CHAPTER XI
Events meanwhile in Japan—Downfall of Nobunaga—Accession of Hashiba, afterwards known as Kwambacudono, and, finally, as Taikōsama—Edict against the Jesuits—Return of the Ambassadors—A. D. 1582-1588.
While the ambassadors were on their way to Europe, great changes had taken place in the Japanese islands. A few months after they had sailed from Nagasaki, Akechi Mitsuhide, a favorite general of Nobunaga’s, had marched from Miyako to join Hashiba Hideyoshi, another favorite general, employed in prosecuting the war against Nagato. The stern severity of Nobunaga had rendered him very unpopular, of which Akechi took advantage to turn about and attack him, left as he was at Miyako almost without troops. Nobunaga, thus betrayed and surprised, having no other resource, set fire to his palace, and perished in it, June 15, 1580, with his eldest son. His second son, overwhelmed by this disaster, went mad, and in that condition set fire to his father’s patrimonial palace at Azuchiyama, thus kindling a conflagration which consumed almost the entire city, including a splendid temple, which Nobunaga had lately erected there, and in which, suspending all other worship by edict, he had required divine honors to be paid to a stone graven with his arms[49] and other devices. To the missionaries, who had all along counted upon making a convert of Nobunaga, this step had caused no less horror than surprise; and they found in it a ready explanation of the sudden ruin which had overtaken himself and his family, especially as his eldest son had been the first to pay the required worship.
Akechi now aspired to succeed the master he had betrayed and overthrown; but he was defeated by Ukondono [Kōyama Ukon], another general, a nephew of the Wada, who had played so conspicuous a part in previous revolutions, and a convert to the Catholic faith, who united with Hashiba to revenge their master’s death, the latter marching upon Miyako in the name of the late emperor’s third son, whom he proclaimed as Kubō-Sama, reserving, however, to himself all real authority; and thus again was Japan, as during part of Nobunaga’s reign, furnished with two “idle kings,”—a Dairi and a titular Kubō-Sama,—while the real power was in the hands of a third party.
Hashiba’s own very humble birth made him the more willing to begin, at first, with ruling in the name of another. Originally he was but a mere private soldier, who, having attracted the attention of Nobunaga, as well by his wit and drollery as by his courage and sagacity, had been gradually raised by him to the highest commands. This founder of the Japanese imperial authority, as it now exists, is described as having been short, but quite fat, and exceedingly strong, with six fingers on each hand, and something frightful in his face, his eyes protruding in a strange manner. It was he who completed what Nobunaga had begun, and who first gave to Japan, at least in modern times, a real and effective emperor, ruling supreme over the whole territory.
The son of Nobunaga, being restless under the humiliation to which he was reduced, was deprived of his place as Kubō-Sama, and obliged to be satisfied with the island of Shikoku, the smaller of the three larger Japanese islands which his father had assigned him as an appanage, while Hashiba declared himself the guardian of an infant child of Nobunaga’s eldest son, whom he set up as titular Kubō-Sama.
He showed at first the same favor to the Catholics as his predecessor had done, and the more so as Ukondono, his confederate against the rebel Akechi, was himself a convert, as were others of his great vassals and principal officers of his court and army.
As the son of Nobunaga could not keep quiet, he was presently stripped of all authority, though his life was spared, and Hashiba, assuming to himself the high title of Kwambakudono, strengthened himself still further by marrying a daughter of the Dairi.
Desirous to outdo his predecessor in everything, he converted Ōsaka, which had, till lately subdued by Nobunaga, been under the rule of a bonze, into a great city, and he built in its neighborhood a great stone castle. To this city, made his capital, the Jesuit seminary, originally established in the now ruined Azuchiyama, was removed, another being also set up in the neighboring city of Sakai. The king of Nagato was even induced to allow the reintroduction of missionaries into his territories. The king of Bungo having appealed to Hashiba for aid against his neighbors, the converted general Kodera Yoshitaka, the chief commander of his cavalry, whom he sent to Shimo, not only rescued the young king, Yoshimune, from his enemies, the kings of Chikuzen and Satsuma, who had taken his capital and ravaged his territories, but succeeded also in bringing up to the point of baptism that fickle and inconstant prince, who had long been a great trial to the missionaries, as well as to his pious father Civan, who, having given up to him the reins of government, had been treated thenceforth with very little respect. The result of this interference also was to reduce the whole of Shimo to the power of the emperor, who now reigned supreme over Shimo, Sikoku, and all the western part of Nippon, though still obliged to pay a certain deference and respect to the pretensions and power of the local kings and princes, whom, however, he required to be frequent attendants on his court, and to leave their wives and children there as hostages, and whose authority and consequence he sought by all means to diminish.
Peace thus reëstablished, everything seemed to favor the spread of Catholicity, when, all of a sudden, and in the most unexpected manner, in the month of July, 1587, the emperor signed an order for the banishment of the missionaries; and because Ukondono would not renounce his religion (at least such was the ostensible cause), stripped him at once of his place and his property. Father Cuello, the vice-provincial, was ordered to assemble all the missionaries at Hirado; and, in obedience to his order, they collected there to the number of about one hundred and twenty, only Father Gnecchi remaining concealed at Ōsaka, and one brother in Bungo. But when the emperor commanded them to embark on board a Portuguese vessel about to sail, they resolved not to obey. A few indeed went on board and sailed for China; but the greater part remained, a message being sent to the emperor that the vessel could not carry the others; to which he responded by ordering all the churches in Miyako, Ōsaka, and Sakai to be destroyed. The converted princes, however, in general, stood firm, except Yoshimune, king of Bungo; and even the unconverted ones are said to have protested against the emperor’s edict as in violation of the freedom of religious opinion heretofore allowed. The missionaries, in disguise, were distributed through the territories of their adherents. The emperor’s grand admiral, Konishi Settsu-no-Kami, who was viceroy of Shimo, though himself a convert, still kept the confidence of the emperor, as did also Kodera, the chief commander of his cavalry. The Portuguese merchants were admitted as before. After a little while the emperor seemed disposed to wink at the conduct of the converted princes, and the missionaries soon began to conceive hopes that, by caution on their part, the work of conversion might still go on, the stimulus of a prohibition not very strictly enforced, more than supplying all the benefits hitherto derived from the éclat of imperial favor.
Some difficulty about obtaining recruits for the imperial seraglio, especially from the province of Hizen, celebrated for its handsome women, but in which the converts were numerous, was said to have provoked the emperor, in a fit of drunken fury, to put forth so suddenly his edict of persecution. But, in fact, his policy brooked no power but his own. He did not fancy a religion which taught his subjects to look up with implicit reverence to a distant and foreign potentate; nor probably was his hostility to the Jesuits much different in substance from that sentiment which had caused Henry VIII, of England, fifty years earlier, to break with the holy see—a breach also ascribed by the Catholics to amorous passion.
But the cautious and artful emperor, who, however he might give way to sudden fits of violence and caprice, was a perfect master of all the arts of dissimulation, knowing, as well as Bonaparte, if not better, how to wait till the pear was ripe, was not yet wholly prepared to break with the converted kings and nobles, whom he found, perhaps, as well as the humbler converts, more attached to their faith than he had supposed. There were too many inflammable materials in his yet unconsolidated empire for him to run the risk of provoking a rebellion; and, besides, there still remained to be subdued eight independent provinces in the east and north of Nippon, including a kingdom of five provinces, in which were situated the great cities of Suruga and Yedo.
The conquest of this kingdom was speedily achieved, partly by arts and partly by arms. A new palace was erected for the Dairi, in place of the old one, which had been burnt during the late troubles at Miyako. A splendid temple had also been built near that city, in which it was suspected that the emperor intended to cause himself to be worshipped, as his predecessor had done; when, in August, 1588, Father Valignani, appointed ambassador to the emperor and kings of Japan, from the Portuguese viceroy of Goa, arrived at Macao, on his way to Nagasaki, having in his company the returning ambassadors to the Pope, who had touched at Goa on their way home, and who had stopped there a whole year before proceeding for Japan.[50]