Chapter XXVIII. The Period of the Catholic Missions

The Creed of Half Japan, by Arthur Lloyd, [1911], at sacred-texts.com

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CHAPTER XXVIII

The Period of the Catholic Missions

Had St. Francis Xavier and his associates been acquainted with Nichiren's apocalyptic interpretation of the Hokekyū, it is possible that they might have been tempted to apply to themselves the fulfilment of the prophecy, and to claim that they and theirs constituted the multitude headed by the four great Bodhisattvas who should appear in the middle of the last Buddhist Millennium, for the purposes of preaching salvation to a world that was forgetting the Law.

The Buddhism of Japan, in the course of its long development since the time when the Chinese Emperor Ming-ti had had his epoch-making dream, had on more than one occasion rubbed shoulders with Christianity. But it had either been the Christianity of the Nearer Orient, the vague syncretism of Gnostics and Manichæans; or the dull apathy of the Nestorians, deprived of vigour in consequence of their estrangement from the main body of their co-religionists. When the Franciscans reached Pekin in A.D. 1300, and when, in 1549, the Jesuits landed at Kagoshima, the Mahāyāna of the Far East found itself confronted for the first time with the militant Christianity of Europe, which had gone half round the globe to challenge it to mortal combat.

It is not my intention to write even a sketch of the history of the Catholic Missions of the sixteenth century.

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[paragraph continues] Others ¹ have done this at considerable length and with carefully weighed judgment. My task is somewhat different. It is to trace the movements, if any, that were going on in Buddhism during this period, and the effects, if any, that the Jesuit Missions had on the native faiths of Japan. In doing this, I shall be obliged frequently to mention the Christian propaganda, though without intending to make it the main purpose of this chapter.

Here let me say, by way of introduction, that none of the Histories, not even that of Murdoch, who is no great friend of the Jesuits, can establish anything against the personal uprightness or probity of the Jesuits, who had the lion's share of the Christian evangelization of that time, and who have had to bear more than their proper share of the hatred and ill-will which has, ever since the seventeenth century, clung to the Catholic name in Japan. That they made mistakes is quite evident; but the best of men may do that. They came to the Far East without having shaken off the traditions and atmosphere of the Far West. They brought with them what I may call the "Walls-of-Jericho" theory of Christian Missions—the theory that they had only to blow the Gospel Trumpet long and loud, and to! the walls erected by inveterate error and falsity would fall down in a moment, and leave the way open for the hosts of Light to make a triumphant entrance into the beleaguered city. They were, consequently, in a very great hurry with their

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earlier, if not with their later, Baptisms, and speedily found their strategic operations hampered by a mixed multitude of half-converted disciples, who were a weakness rather than a strength to their cause. Again, they brought with them the traditions and atmosphere of Europe in the sixteenth century, and there was not much there to commend itself to the statesmen of a country like Japan, who were earnestly seeking for ways and means of bringing peace to their distracted country. ¹ Neither were they fortunate in the companions they brought with them, for all Europe in those days looked upon slavery as an institution not contrary to the law of Christ, and the Portuguese merchants, besides selling arms to restless daimyos whose activities were hindering the pacification of the country, did .a very considerable trade in Japanese slaves. ² The Jesuits do not seem to have had anything to do with this trade themselves, but their reputation had to suffer for the ill deeds of their associates. In their mission work they neglected to hallow the Japanese language by consecrating it to the uses of Christian worship, ³ and they made the fatal mistake of allowing their young converts to ridicule and denounce the Buddhist clergy, and to urge the people to destroy temples and

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shrines. ¹ It is true that Nobunaga and others did the same, but things which a native may do with impunity wear a very different aspect when done under the inspiration of a foreigner.

The national rivalries between European nations had also much to do with the ultimate ill success of the Catholic Missions. It is quite certain that the English and Dutch, though not very friendly towards each other, were united in their enmity against the Jesuits. But the Catholics themselves were disunited, and the Franciscans and Dominicans, coming under Spanish auspices, did much to thwart the Jesuits, who represented the Portuguese monopoly of trade and missionary effort. ²

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The Jesuits first landed in Kyūshū, their labours in that island forming as it were the first chapter of their activities in Japan. Kyūshū was at the time divided into several small principalities, practically independent kingdoms, which scarcely recognized the authority of Kyōto at all, and which were busily engaged in contests for supremacy within that island. Here, at first, the new-corners were eagerly welcomed, for wherever the priests went the merchants followed, with the guns and implements of war so dear to a warlike people, and the missionaries had their choice of many daimyates for their evangelization. Even the Buddhist bonzes spoke well of them, and received them kindly; for Christianity seemed to them to be but one more sect of the Buddhist faith, and, indeed, it was so described by Ōuchi Yoshitaka, lord of Suwo, when Xavier crossed over the Straits of Shimonoseki into the territories of Yamaguchi. But it was soon found that the new religion was not in the least disposed to accept so humiliating a classification. The Jesuits were as intolerant of other creeds as were the Nichirenists themselves, and the kind sentiments of the Buddhist monks soon changed to feelings of suspicious hostility.

But before these feelings turned into acts of serious opposition, the Jesuit leaders had concluded that if the friendship of local daimyos, such as Ōtomo and Ōuchi, was so advantageous to their cause, very much more might be expected from the favour of the Emperor and Shōgun. They had accordingly made their way to Kyōto for the purpose of winning the ear of those potentates, little knowing that Emperor and Shōgun counted for so little in those days that the reigning Emperor Go-Nara could not have been crowned, as one of his predecessors could not have been buried, had not one of his generous subjects paid the expenses of the coronation. The generous

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subject in this case was Ōuchi, the Daimyo of Suwō, and the friend of Xavier.

The Jesuits did not succeed so easily in gaining a footing in the Imperial City, though it ultimately became one of the chief seats of their activity. But their sojourns in Kyōto brought them into contact with Nobunaga, and thus ultimately with Hideyoshi, Iyeyasu, and Iyemitsu, and it is around these names that centres the religious as well as the political history of Japan during the eventful century of the Catholic Missions.

Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) was fifteen years of age when he succeeded his father in the headship of a small daimyate in Owari. He did not at first realize the importance of his position at this critical period of his country's history, when the supreme power in Japan lay waiting for the first bold man to come and take it, and his youthful escapades gained for him the nickname of Bakadono, "the Fool-Lord." He was recalled to a sense of duty by one of his retainers, who wrote and presented to his master a dignified protest against his follies, and then added point to his remonstrances by committing suicide. Nobunaga mended his ways, and, fortunately for himself, found amongst his retainers another faithful adviser—an old man, Tokichirō, who is considered to have been a very great judge of human character.

Acting on Tokichirō's advice, he put down, in 1557; a revolt amongst his own subjects to which his foolish conduct had given occasion, and in which his own brother was a participator. Three years later, his neighbour, Imagawa, lord of Suruga, Totomi, and Mikawa, one of the most powerful of the great princes, started for Kyōto with an army, intending to seize the persons of the Emperor and Shōgun, and thus to legalize his own designs of making

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himself supreme in Japan. Nobunaga refused permission for Imagawa to pass through his diminutive territories, met the invader at the village of Okehazama, and defeated him utterly. He now found himself the master of four wealthy and populous provinces, and universally looked up to as the "coming man." In 1562, two years after his victory over Imagawa, he received from the Emperor Ōgimachi, the son of Go-Nara, who had succeeded in 1558 to the impoverished ¹ Imperial throne, a secret commission authorizing him to take steps for the pacification of the country. Nobunaga accepted the task, and set his hand to the work, being assisted therein by Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Iyeyasu, ² who had passed into his service as a consequence of the defeat of the Imagawas. By 1568 he had overthrown the Saitō family in Mino, which he annexed, moving his own residence to Gifu, and had further spread his victorious arms into Ise.

But his progress was not rapid enough to satisfy the Emperor, who saw himself harassed on all sides. A second envoy reached Nobunaga, urging him to make his way to the capital, and this message was enforced by an appeal from Ashikaga Yoshiaki, the brother of the last Shōgun, Yoshiteru, who had been assassinated by his ministers, Miyoshi and Matsunaga. The assassins had appointed a puppet Shōgun of their own, and now Yoshiaki appealed to Nobunaga for assistance in the recovery of his rights. Nobunaga, who had in the meantime strengthened

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himself by family alliances with the Asai, the Takeda, the Tokugawa, and other powerful families, accepted this double invitation, marched straight into the province of Omi, overthrew the Miyoshi and their allies, the Sasaki, or Rokkaku, set Yoshiaki on his Shōgunal throne, and rejoiced the heart of the Emperor by the pacification of the provinces of Settsu, Kawachi, and Omi.

Nobunaga's successes entailed an immense amount of ill-will from rivals and competitors, and especially from those enemies whom he had had the good fortune to vanquish. The mutual jealousies of the great Daimyos of the North, Uesugi, Takeda, and Hōjō of Odawara; together with the faithful watch kept by his trusty henchman, Iyeyasu, kept him secure from armed attack from that quarter; but it needed constant vigilance to control the provinces he had already subdued, and the Shōgun Yoshiaki, who had passed from a monastery to a palace, was of no practical value as an ally. The Miyoshi and others despised him, and he himself bitterly resented the limits which Nobunaga placed upon his extravagance. At last, in 1570, while Nobunaga was absent in Ise, finishing his projects in that province, his enemies revolted. Nobunaga returned, blotted out the families of Asakura, Asai, Miyoshi, and Sasaki, which now disappear from history, deposed Yoshiaki, abolished the Ashikaga dynasty of Shōguns, and received from the Emperor the high-sounding title of Gon-Dainagon. The suppression of this rebellion brought him into dealings with the Buddhist monks. About the same time, he came into personal contact with the Jesuits.

It was in 1568 that Nobunaga had the eventful interview with the Jesuit Froez, which led to an informal alliance between the Dictator and the Missionaries. Some years before that time, the criticisms of Father Vilela

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had led the Nichirenshū priests to depose an abbot for immoral conduct, and the tension between Christian and Buddhist in Kyōto was considerable. The Nichiren sect had given considerable aid to the Miyoshi and Matsunaga at the time of the assassination of Yoshiteru, and Nobunaga, who already saw that the great worldly monasteries would be amongst his bitterest enemies in the pacification of the country, had ordered the demolition of several of the chief houses, using the materials thereof for the construction of the new palace which he was constructing for Yoshiaki. After his interview with Froez, Nobunaga deliberately determined to use the Catholic missionaries as one of his instruments for crushing the Buddhist monasteries. His heart remained absolutely untouched by the Christian verities; his head saw the advantages which were to be gained from an alliance with the Christian organization.

In 1570, Nobunaga disgraced, and sentenced to death, a Nichiren priest, Nichijō Shōnin, who had taken a prominent position in the opposition to his measures. (It was this Nichijō who, in a heated discussion with Froez about the nature of the human soul, had wanted to cut off the Jesuit's head in Nobunaga's presence, in order that the Dictator might see what the soul looked like as it escaped from the human body.) From that time the Buddhists showed unmistakable signs of hostility. Nobunaga gave them but short shrift. The Hieizan monks had sided with Matsunaga and the Miyoshi in their rebellion against him. With a strong army from Gifu, Nobunaga marched against the monks, stormed the Hieizan heights, and wiped out the monastery. "The final assault," says Murdoch, "delivered September 29th, 1571, ended in the extermination of every occupant of the three thousand monasteries that had studded the faces

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of the mountain, and its thirteen valleys, a few days before."

Nobunaga next turned against the Monto priests, who, under Kennio Kosa, had established themselves in what is now Ōsaka, in a strategic position of prime importance, which they had fortified elaborately. It took him several years to reduce this priestly fortress, and it was not until 1580 that he made himself master of it. "The slaughter," says Murdoch, "had been immense, and the stench of burning flesh poisoned the air for miles around." A small remnant surrendered and were spared, but the fortress itself was burnt to the ground. Kennio, said Hideyoshi, in his later years, "had given Nobunaga morn trouble than all his other enemies combined."

In the meanwhile, a dispute had taken place between the priests of the Jodo and their bitter enemies of the Nichiren sect, and Nobunaga was invited to act as umpire, an office which he accepted on the condition that the defeated controversialists should agree to be decapitated. The Nichiren champions were obliged in the disputation to own themselves defeated. Nobunaga not only enforced the penalty agreed upon, but further laid on the whole sect a money fine so heavy that the Nichiren priests were unable to pay it, and withdrew to remote provinces where Nobunaga's hand had not as yet made itself felt. ¹

Thus Nobunaga became the "scourge of God" to the worldly and carnal-minded priests of the various sects of Buddhism, and the Jesuit Fathers felt that the ground was being cleared for them by the drastic measures of the Dictator. But they were mistaken in their estimate of the situation. Stern measures, such as these were, could

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not be taken without stirring up bad feeling and resentment, and the Jesuits, whom Nobunaga had befriended, were the ones to bear the resentment of the Buddhists, whose feelings Nobunaga had so terribly outraged. The time came when they had to pay most dearly for the sins against humanity of which their ally Nobunaga had been guilty.

For Nobunaga himself it could not be pleaded that he had intended to act ad majorem Dei gloriam. Nothing was further from his intentions. He looked upon the Jesuits merely as convenient tools; his own views of religion were sufficiently exposed by the great temple (the Sōchenji) which he built, with a stone image, representing himself, placed higher than all the other idols of gods and hotoke, to receive the adoration of the people. A few months later (June 22, 1582) his trusted general, Akechi Mitsuhide, conspired against him, and Nobunaga perished miserably by an assassin's hand.

The successor to Nobunaga's power was his friend and trusted lieutenant, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the famous Taikōsama. Hideyoshi had first come under Nobunaga's influence after the victory at Okehazama, and had become allied with the Dictator's family by marriage. When the news of Nobunaga's death reached him, he was engaged in the Western provinces, reducing the clansmen of Mōri Terumoto, and the troops with which Akechi Mitsuhide rose against Nobunaga were troops which Hideyoshi had asked for as reinforcements for himself. When the news reached him, he promptly made peace with his enemies and hurried to the Imperial Capital, where, by a series of triumphs, diplomatic as well as military, he shortly succeeded in getting into his own hands all the powers that Nobunaga had wielded, and a great deal more.

Hideyoshi did not wring the neck of the poor nightingale

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as Nobunaga had done, but he contrived to make it sing to his tune. In establishing himself in Nobunaga's place, and in extending his authority over the rest of the Empire, he used the arts of diplomacy much more than of military compulsion. His aim, as Murdoch says, was "not to kill two birds with one stone, but to use the same missile for the purpose of laming a considerable number of fowls, whom he would then catch and train to lay golden eggs for his own advantage." He did occasionally use the sword, and then with a cruelty which even Nobunaga might have envied. When he slew his nephew and adopted son, Hidetsugu, and hacked his whole family to pieces, he showed how monstrously cruel he was capable of being, should political expediency demand drastic measures. But he always stood ready to temper his cruelty by wise diplomacy. Thus he stormed and destroyed the great Shingon Temple-Fortress of Negoro, in Kii, with its four thousand armed bonzes, but he spared the Mother-Temple of Kōya, and practically made the Shignon priests serve him in the capacity of warders of a prison for political offenders. He laid a very heavy hand on the Monto priests, but, having done so, he used Kennio Kosa, who had contrived to escape Nobunaga's massacre of the bonzes at Ōsaka, as a political agent of his own in the territories of the Satsuma Daimyo. ¹ When he thought that he had reason to fear the influence of the Jesuits (as before he had seen reason to fear Hidetsugu), he suddenly dropped his mask of friendship and ordered the execution of the twenty-six victims who were crucified on the Martyrs’ Mount at Nagasaki on the 5th of February, 1597. Yet, to

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the end of his life, Hideyoshi understood how to use the Christians and their teachers for his own purposes, and Konishi's Christian Brigade did yeoman service for him in Korea.

It was part of Hideyoshi's plan to impoverish those whom he had reason to fear. He would invite the powerful and wealthy daimyos to come into residence in Kyōto, where they were forced to spend huge sums of money in costly and lavish entertainments. He made one Daimyo bear the expense of building a great castle or palace; others had to entertain envoys from Korea, China, or the Philippines, in a manner worthy of the dignity of a great Empire. For the monks, who still were wealthy, he prepared a heavy burden in the shape of an immense Colossus—a Daibutsu—and many sumptuous temples, in the place of those which Nobunaga had destroyed. The Daimyos and the monks had to bleed their subjects with a sharp lancet of taxation to meet the expenses of these costly undertakings, and the peasants in these districts turned envious eyes towards the happy inhabitants of the provinces under Hideyoshi's direct rule, who were free from the imposts under which they themselves were groaning. There were two religious powers that Hideyoshi dreaded—the Jesuits and the intolerant followers of Nichiren. He placed the Christian Konishi in command of one battalion, composed mainly of Christians, the Nichirenist Katō Kiyomasa in command of another battalion, composed mainly of Buddhists, and sent the two generals to Korea to spy on one another, and, possibly, to get shot.

Hideyoshi was no more a friend of the Buddhists than he was of the Christians. What little religion he had inclined him towards the Kami of the native Shinto. Shinto makes little or no demand on the moral nature of

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man. It does not forbid the taking of life, nor yet the breach of what we Christians call the Seventh Commandment. It also holds out to a distinguished man, such as Hideyoshi undoubtedly was, the prospect—an extremely gratifying one—of deification after death. Hideyoshi suffered from megalomania. He dreamed of making himself Ruler of All Japan; he dreamed of conquests on the mainland of Asia; he seems in his dreams to have seen himself sitting in Pekin on the throne of the Mings. He certainly saw himself the object of posthumous worship, for he too, like Nobunaga, spent time and money on the erection of a magnificent temple to be dedicated to Shin Hachiman, the new god of war, and Shin Hachiman was his deified self. The temple of Shin Hachiman was in course of erection when Hideyoshi died. The apotheosis of the Taikōsama was celebrated in it, with great pomp, by Iyeyasu, in the days before his final breach with the family of Hideyoshi. After the breach had been accomplished, in 1615, the temple was quietly demolished by the Governor of Kyōto, and no one remonstrated. The new god was not much of a success in his new rōle.

We now come to Ieyasu (1542–1616), the founder of the Tokugawa line of Shōguns, the man who had the wisdom as well as the good fortune to be able to wait patiently until the nightingale sang to his tune. He was in a position to do so. Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had laboured at the unification of the Empire. Ieyasu had but one battle to fight: after Sekigahara, he was able to enter into the labours of his illustrious predecessors. ¹ His talents were shown in the wonderful administrative

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machine which he constructed, and the minute care with which he provided for the transmission of the supreme power to his descendants of remote generations.

We need not here speak of his secular administration and reforms. Of his activities in the sphere of religion it may be said that, whilst disapproving of Christianity and mistrusting, nay disliking, the foreign missionary clergy, he never put a single one of them to death during the whole of his tenure of office. It was reserved for Iemitsu, his grandson, the third Shōgun of the Tokugawa line, to become a persecutor, and Iemitsu was a very different person from his grandfather.

With regard to Buddhism, Ieyasu was in a position to make use of it for his own purposes, and ho did so with great success. Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had broken for ever the military power of the Buddhist monasteries. There was no fear of a new Hieizan, or Negoro, rising out of the ruins of the temples, and the sects whom the sword had spared, Hideyoshi had managed effectually to impoverish by his heavy imposts. Ieyasu was able to use the broken forces of the clergy for his own purposes. He encouraged the monks, and made of them a kind of religious police. For himself, he claimed to have been converted to the Tendai faith, and his great mausoleum at Nikko was entrusted to Tendai hands, as was also the great temple he erected at Uyeno Park. But the women of his household seem to have divided their attention between the Nichiren and Jōdo, and the Jōdo Temple of Zojoji was likewise of his founding.

But it is evident that his ideas of Buddhism were those of a reformer. The Confucianist school of Shushi, with its enlightened views of statesmanship and statecraft, was much encouraged, and it was Ieyasu's evident endeavour to graft this reformed Confucianism on to a

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[paragraph continues] Buddhist stock, in the hopes of thereby producing a better variety of fruit. Many of the early leaders of this new Confucianism were Buddhist priests, and this was notably the case with Jigendaishi, the Abbot of the Great Temple at Uyeno, and the friend and counsellor of both Ieyasu and Iemitsu.

The Zen, whose record has always been a good one, and whose tenets made the adoption of Confucianist notions comparatively easy, was much favoured by the half-philosophical, half-religious priests whom the policy of the early Tokugawas did so much to encourage. In 1654, a little while after the death of Iemitsu (1651), a celebrated priest was summoned from China to become the founder of a new and enlightened sect of the Zen. His name was Ingen, and the sect he founded is known as the Obaku, a small body, but always influential. It shows the practical character of the Buddhism which the Tokugawas tried to propagate that Ingen's sect adopted modern Chinese as the language in which the Buddhist Scriptures and services should be read. The great mass of the Buddhist worship is in a dead language, the Chinese of fifteen centuries ago; in the Ōbaku worship, the ordinary Sinico-Japanese of the modern literary style has been, as it were, consecrated to the purposes of religion.

One part of Nichiren's contention had been now fulfilled. He had said that but one Sun ruled in the Heavens, but one Lord in the religious world, but one Ruler in the Empire. The Empire had been unified, and there was but one Ruler. It is true that it was not yet the legitimate ruler, but the reign of the usurper seems to have been necessary for the welding together of the whole.

Our sympathies as Christians naturally go out to the heroic martyrs and confessors of that strangely interesting

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period. They seem to have been only the pawns on the chessboard, played by the hands of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu. In our next chapter we shall see how the great men themselves were, after all, but the knights and castles on the same great chessboard of history, and that the Master Hand that played them was one far greater than they deemed Him to be when they set aside the testimony of His servants.

Footnotes

351:1 For detailed information on this period, the student is referred to papers in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, by Sir Ernest Satow, Mr. Gubbins, the late Rev. J. Summers, and others. Also to the more recent histories, e.g. "Die Entwickelung des Christentums in Japan," by Dr. Haas, the "Christian Daimyos," by Father Steichen, and Murdoch and Yamagata's "History of Japan." Papinot's "Dictionnaire d'Histoire et de Géographie du Japon" gives very useful information.

352:1 We read of the Jesuits sending some of their converts to Europe to show them the glories of the Catholic countries. But it was a dangerous remedy. One man, at least, went as a spy, got himself ordained, and then, returning to Japan, threw off the mask, and became one of the most determined enemies of the Jesuits. And Iyeyasu sent a special envoy of his own, a man named Nishi Sōin (Murdoch, p. 495).

352:2 Murdoch, pp. 241, 242. See also what he says of the slur cast, through slave dealing, on the charitable institutions of the Jesuits, p. 76.

352:3 Thus, the Christian converts from Buddhism went from the use of one unknown tongue to another. See what I say below about Ingen and the Ōbaku sect.

353:1 Murdoch, p. 241, etc. Had the Jesuits, instead of constantly aiming at the conversion of the great men, and of then urging them to extirpate "heresy" and paganism within their dominions, been content to work quietly as a leaven amongst the mass of the people, their work might have been far more lasting. The wonderful tenacity of the humble folk of Urakami and Amakusa, who remained faithful through more than two centuries of relentless persecution, shows how strong they were in this kind of work.

353:2 The following extract from Murdoch (p. 282) shows that the charges of political aggrandizement schemes ought to be laid at the door of the Shōgunate rather than at that of the Spaniards:—

"Among the converts made by the Jesuits was a certain Harada, who later on had found his way to the Philippines as a trader, and had taken full note of the weakness of the Spaniards in their new possessions. In that weakness he saw his own account, and he made haste to return to Japan, where ho struck up an acquaintance with one Hasegawa, a courtier of Hideyoshi. Through Hasegawa, Harada represented to the Regent how easy it would be for him to take possession of the Philippines. Hideyoshi … listened to Hasegawa's exposition of Harada's notions readily enough, and in 1591 he penned a very haughty letter to the Governor of the Philippines, calling upon His Excellency to recognize him (Hideyoshi) as his suzerain." Hence, for the Shōgunate to make capital out of the missionaries, by accusing them of conspiring against the political liberties of Japan, was, to say the very least, for the pot to call the kettle black.

356:1 Ōgimachi had to wait for his coronation three years, the expenses of the festivities being ultimately defrayed by Mōri Motonari, who had ousted the Ōuchi family from Suwō and Yamaguchi.

356:2 The differences in the characters of these three great men has been well summed up by the Japanese wit. "If you don't sing," said Nobunaga to a silent nightingale, "I'll wring your neck." "If you don't sing," said Hideyoshi, "I'll make you sing." "If you don't sing," said Iyeyasu, "I'll wait until you do."

359:1 Nobunaga never came into collision with the Shingon priests. It was left for Hideyoshi to destroy their great monastery fortress of Negoro with its four thousand fighting priests.

361:1 The Monto priests made themselves so much hated in Satsuma that, until comparatively recent years, they were not allowed to enter the province, and the Satsuma men have nearly always been hostile to Buddhism.

363:1 A well-known caricature, reproduced by Father Papinot in his Dictionary, represents Nobunaga and Mitsuhide pounding the rice, Hideyoshi kneading the dough, and Ieyasu sitting apart and eating the cake.