The Christian Century

(This first appeared in the Japan Times, Dec. 2007)

 

Some scholars say Japan's Christian history began long before the famous "Christian century" (1549-c.1640). Their claim takes us all the way back to 7th- and 8th-century Nara, where Nestorian Christians from Persia are said to have built churches, operated a leper hospital and even converted the Empress Komyo, wife of the highly devout Buddhist Emperor Shomu (reigned 724-749), to Christianity.

The evidence is tantalizing but inconclusive. If they existed, Nara's early Christians left no discernible mark on the culture. The Spanish and Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who arrived some eight centuries later not only had to start from scratch, they had to define scratch. How does one begin to explain, in an alien language, such alien and mysterious concepts as transcendent Godhead, the Virgin Birth, the sacrifice on the Cross of the Son of God for the redemption of mankind?

The monumental difficulty of the task is a measure of the determination of the men who faced it, and Francis Xavier, the Basque Jesuit whose landing at Kagoshima in August 1549 inaugurates the "Christian century," was nothing if not determined. A prayer attributed to him begins, "Eternal God, Creator of all things, remember that the souls of unbelievers have been created by thee and formed to thy own image and likeness. Behold, O Lord, how to thy dishonor hell is being filled with these very souls... Do not permit, O Lord, I beseech thee, that thy divine Son be any longer despised by unbelievers..."

Thus fortified, the future saint went to work on the Japanese.

***

He had by then been in Asia seven years, having arrived in Goa, "the Rome of India," capital of Portugal's Far Eastern empire, in 1542. He traveled vast distances, much of his missionary work unfolding among cannibals and warriors of remote South Asian Islands. Of the Moluccas, the "Spice Islands" of today's eastern Indonesia, he wrote home, "The people of these islands are very barbarous and full of treachery..... There are islands here in which men eat one another..."

Of an island off the modern Philippines he wrote, "The land of Moro is very dangerous because its people are treacherous and put poison in food and drink. So the people who should have looked after the Christians stopped going there.... On account of the need I have of losing my temporal life to succor the spiritual life of my neighbor, I determined to go myself to Moro..."

His work there done (or at least begun), he was in 1547 on his way back to Goa when he heard at Malacca, in today's Malaysia, encouraging reports of a brand new Asian discovery. Four years earlier a party of Portuguese traders blown off-course by a storm had been the first Europeans known to set foot on Japan. "There, " wrote Xavier, "according to the Portuguese, much fruit might be gained for the increase of our holy faith, more than in any other part of the Indies, for they are a people most desirous of knowledge, which the Indian heathen are not."

At Malacca he met a Japanese, a sometime pirate named Yajiro: "He came to seek me with a great desire to know about our religion." Yajiro, christened Paul, became Xavier's companion and interpreter. He proved a mixed blessing.

***

Japan in the 16th century was disintegrating. Feudal lord fought feudal lord; combat had become endemic; "there was not a province in Japan," writes the historian George Sansom, "free from the armed rivalry of territorial barons or lords of the [Buddhist] church." Whether one calls this warfare or anarchy, there were in 1549 few signs of the firmly united nation that was to emerge a scant 50 years later.

Nor was there much in Xavier's first faltering steps in this highly civilized but, to him, utterly unknown land that suggested the groundswell of success soon to reward the Jesuits' unshakable confidence and dedication. The success was brilliant but fleeting. It ended tragically in what Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician and chronicler stationed at Nagasaki early in the 18th century, called "the most cruel persecution and torture of Christians ever witnessed on this globe..., lasting more than 40 years until the last drop of Christian blood was spilled."

Xavier, Yajiro and two Jesuit companions boarded a Chinese pirate ship at Malacca and disembarked at Kagoshima in southern Kyushu. Xavier was impatient to push on to Kyoto and convert "the king of Japan." The trouble was, there was no "king of Japan," only an emperor who was powerless and a shogun, Ashikaga Yoshiteru, who was even more so. Central authority had altogether broken down. The bringers of the Word would have to be content to deal with warlords.

These were, for the most part, accommodating. Engaged in their unremitting internecine feuds, the Kyushu and southern Honshu daimyo were quick to see the value of Portuguese backing, Portuguese trade, and, of course Portuguese guns, first introduced into Japanese warfare around this time. If a courteous reception of the missionaries brought such rewards, it seemed a small price to pay.

Xavier and his little band were first welcomed at Kagoshima by the "king of Satsuma"---the daimyo Shimazu Takahisa. He granted the newcomers permission to preach in the streets, and listened to them dispute the finer points of ultimate reality with a group of Zen monks. Yajiro's skills as an interpreter, which modern scholars do not rate highly, must have been taxed to the limit. Still, so considerable was the degree of mutual good will among the parties that the missionaries were deeply distressed when the monks declined baptism---"preferring," laments the contemporary Jesuit chronicler Luis Frois, "to land lost and miserable in hell."

The padres did better on the streets, baptizing, according to Frois, 150 people in the 10 months they were there.

Yamaguchi in southern Honshu was their next stop, and there too the "king" was cordial, at least at first. His sudden change of mood suggests the thin ice the missionaries trod. Here is Sansom's account: "Xavier had an audience with [the daimyo Ouchi Yoshitaka], at whose request he told the interpreter to read in Japanese a document, already prepared, which gave the elements of Christian doctrine. This included a discourse upon error and sin. When the reader came to a passage on sodomy, describing those guilty of this offense as filthier than swine and lower than dogs, the daimyo changed color and dismissed them, no doubt because he, in common with many military men and monks in that part of Japan, was given to such habits. The interpreter thought that they might have their heads cut off, but they left safely..."

As in Kagoshima, Xavier in Yamaguchi got on well with the Buddhist priests. Here the prevailing sect was Shingon, which worships the Buddha Vairocana, Dainichi in Japanese---an avatar of the cosmos as a whole. A befuddled Yajiro convinced the credulous Xavier that Dainichi was none other than the Catholic "Deus-sama" in Oriental dress, that Shingon and Christianity were essentially one.

This was good news indeed, but it did not bear scrutiny. "[Xavier] approached the monks again," writes Sansom, "and questioned them on the mystery of the Holy Trinity, asking whether they believed the second Person of the Trinity had become a man and had died on the cross to save mankind. The Shingon monks were accustomed to mysteries, but these things were so strange to them that they seemed like fables or dreams, and some laughed at what the father said."

Realizing his mistake, Xavier turned acerbic. He now taught, says Frois, that Shingon was "an invention of the devil, as also were all the other sects of Japan."

Xavier left Japan in 1551, more hopeful than discouraged, strangely enough. Stranger still, his hope was borne out---for a time; a very brief time..

***

On July 24, 1587 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second of the three great unifiers of Japan and by then the most powerful warlord in the country, issued an edict giving the foreign purveyors of the "pernicious doctrine"20 days to leave the country.

It was a bolt out of the blue. Christianity's prospects had flowered dramatically in the 36 years since Xavier's departure. By 1582 there were 200 churches serving an estimated 150,000 native Christians. Common people aside, the Jesuits had friends and allies in high places, none friendlier or higher than Hideyoshi himself, or so it seemed---had he not, in 1586, granted the padres the right to reside and preach the gospel unmolested "in all the lands of Japan?"

As early as 1559 it was beginning to look as if some at least of the seeds sown by Xavier had fallen on good ground. That year Padre Gaspar Vilela succeeded in ingratiating himself with the shogun, Ashikaga Yoshiteru. That in itself meant little, the shogun being a mere figurehead, but when the Buddhist clergy in Kyoto demanded the expulsion of the padres on the grounds the foreign religion was corrosive to native tradition, a trial convened to weigh the truth of the charge ended in a startling triumph for Christianity: two eminent Confucian scholars sitting as judges heard the evidence and requested baptism---being satisfied, they said, that Christianity was the true religion.

In Kyushu too, Christianity was looking more and more like the wave of the future. Omura Sumitada, lord of the territory surrounding Nagasaki, became Japan's first Christian daimyo, receiving baptism in 1563 and taking the Christian name Bartholomeu. Eleven years later, beset by regional enemies, he was extricated by a Portuguese fleet---in return for which, suggested the Jesuit Gaspar Coelho, Bartolomeu ought, as the chronicler Frois records, "to extinguish totally the worship and veneration of the idols in his lands" until "not a single pagan remained."

The result was Japan's first forcible mass conversion. Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines were burned to the ground, and Christianity at one stroke gained 60,000 new converts. (A similar if less violent mass conversion was imposed in 1577 on nearby Shimabara Peninsula. It bore tragic fruit six decades later, as we shall see.)

To the east of Bartolomeu's domain lay the province of Bungo, whose daimyo, Otomo Sorin, had been well-disposed towards the Portuguese since Xavier's passage through his territory in 1551. His lively protestations, in letters to the Portuguese base at Macao, of respect for "the things of God" and "the Christians who are in my kingdom" accompany requests for arms, making it difficult to ascertain which side of the spiritual-temporal divide was uppermost in his mind. On the one hand, he did not accept baptism until 1578; on the other hand, having accepted it, he seems to have embraced the new faith wholeheartedly. History knows him best as "Good King Francisco"---and his wife, deeply and (so it is said) shrewishly anti-Christian, as "Jezebel."

Like his neighbor Bartolomeu, Good King Francisco indulged a passion for temple- and shrine-burning---most notably in a neighboring province he invaded in May 1578, intending, Frois tells us, to turn it into a model Christian community.

Alas, the victory proved short-lived. The defeated enemy rallied and Francisco fled back to Bungo---evidence, to Frois, of God's wish to "punish the people of Bungo" for sins which "had accumulated to an extent that God could no longer ignore."

***

Hideyoshi's abrupt expulsion order opens the final act of the drama of the "Christian century." Mildly enforced at first, it culminated in the relentless torture and persecution Kaempfer speaks of, an agonizing, appalling, ultimately futile mass martyrdom whose most obvious parallel is a supremely ironic one---the martyrdom the Catholic Inquisitions were simultaneously inflicting on "heretics" in Europe.

For 10 years there were few signs that Hideyoshi meant business.. Missionary activity and Christian worship carried on much as before, officials looking on tolerantly as new converts were brought daily into the fold. In 1596 Hideyoshi had only two years left to live---would history have been different had the pilot of a Spanish galleon from the Philippines not in that year recklessly boasted of the power of the Spanish Empire and of the missionaries who pave the way for its overseas conquests?

Thus provoked, Hideyoshi acted swiftly. On February 5, 1597 in Nagasaki 26 Christians---six Spanish Franciscans and 20 Japanese---were crucified. "To the protests of the Governor of the Philippines," writes Sansom, "[Hideyoshi] replied that the Spaniards had no more right to introduce their religion into Japan than had the Japanese to preach the worship of their own gods in the Philippines."

***

In 1614, national unification all but complete, Hideyoshi's successor Tokugawa Ieyasu delivered the coup de grace. "The Kirishitan band," he declared, "have come to Japan... to disseminate an evil law, to overthrow true doctrine, so that they may change the government of the country... This... must be crushed."

It was. Within 30 years Christians numbering 300,000 out of a total population of 20 million were either slaughtered wholesale, tortured and murdered individually, or else driven so deep underground that scarcely a trace of their existence was to surface for two and a half centuries. As persecution intensified, the Jesuits were nonplussed by a Japanese trait they had not previously noticed. "They race to martyrdom," observed Father Organtino, "as if to a festival." The Christian view of suicide as sinful made few inroads against the traditional Japanese view of it as glorious.

"Fifty-five persons of all ages and both sexes," wrote the English trader Richard Cocks of a scene he witnessed in October 1619, "[were] burnt alive on the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto, among them little children of five or six years old in their mothers' arms, crying out, 'Jesus receive their souls!'"

But these public executions, the authorities soon realized, were not having their desired effect. Far from terrifying the Christians into renouncing their faith, they only made Paradise seem that much nearer. Subtler tortures were called for, and were soon devised.

Their aim was to induce apostasy before, or sometimes instead of, death. Three torments are especially notorious: the onsen, the fumie, and the pit.

The first amounted to being slowly boiled alive in scalding natural hot springs. The second involved having suspected Christians trample holy images of Jesus and Mary. Refusal exposed them as Christians. Many trampled; many refused, preferring martyrdom.

"For non-Christians," writes theologian Stephen Turnbull in "The Kakure Kirishitan of Japan" (see accompanying story), "stamping on the fumie eventually acquired the air of an annual ritual eagerly awaited as one of the many New Year celebrations, but to the [Christians], fumie never lost its horror, even in cases where the authorities required only the outward sign of apostasy... Prayers were said to counteract the blasphemy, and in one community there was a ritual of burning the straw sandals worn when treading on the image, mixing the ashes with water and drinking the result."

The pit was said to be the most horrible torture of all. Historian C.R. Boxer describes it:

"The victim was tightly bound around the body as high as the breast (one hand being left free to give the signal of recantation) and then hung downwards from a gallows into a pit which usually contained excreta and other filth, the top of the pit being level with his knees. In order to give the blood some vent, the forehead was lightly slashed with a knife. Some of the stronger martyrs lived for more than a week in this position, but the majority did not survive more than a day or two."

***

The "Christian Century" ends with the Shimabara rebellion of 1637-38. Ivan Morris calls it a "holocaust," a word no 20th-century historian would use lightly. The Shimabara Peninsula in western Kyushu was then a desperately poor outback whose starved peasants were mercilessly squeezed for taxes far beyond their capacity to pay. Default invited torture as ghastly and imaginative as that meted out to Christians. How much the uprising was motivated by poverty and how much by Christian ideals remains in dispute. Its leader was a charismatic 15-year-old named Amakusa Shiro, known to his followers as "heaven's messenger." Miraculous powers were attributed to him.

Ensconsed in the abandoned castle they had seized as their stronghold were 37,000 rebels---peasants and low-ranking samurai, all at least nominally Christian. A message from them to the besieging forces of the Shogun reads: "Some among us there are who consider the hope of future life as of the highest importance... Should [the anti-Christian laws] not be repealed, we must incur all sorts of punishments...; we must, our bodies being weak and sensitive, sin against the infinite Lord of Heaven, and from solicitude for our brief [earthly] lives incur the loss of what we most highly esteem."

For five months they held out against impossible odds, but the end, barring a miracle, was never in doubt. "The slaughter on 15th April [1638]," writes Morris, "was one of the greatest in all Japan's sanguinary history." Rebels who weren't massacred hurled themselves into the flames of the burning castle. Morris quotes a contemporary daimyo---steeped in samurai rather than Christian ideals---as commenting, "For people of their low station this was indeed a praiseworthy way of dying. Words cannot express [my admiration]."

Shimabara marks Japan's retreat into more than 200 years of isolation from the outside world. It also marks the end, until modern times, of open Christian worship in Japan. For the next two centuries the story of Japanese Christianity is that of the "Kakure Kirishitan," the "hidden Christians."