agree on what happened next, though not on the exact order of days. The captain of the Portuguese ship at Hirado, Domingos Monteiro, came to apologise that his ship could not be brought round to Hakata. Hideyoshi received him courteously. Then, around midnight, a messenger roused Coelho with a set of questions: why the padres forced Hideyoshi's subjects to become Christians, why they had temples destroyed, why they persecuted the Buddhist clergy, why they ate oxen and cows, and why the Portuguese were allowed to buy Japanese and carry them off as slaves.⁷A second messenger read out the sentence of exile on the Christian lord Takayama Ukon, who lost his command and his fief.⁷Coelho, by Murdoch's account following Charlevoix, answered that the padres had never used force, and pointed to the written permission Hideyoshi himself had given them in May 1586.⁷The answer changed nothing.

The exile of Ukon showed where the line ran. Murdoch notes that at this moment Ukon was the only one of Hideyoshi's Christian officers to be touched; Konishi (Dom Agostinho) and Kuroda (Simeão), also Christians, kept their places because Hideyoshi still needed them.⁷What Hideyoshi could not accept was a great lord whose loyalty seemed to run first to the padres.

The edict dated Tenshō 15.6.19, which the National Astronomical Observatory's calendar data give as 24 July 1587, declared that Japan was "the land of the gods" and that the padres must leave within twenty days. The Portuguese ships, it said, came for trade, and that was a separate matter.⁸⁹Its target was the missionaries, and the lords who, as its first articles complained, had made their vassals Christians and had shrines and temples destroyed.⁸

Why did he do it? Hideyoshi's own explanation, as a Portuguese merchant recorded it in the autumn of 1588, was that the padres preached a law hostile to the kami and hotoke of Japan, and that the kami "are none other than the Lords of Japan", so that the new law, "although it may be good for other countries, is not good for Japan".¹Jesuit writers of the time put it down to pride, or to the whispering of his physician Seyakuin Zensō.⁷Murdoch, writing in 1903, thought it deliberate policy rather than a drunken whim.⁷That is his interpretation, and Murdoch had his own leanings (see Notes). What the edict itself shows is that Hideyoshi kept the Portuguese trade while sending the padres away.⁸¹³

Hideyoshi had promised in 1586 to leave Nagasaki to the Church. In 1587 his officers had the town's bastions torn down and its moat filled, and the Jesuits' lordship there was ended.¹On Tenshō 16.4.6 (1588) a letter under his vermilion seal named Nabeshima Naoshige as his deputy for "the lands round Nagasaki which in recent years were held by the padres", with orders to collect their revenue.⁴Nagasaki became part of his personal domain.¹

Yet the edict was enforced unevenly. Many Jesuits did not leave; they went into hiding in Christian domains.¹In 1590 Alessandro Valignano came back to Japan as ambassador of the Viceroy of Goa, bringing with him the four young Japanese who had travelled to Rome and returned laden with gifts. Hideyoshi was eager to meet them. He received the embassy at his palace, the Jurakutei in Kyoto, on 3 March 1591.¹He was pleased with the presents, but he would not withdraw the edict. All he granted was that ten padres might stay in Nagasaki to serve the Portuguese traders, and the São Paulo church on the cape could be opened again.¹Four years after the ban, the churches of Nagasaki were still standing, and many Christians began to hope that Hideyoshi meant to let the faith alone.¹

The worst came near the end. In the winter of 1596 to 1597 Hideyoshi ordered the arrest of the Franciscans in Kyoto and Osaka and the Japanese Christians with them. They were walked to Nagasaki and crucified there on 5 February 1597: six foreign Franciscans and twenty Japanese, among them three Jesuits.¹¹⁰Murdoch counts these twenty six as the only Christians whose deaths Hideyoshi was directly responsible for.⁷

Hideyoshi died at Fushimi Castle on Keichō 3.8.18, 18 September 1598 in the Gregorian calendar, leaving a small son, Hideyori; Murdoch's source has him talking to the very end of nothing but how to secure his son's succession.⁷⁹¹¹¹⁴Murdoch, who admired him greatly, called him "the greatest man Japan has ever seen".⁷For the Christians of Japan his reign was something more mixed: the years of open favour at Osaka, the sudden ban at Hakozaki, a long uneasy tolerance in which the missionaries hid and the churches were sometimes pulled down and sometimes rebuilt, and finally the hill at Nishizaka.

He had told the Jesuits in 1586 that he wished above all to leave a great name after he died.¹His successor Tokugawa Ieyasu would take up where he left off.