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]
CHAPTER XII
Recapitulation—Extent of the Japanese Empire—Valignani arrives at Nagasaki—Progress hitherto of the Catholic Faith—The Emperor’s Projects against China—Valignani’s Visit to the Emperor at Miyako—Ukondono—The returned Japanese Ambassadors—Audience given to Valignani—The Viceroy’s Letter—The Interpreter Rodriguez—A. D. 1588-1593.
The Japanese islands had been found by Xavier and his successors divided into numerous principalities, which, though they acknowledged a nominal subordination to one imperial head, were substantially independent, and engaged in perpetual wars with each other. The superior abilities of two successive military usurpers,—Nobunaga, who ruled from 1567 to 1582, and Hashiba Hideyoshi, who took first the title of Kwambacudono, and subsequently that of Taikō-Sama—had consolidated these numerous states into a real empire, embracing then as now the three principal islands of Nippon, Shimo (or Kiūshiū), and Shikoku, with many smaller ones, and some claims also of authority over parts, at least, of the large northerly island of Matsumaye, or Yezo, the latter the aboriginal name.
Among the dependencies, at present, of the Japanese empire, are reckoned at the north, besides this island, the southern half of the large island or peninsula of Sakhalin, called by the Japanese Oku Yezo (upper Jeso), or, as Siebold says, Karafuto, and the three smaller Kurile islands, Kunajiri, Etoropu, and Uruppu, numbered on the Russian charts as the 20th, 19th, and 18th Kurile islands, and the two latter called by the Dutch State’s Island and Company’s Island. On the south, the Lew Chew Islands form, or did form (for the Japanese seem lately to have renounced their claim of sovereignty), a dependency of the kingdom of Satsuma. But all these are of comparatively recent acquisition, subsequent to the accession of Hashiba. It is said, indeed, on Japanese authority, that Yezo was first invaded in 1443 by the Japanese family of Matsumae; but it is apparent from missionary letters that in 1620 it was a recent settlement. The Japanese annals date the conquest of the Lew Chew Islands from the year 1610; and, according to Golownin, the Japanese settlements on Sakhalin have been subsequent to the voyage of La Perouse in 1782.