# Japan: Its History, Arts, and Literature/Volume 3/Chapter 3

Chapter III
THE EARLY TOKUGAWA TIMES
The two greatest figures of mediæval Japan, if not the two greatest in her whole history, are Hideyoshi, the Taikō, and Tokugawa Iyeyasu. Contemporaries and therefore rivals, as was inevitable under the circumstances of their era, that they avoided fatal collision must be counted one of the clearest evidences of their astuteness. They did once meet in battle, and the Taikō, for all his military genius, suffered defeat. But thereafter they lived in concord, and the Tokugawa chief, surviving Hideyoshi and becoming the administrative head of the nation, organised a system of government which gave to the country two and a half centuries of tranquillity. Iyeyasu, had he respected his pledges, should have applied himself to secure to the Taikō's son, Hideyori, the supreme place won by Hideyoshi's genius. But the ethics of the age did not require any such sacrifice of personal ambition. The Tokugawa chief not only crushed the man he had promised to support, but deliberately contrived an oppor​tunity for crushing him, and posterity does not count the act a crime.
Campaigns, battles, and political intrigues do not find a place in these volumes; else there would be much to tell about the events which raised the Tokugawa to supremacy. A pathetic figure lends special interest to the last act of the drama; the figure of the beautiful Yodo, the Taikō's favourite mistress and mother of the lad to whom he vainly bequeathed the fruits of his splendid victories and still more brilliant statesmanship. Left a widow at twenty-two, Yodo devoted herself uniquely to her son's cause, and in the final fight, when she and he, shut up in the castle of Osaka, had been refused quarter by Iyeyasu and saw death coming steadily closer, the lady and her band of handmaidens did soldier's service, and at the supreme moment died by their own hands.
Iyeyasu then stood without a rival in the whole Empire. To other leaders opportunities equally great had presented themselves, but to utilise them as he utilised them required a genius for organisation which he alone seems to have possessed, and a power of analysing the lessons of history which few have equalled.
The first problem to be considered was the position of the Emperor. It has been shown in these pages that the doctrine of the Mikado's divine descent survived all the vicissitudes of Imperial life. Weeds might flourish in the ne​glected courtyards of the Kyōtō Palace; the corpse of an Emperor might lie uninterred for weeks through lack of money to perform the funeral rites; sovereigns might be held prisoners by haughty subjects, or compelled to abdicate at the first display of a tendency to exercise independent governing sway; but the theory of the monarch's sacrosanctity remained practically unchallenged. Even to-day, when the merciless scalpel of the critic lays open the mummy-cases of antiquity, and discloses dust and emptiness in places peopled by tradition with figures of splendid humanity, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a Japanese writer bold enough to scrutinise the legends that environ the Throne. Side by side with such companions as constitutional government, parliamentary institutions, and freedom of speech and pen, faith in the sovereign's direct descent from heavenly ancestors seems strangely incongruous. But it still abides, and Iyeyasu had to reckon with it in his day. Trespasses upon the Imperial prerogatives had greatly helped to undermine the power of the Fujiwara, the Taira, and the Hōjō. Iyeyasu had to provide against that error in the case of himself and his descendants. He had also to provide that the sovereign should no longer be a puppet in the hands of ambitious nobles, and that insurrection against his own administrative authority should no longer be able to borrow legitimacy from an enforced semblance of Imperial sanction. These ends he ​compassed by giving, on the one hand, a full measure of recognition to the divinity of the Throne's occupant, and by enforcing, on the other, the logical sequence of that doctrine. The descendant of the gods must be completely divested of all executive functions, these passing absolutely and unquestionably into the hands of the Shōgun, who should exercise them without any reference to the sovereign, accepting, in return, full responsibility for the public peace and good order of the country which he thus undertook to govern. No command of the Emperor could have the force of law unless it received the counter-signature of one of the Shōgun's chief officials. In short, nothing was left to the sovereign except the prerogative of conferring honours and titles. His seclusion was made more complete than ever. Progresses, state visits to shrines, ambassadorial audiences,—such things passed out of His Majesty's existence. The great territorial magnates were forbidden to visit the Palace, or even to enter the quarter of Kyōtō in which it stood. The Court nobles might not intermarry with the families of the military chieftains unless the permission of the Government in Yedo had been obtained. These two classes were to be kept rigidly distinct. And never by either the one or the other might the Emperor's face be viewed. Even when the ministers of the Court approached the Throne, they saw nothing of their sovereign except the ​obscure outlines of a dark figure seated behind a semi-transparent curtain. But, though shorn of temporal power, the Emperor gained in mystical dignity. He received periodically the profound homage of the Yedo Regents. From him the living derived their titles; the dead their apotheosis, and by an Imperial delegate even the Shōgun himself was invested. In the speech of the people he was always "the Son of Heaven;" in their writings the line where his name figured might never be invaded by any other ideograph. A magnificent abstraction, the possibility of his becoming involved in any intrigue, voluntarily or involuntarily, grew more and more remote in proportion as his godlike dignity obtained fuller appreciation. That was the end contemplated by Iyeyasu. Against the head of the secular administration, the Shōgun in Yedo, who held his commission direct from the sovereign, every insurrection unsanctioned by the Emperor would be technically rebellion, and every insurgent a traitor to the Throne. Iyeyasu made it virtually impossible for any one to obtain that sanction or even to seek it.
Responsible government had never before existed in Japan, and Iyeyasu thus became the author of the first written constitution. The so-called constitution of Prince Shôtoku in the seventh century had been only a collection of moral maxims; but now a document was drafted consisting of thirty-five articles, seventeen of ​which, bearing the signatures of the Tokugawa chief and the Regent (Kwampaku)—the latter acting as the sovereign's representative—made provision for everything relating to the Imperial Court; and the remaining eighteen, which had the signature of Iyeyasu only, contained general administrative rules.
Having thus placed the relations of the Shōgun's administration and the Imperial Court on a clear basis, and having secured for the former virtually autocratic authority while leaving the latter's dignity nominally undisturbed, Iyeyasu took the map of feudal Japan and reconstructed it. Like everything really great, his principle of procedure was simple. Wherever risk could be discerned of coalitions hostile to his house, he inserted a wedge formed of his own partisans. Two hundred and thirty-seven military nobles held practically the whole of Japan in fief. One hundred and fifteen of these were Tokugawa vassals; men who owed their ranks and estates to his favour, and on whose fidelity it should have been possible to rely implicitly. He wove these two hundred and thirty-seven fiefs into a pattern such that one of the hundred and fifteen loyal threads always had a place between any two of the remainder whose fealty was doubtful or their revolt probable. Thus he bequeathed to his descendants a congeries of principalities so arranged as to offer automatic resistance to rebellion or anarchy.
​But while he seemed to be organising a feudal system, Iyeyasu made every effort, at the same time, to paralyse the strength of the feudatories. Without the Shōgun's permission they were forbidden to contract marriages, to build castles, to construct large ships, to make warlike preparations, or to found temples. A strict veto was also imposed on the passage of vassals from the service of one feudatory into that of another, and it was enacted that each feudal chief must spend a part of every second year in Yedo, and must leave his sons there always as hostages for his own fealty. The provision with regard to the sons was abolished in the middle of the seventeenth century, but not until 1862 did the obligation imposed on the feudatories themselves undergo any relaxation.
The effect of this system—Sankin Kōtai, as it was called—upon the prosperity and embellishment of Yedo, as well as upon the supremacy of the Tokugawa administration and the allegiance of the military nobles, is easily conceived. Not merely were the territorial chiefs thus brought into constant contact with the head of the government through whose grace they held their fiefs; not merely did their attendance in Yedo constitute a sign of their allegiance,—a sign that could be unerringly interpreted,—but Yedo itself became their capital. There they had to take their places and preserve their state among their peers, and the magnificent mansions that ​a spirit of rivalry induced them to build, the brilliant equipages they supported, and the costly habits they cultivated, not only served as a wholesome drain on their resources, but also occupied their attention to the exclusion of politics and other dangerous topics. It was, indeed, a part of the Tokugawa chieftain's plan that the accumulation of wealth in the coffers of individuals should be carefully prevented. In his instructions for the guidance of his successors he laid down the principle that, whenever the opulence of any noble began to attract attention, the task of carrying out some great public work should be imposed upon him.
Iyeyasu excelled as an organiser. Victory in arms served him merely as a prelude to organisation. In that respect he differed from all his predecessors. They had been content to acquire power; his great aim was to consolidate it. They had sought chiefly to exalt their own houses; he sought to place himself at the head of an organised nation and an organised society. Yet he does not appear to have entertained any national ambition. He made peace with Korea on the easiest terms. He refused to assist the Ming dynasty against the Manchu invaders. He struck a fatal blow at maritime enterprise by causing all large ships to be destroyed, an act which his grandson, Iyemitsu, supplemented by an ordinance forbidding the construction of sea-going vessels. He may be said to have inaugu​rated the policy of hermetically sealing the country against foreign intercourse, though in that matter he obeyed the teaching of experience rather than the suggestion of inclination. His dying behest to his son and successor showed that the people occupied a large place in his thoughts, yet he made no attempt to improve the condition of the lower orders, being apparently persuaded that poverty and hardship were their appointed lot. Neither did he devise any system for rewarding merit, hereditary titles to office and emolument ranking higher, in his opinion, than individual qualifications.
It is a curious fact that the most commendable of his measures from an ethical point of view proved the principal means of undermining the organisation he had so cleverly devised. Thinking to soften the military spirit of the age, he bestowed open-handed patronage on literature and education. But literature in those days was derived altogether from China. Japanese scholars saw nothing worthy of study beyond Confucianism. Iyeyasu himself had not read deeply. Sharing the ignorance which characterised the military class in his time, he had no perception of the true spirit of Confucian and Mencian political philosophy. He issued an order that primers of the ancient learning should be procured and studied. The order was obeyed and the various feudal chiefs hastened to emulate its spirit, so that the Zen ​doctrines of Buddhism, which contributed so much to the development of the heroic and the sentimental, and were therefore favourable to the stability of military feudalism, gradually gave place to a theory that the only legitimate ruler was heaven-appointed; that the good of the people should be the first object of administration, and that to fail in achieving that good was to forfeit the title of administrator. Before the Tokugawa chief died he had himself imbibed something of this philosophy, and it was perhaps because he foresaw the tendency of the Chinese learning he had thus encouraged that, on his death-bed, he enjoined upon his successor the duty of taking care of the people before all things. He had unwittingly sown the seeds of a new revolution.
Yoshitsune's Helmet (Iron); Twelfth Century
When the boy, Iyemitsu, against whom this plot had been directed, inherited the Shōgunate, he proved himself one of the greatest of the Tokugawa, as well as one of the most masterful. Assembling all the principal feudal chiefs, he made to them this speech: "My grandfather ​owed much to your assistance when he brought the Empire under his sway, and my father, remembering these things, naturally treated you rather as guests than as vassals. But my case is different. I was born to the headship of the country. I cannot regard you in the same light as the last Shōgun did. My relation to you must be that of sovereign to subject if good order is to be preserved. Should any among you find that relation irksome and desire to reverse it, I am prepared to decide the issue on the battle-field. Return to your own provinces and consider the question." This bold challenge astounded the assembled feudatories. They remained silent for a time, until Date Masamune, chief of Sendai fief, constituted himself spokesman: "We all bathe in the favour of the Tokugawa. If any one here entertains a disloyal purpose, I, Masamune, will be the first to attack him." After that no dissentient voice was raised: the supremacy of the Tokugawa became absolute and unchallenged.
Iyemitsu carried his conception of administrative autocracy to such a point that he did not hesitate to revoke acts of the Emperor. For the sovereign having bestowed titles and ranks on certain priests and members of the Imperial household, the Shōgun took back the former and rescinded the latter on the ground that his endorsement had not been obtained. The Emperor naturally observed that he might as well vacate ​the Throne if he were not permitted to reward even a monk; and soon afterwards he did actually abdicate, after having been obliged to grant audience to the Shōgun's nurse.
Thus early in the history of the Tokugawa administration a collision between the two Courts of Kyōtō and Yedo seemed imminent. But Iyemitsu averted the peril with characteristic vigour. He repaired to Kyōtō with a retinue of thirty-five thousand men-at-arms, raised the revenue of the Imperial Household from three thousand koku of rice (about as many sovereigns) to ten thousand koku, and distributed a hundred and twenty thousand riyo (appropriately one hundred and ninety-two thousand sovereigns) among the Court officials. He appears to have realised, even more clearly than his grandfather, Iyeyasu, that the stability of the Shōgunate system depended on the absolutism of its administration, and it will be seen presently that the system fell owing to the failure of his successors to follow his autocratic example.
But however large his conception of governing authority, he seems to have been, like his grandfather, entirely without ambition that his country should figure prominently on the stage of the world. He made no attempt to take advantage of the victories won in Siam by his nationals, Yamada Jinzayemon and Tsuda Matazayemon. He rejected renewed applications for ​assistance from the Ming rulers, then reduced to the last extremity by the Manchu. He forbade Japanese subjects to travel abroad under penalty of death. He interdicted the building of sea-going ships. He closed the country to all foreigners except a few Dutchmen, and even they were not allowed to continue their trade except on condition of living a life of degraded ostracism on a little island in Nagasaki harbour. In short, he arrested Japan's international development, which then seemed full of promise, and he deliberately diverted her from opportunities that would have opened for her a great career, had she utilised them boldly.
It is necessary to elaborate this last point; to show what were the opportunities upon which Japan turned her back in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and to what motives her suicidal policy is attributable.
When Occidental commerce first invited Japan's participation, the Japanese merchant laboured under two signal disqualifications for engaging in it successfully,—inexperience almost absolute, and a traditional habit of relying on official tutelage in commercial affairs. He was accustomed to exchange his staple commodities at prices fixed by law; he did not enjoy the privilege of discriminating between the intrinsic values of the coins issuing from the mint, but was required to render blind deference to their superscriptions; his commercial conscience had been ​blunted by repeated evidences of the Government's financial unscrupulousness; tradition and the inflexible rules of caste taught him to place trade at the lowest point in the scale of human occupations, and he lived in an essentially military age when the business type was out of touch with its surroundings and had not yet attained any appreciable development. Observing these antecedents, the historian is confronted by an unexpected consequence. He finds that, from the very outset, Japanese national enterprise turned quickly into the paths of foreign commerce, and that the people exhibited a marked faculty for engaging with vigour and success in routes of peaceful trade where countries like Portugal, Spain, Holland, and England were then supposed to enjoy a monopoly. Between the coming of the Portuguese in 1542, and the closing of Japan to the outer world in 1636, the Japanese established commercial relations, and inaugurated a trade of more or less volume, with no less than twenty foreign markets. The reputation that the island empire subsequently acquired owing to more than two centuries of semi-seclusion has hidden these facts from general observation, but they are none the less historical. Two things present themselves clearly to view: first, that there was originally no evidence whatever of a disposition to impose restrictions on the comings and goings of Western traders; secondly, that the benefits of commerce, ​as exemplified by the doings of those traders, impelled Japan to immediate and enthusiastic imitation. Portuguese ships were made free to visit any part of the realm. To the Dutch and the English, when they came in the early years of the seventeenth century, similar freedom of commerce was granted. They received written authorisation, over the vermilion stamp of the Tokugawa Shōgun to "conduct trade without molestation in any port or at any place in Japan." There was no imposition of onerous taxes or duties, and though presents had to be offered to local officials and to the central government, their total value never exceeded five per cent of the nominal cost of the cargo on account of which they were made. Yet, eighty-seven years after this auspicious inauguration of foreign intercourse, Japan made an almost complete reversal of her national policy, adopted an exclusive attitude, substituted distrust and aversion for the confidence and amity of her previous mood, and asserted her right of isolation with fierce and unrelenting imperiousness. What had happened to produce this remarkable metamorphosis?
Looking back to the commencements of Japan's foreign intercourse, it is seen that close upon the footsteps of the pioneers of trade followed the pioneers of Christianity. They too were hospitably received. It is true that the sequel of their propagandism shows Japan re​sorting to the fires of persecution and the cross of the martyr with all the merciless vehemence of contemporary Europe, and that the story of their doings was thus projected upon the pages of history in shocking outlines. But the mood ultimately educated by the conduct of the Christian propagandists differed widely from the mood with which they were originally welcomed. That fact cannot be too emphatically asserted. If these Portuguese and Spanish apostles of the Nazarene, together with their Japanese disciples, fell victims at the last to the wrath of the nation whose heart they had come to win, the cause is to be sought in their own faults and in the intrigues of their foreign rivals rather than in the prejudice or bigotry of the Japanese. They taught to Japan the intolerance which she subsequently displayed towards themselves, and they provoked its display by their own imprudence.
The historical bases of these propositions are easily traced. During the interval of two hundred and sixty-one years—1281 to 1542 A. D.—that separated the great Mongol invasion of Japan from the opening of intercourse between the latter and Europe, the spirit of lawless adventure prevalent throughout the Occident found its counterpart in the conduct of the Japanese. It might be supposed that their lust for fighting would have been amply sated by the perpetual domestic combats that kept their own country in a ferment from shore to shore. But although ​rich prizes fell to the share of the leaders in these internecine struggles, the ordinary samurai gained little by them. His pay was scanty, his prospect of promotion limited, and it may well be that he sometimes turned with loathing from the constant necessity of bathing his hands in the blood of his own countrymen. At all events, piracy became a favourite occupation. The Japanese appear to have regarded the littoral provinces of their neighbours as fair fields for raid and foray. Some historians suggest that the fiercely aggressive temper of the time was kindled, or, at any rate, fanned into active flame, by the Mongol assaults which the great Khan made upon Japan. But the course of events is not consistent with that theory. The defeat of Kublai's armadas, on the contrary, was succeeded by an interval of comparative quiescence, partly, no doubt, because the Japanese appreciated the might of which such formidable efforts were an evidence, and partly because their sea-going capacities still remained comparatively undeveloped. But from the middle of the fourteenth century it became a species of military pastime in Japan to fit out a little fleet of war-boats and make a descent upon the coasts of Korea or of China. The annals of the sufferers, naturally more credible in some respects than those of the aggressors, show that what the Norsemen were to Europe in early ages, and the English to Spanish America in times contemporary with those now under consideration, the ​Japanese were to China. They made descents upon the Shantung Promontory,—the same place where their posterity, in modern days, were destined to annihilate China's naval forces at Weihaiwei,—and carried their raids far inland, looting and destroying villages and towns, and then marching back leisurely to the coast, where they shipped their booty and sailed away when the wind suited. They repeated these outrages, year after year, on an increasing scale, until the provinces of Fuhkien, Chekiang, Kiangsu, and Shantung—in other words, littoral regions extending over three degrees of latitude—were almost wholly overrun by the fierce freebooters. It is related in Chinese history that the commonest topics of conversation in this unhappy era were the descents of the Japanese on the dominions of the Middle Kingdom, the vessels taken by them, the towns pillaged and sacked, the provinces ravaged. They are spoken of as "sovereigns of the sea," and although forty-nine fortresses were erected by the much harassed Chinese people along the eastern coasts, and although one man out of every four of the sea-board population was enrolled in a coast-guard army, the raiders made nothing of such obstacles. The immemorial iteration of Chinese military experiences was again exemplified. Defeated generals laid accusations of incapacity and treachery at each other's doors, and being all alike denounced by the censors, the best were recalled and punished and the worst left in command. ​The Japanese pirates, it should be remembered, were not backed by any reserve of national force; they were private marauders, mere soldiers of fortune, without even the open countenance or support of a feudal chieftain, though undoubtedly their enterprises were often undertaken in the secret interests of some local magnate. It stands to China's lasting humiliation that she was at last compelled to treat the freebooters as a national enemy, and to move a large army against them. There is, indeed, an element of comicality in the situation as it existed at the time of which we write,—China always perched upon a pedestal of ineffable loftiness, addressing her neighbours in forms of speech rigidly adapted to the height at which she supposed herself to stand above them, and solemnly registering the visits of their ambassadors as tribute-bearing missions; Japan lightly contemptuous of such pretensions, thrusting the magnificent Empire's envoys into prison and keeping them there for months on some transparently petty pretext, crossing her neighbour's borders whenever and wherever she pleased, and carrying away everything of interest or of value that came under her hand, yet never hesitating to send openly and courteously for a Buddhist sutra, a céladon vase, or a brocade altar-cloth, if a desire for such objects suggested itself.
Korea underwent at Japan's hands experiences only a degree less harassing than those suffered by China, but failed altogether to find ​a remedy. Her feeble and ill-judged measures of retaliation served merely to provoke fresh aggression.
The interest of this chapter of Japanese history consists not merely in the materials that it furnishes for estimating the quality of Japanese enterprise and of Japanese fighting capacity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also in the indications that it contains of the country's attitude towards foreign commerce and foreign intercourse at that epoch; that is to say, commerce and intercourse with China and Korea, for the time here considered was prior to the coming of Europeans. Foreign commerce was regarded, not as a factor of national wealth, but as a means of enriching a few privileged individuals. Its profits were, for the most part, confined to two great families, the Ouchi in the case of China, and the So in the case of Korea, and restrictions were imposed upon its dimensions solely for the purpose of keeping it within reach of the prescribed control. Speaking generally, it may be said that the patronage of one feudal chief or court noble involved the opposition, or aroused the jealousy, of some other, and not until the unification of the nation in modern times created a common interest in promoting factors of prosperity, did foreign commerce cease to be hampered by personal rivalries and political ambitions. As for foreign intercourse, its conveniences alone were considered, the obligations ​that it imposed being practically neglected. Japan drew freely upon China and Korea for whatever contributions they could make to her literary, religious, and artistic equipments, but at the same time she allowed her subjects to pursue toward both countries a course of lawless violence that must have speedily involved her in war had either the Koreans or the Chinese seen any hope of engaging her successfully. There was no hope, however. She beat back their armadas; she carried fire and sword into their territories without even the semblance of a national effort; she imprisoned their envoys; she showed her total fearlessness of them in a hundred ways. But she never opposed the comings and goings of their peoples to and from her own territories. There was no isolation on her side.
Such was the state of affairs when (1542) the first Europeans came to Japan.
Christianity and foreign commerce presented themselves, hand in hand, and there is no doubt that the marked success which the former achieved at first was due, in large part, to the favour with which the latter was regarded as a means of furnishing wealth and novel weapons of war to the feudal chieftains in their combats and armed rivalries. The alien creed was, in fact, drawn from the outset into the vortex of Japanese politics, and by an evil chance its early patrons, though powerful at the moment, were destined soon to be stripped of their possessions and their ​influence. But its sun had risen high above the horizon before the first clouds made their appearance. In thirty years two hundred thousand converts were won, three monasteries, a college, a university, and upwards of fifty churches were built, and it seemed as though the thirty-six provinces of which Japan then consisted might soon be included in the pale of Christendom. Such results, when compared with the achievements of missionaries in the present times, suggest, at first sight, either that the methods of mediæval propagandism were superior to those of modern, or that some special receptivity for religious truth existed among the Japanese of the sixteenth century. But the fact is that the imported faith profited largely by two adventitious aids, its commercial associations and the marked disfavour into which Buddhism happened to have fallen at that epoch. The latter point, already briefly touched on in a previous chapter, deserves elaboration.
At the moment when the question of the State's attitude towards Christianity had to be answered, Oda Nobunaga, the first of the great triumvirate who finally rescued Japan from internecine strife, was approaching the zenith of his power in the central and northern districts. He aimed at restoring the administrative authority of the Emperor and putting an end to the sanguinary struggles carried on by the feudal chiefs throughout the Empire. His splendid successes soon placed him in a position to decide whether ​the foreign creed, already counting many disciples in the south, should be sanctioned or proscribed in the capital. Historians delight to put wise epigrams into the mouths of illustrious men. It is related of Nobunaga that he dismissed the Christian problem by curtly observing that, since Japan already possessed a dozen different sects of religion, he saw no reason why she should not have a thirteenth. He may have couched his decision in that language, but as to the real motives of the decision there cannot be much doubt. He regarded the Buddhists as enemies of the State. During nearly seven centuries the arrogant pretensions of the priests had grown more and more defiant of official control. From an early era it had been the custom to entrust to them the care of mortuary tablets and the guardianship of tombs. Immense importance naturally attached to the discharge of such functions in a country where ancestral worship informed all religion. Besides, it has already been shown that the representatives of the Indian creed were closely associated with the progress of moral enlightenment and material prosperity, and that they figured prominently in maintaining relations with Japan's continental neighbours. If to that record the fact be added that, from the close of the seventh century, Buddhism had been employed to some extent by Japanese statesmen as an aid to the unification of the nation, and, at a later time, by Japanese sovereigns in their strug​gles against usurping clans, it is possible to appreciate the important position held by it in every sphere of the people's life. Rich gifts and extensive tracts of land were bestowed upon the temples, now by a superstitious sovereign or crafty statesman; now by some powerful feudal noble who desired to associate heaven with the prosecution of his ambitious designs, and in any national crisis, such as the Tartar and Mongol invasions, the coffers of the State were emptied into the sacred treasure-chests. Prominent among the ancient superstitions of Japan was a belief that all evil influences and their abode in the northeast, the Demons' Gate (Kimon). Due northeast of the Imperial Palace in Kyōtō stood the mountain of Hiyei, and there, to guard the Court against demoniacal approaches, Dengyo, a celebrated Buddhist priest of the ninth century, founded a monastery which by and by grew to be a town of three thousand buildings, inhabited by from thirty to forty thousand monks, the great majority of whom could wield a halberd much better than they could intone a litany. The example set at Hiyei-no-yama—or Hiyei-zan, as the place is now called—was soon followed by other congregations of religionists, and the powerful bands of tonsured soldiers (Sōhei) thus organised became one of the most turbulent and unmanageable elements in the State. Theological questions troubled them little. They interested themselves much more vividly in the fortunes of the ​nobles or the sovereigns from whom they derived their own wealth, and since they soon learned to employ the shrewd device of combining esoteric and exoteric influences by carrying the holy car of Buddha in their armed processions, their enmity became as formidable as their alliance was valuable. Nothing bears stronger testimony to the religious instincts of the Japanese than the fact that, despite the violent incursions perpetually made by the monks into the domain of politics, from the time of Shirakawa's reign (1073–1087) down to the second half of the sixteenth century, the monasteries almost invariably escaped the destruction that overtook the strongholds of nobles whose cause they espoused. But Nobunaga measured out ruthless justice to these truculent religionists. A soldier before everything, he had no compassion for any obstacle that barred his military path. If he did not shrink from putting his own brother and his wife's father to the sword, neither did he hesitate to deluge a monastery with blood before he reduced it to ashes, or to set up, with imperious inconstancy, his own effigy among the images of the gods whose fanes he had annihilated. Some of the most powerful Buddhist associations had sided with his political enemies, and he determined not only to root them out, but also to destroy permanently their mischievous potentialities.
It was at the moment when this fury against the Buddhist priests had reached destructive heat, that ​the Jesuit fathers applied to Nobunaga for a charter of propagandism, and received from him an extensive grant of land in Kyōtō, a yearly allowance of money and authority to take up their residence in the capital. The Owari chieftain does not seem to have entertained any respect for Christianity. Religion, in whatsoever guise, occupied an insignificant space on his moral horizon. His unique motive was to set up an opponent to the doctrine that had begotten such troublesome factors in the realm. Christianity was nothing to him for its own sake. As a rival of Buddhism it might be much.
From using the foreign faith for political purposes to suspecting it of political designs the interval was short, and Nobunaga's intelligence soon traversed it. His scrutiny of the Jesuits' methods—their profuse almsgiving, their tendance of the sick, their exercise of unprecedented medical skill—convinced him that they aimed at something more than saving men's souls, and he had begun to revolve plans for their expulsion when death overtook him at the hand of a traitor. But even the brief favour extended by him to Christianity had been disapproved by the man who avenged his fate and succeeded to his power, Hideyoshi, the Taikō.
The annals of the Jesuits ascribe to the meanest and paltriest motives the animosity that the Taikō ultimately displayed towards their faith. It is impossible to accept their evidently preju​diced verdict. The Taikō, like all Japanese of his era, was without any experience of international intercourse, but his statecraft rose to the height of genius. It is inconceivable that a man of such profound insight could fail to detect the political import of the credentials from secular authorities with which the Jesuit fathers came provided, or to appreciate the material character that the conquests of the Cross might be made to assume. He had learned by heart every lesson that the annals of his own country could teach. He knew how Buddhism, originally an instrument in the hands of Japanese statesmen, had ultimately defied their authority, raised itself even above the Imperial Court, and developed military strength with which the most powerful feudal nobles hesitated to cross swords. The story of the very sect against which the animosity of his leader and patron, Oda Nobunaga, burned most relentlessly, showed what even a creed of gentle tenets and refining influences like Buddhism might become in the hands of militant propagandists. He perceived that Christianity evinced nothing of the eclecticism or adaptability which had prevented a collision between Buddhism and the ancestral cult of the Japanese. He saw that the Jesuit fathers spurned all compromise; that the disciple of every other faith was to them an infidel, a pagan, a child of the devil; that their fierce zeal, heated white in fires of which no reflection had yet been cast on the ​horizon of Japan, drove them from the outset to excesses of intolerance presaging a national catastrophe as soon as Buddhism found itself forced to fight for its life. The Taikō owed much of his remarkable success to a fine sense of proportion. He possessed the gift of measuring with precision the strength of offence or defence that a given combination of men or things would develop under certain contingencies. Nothing is more improbable than that he underestimated the immense potentialities for resistance, or, if need be, for aggressive destructiveness, possessed by Japanese Buddhism in his time; an imperium in imperio, dowered with vast stores of wealth, wielding a military organisation which, were its various parts combined against a common foe, would hold the whole realm at its mercy, and historically capable of efforts so strong even for the petty purposes of a sectarian squabble that their supreme exercise in a life-and-death struggle with Christianity could not be contemplated without the gravest misgivings. Vaguely, perhaps, but still in outlines sufficiently distinct to suggest a lurid picture, these eventualities must have presented themselves to his strong intelligence, and as the cries of dying priests and the crash of falling temples reached his ears from Kiushiu where the Christian propagandists were harrying their opponents with the faggot and the sword, he may well have begun to appreciate the dimensions of the impending catastrophe. ​He did not, however, immediately take steps to evince his disapproval of militant Christianity, nor when the time seemed ripe for proscribing it did he proceed to extremities. The crucifixion spear does not appear to have suggested itself to him as a prudent weapon for combating moral convictions. It is true that in the heat of his first anti-Christian demonstration he caused two men to be executed, and it is also true that he deprived a Christian noble of his fief by way of penalty for the constancy of his faith. But, for the rest, he remained content with the razing of a few chapels, and with a public declaration that he would not tolerate, on the part of Christian propagandists, any recourse to the violent methods of which the country had garnered such painful experiences in the case of the Buddhist Sōhei, and of which the Christians had already shown themselves ready employers. There is nothing to indicate that, had Christianity thenceforth relied solely on legitimate weapons, the pulpit, education, and example, paying due respect to the laws of the land and extending to others the toleration that it claimed for itself—there is nothing to indicate that it might not have retained, strengthened, and extended the footing it had gained in Japan, and that the Japanese might not then have finally entered the arena of international intercourse and competition, instead of isolating themselves for nearly three centuries until they had been almost ​hopelessly distanced in the race of material civilisation.
But a new influence now made itself felt. The Jesuits were assailed by an enemy from within the fold. Hitherto they had been without sectarian rivals in Japan. Their precedence in the field was regarded as constituting a title to its monopoly, and a Papal Bull had assigned the Far-Eastern islands as their special diocese. Now, however, the Spaniards took steps to dispute their ascendancy by sending an envoy from the Philippines to complain of some alleged illegality on the part of Portuguese merchants. In the envoy's train came a number of Franciscans, and when the Jesuits remonstrated, and called attention to the Papal Bull, the Franciscans gave an ingenuous reply. They had observed the Bull, they said, since they had not come as religionists but as members of an ambassador's suite, and having thus by lawful means surmounted the difficulty of getting to Japan, there was no longer any just impediment to their preaching there. Very soon they made their presence felt in a pernicious manner. Hitherto the Japanese had been left to draw their own conclusions as to the political contingencies of Christian propagandism. Thenceforth they received ample material for suspicion from the Portuguese and the Spaniards themselves, for each roundly accused the other of aggressive designs against Japan's integrity. Hideyoshi ​strictly interdicted any attempt at religious propagandism on the part of the Franciscans, whose presence in the capital he had sanctioned in an ambassadorial capacity only. The Franciscans paid not the smallest heed to his veto. Possibly they justified their disobedience by some casuistry as convincing as their retort to the Jesuits. If so, they failed to make the point clear to Hideyoshi. He ordered their arrest, and sent them, with three Jesuit fathers and seventeen—some records say twenty-four—native Christians to Nagasaki, where they were executed. The scene was transferred to canvas by a nameless European artist of great ability. Crucifixion was the method of execution, but not crucifixion as practised in the Occident. The victims were tied to a cross and pierced from left and right simultaneously by sharp spears inserted below the ribs and thrust diagonally towards the shoulders. Death was generally instantaneous, but sometimes the stabs had to be repeated. The painting is true in every detail. It portrays, without exaggerating, the racial types of the victims and their slayers, the vinous swagger of the semi-brutalised executioner, the ecstatic calm of the Fathers, and the awful perspective of the long line of crosses with their bleeding burdens.
This was Hideyoshi's protest, first, against the risk of Japan's becoming a battle-field for rival creeds from abroad; secondly, against the defiant attitude assumed by the strangers towards secular ​authority, and thirdly, against the political intrigues of which the Christians accused themselves and of which he had long suspected them. It is worth while to observe these facts carefully, for they lie at the root of all Japan's foreign intercourse.
Iyeyasu, the Tokugawa chieftain, who succeeded to the work of domestic pacification already carried within sight of completion by Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, did not at first give any clear indication of the course that he intended to pursue towards the Padres and their following. But there can be no doubt that the Christian problem had attracted his keen attention long before the full control of administrative affairs came into his hands (1600 A. D.). No Japanese statesman could afford to ignore a question which was producing not only widespread disturbance, but also a startling change in the relations between the classes. In all times, one of the results of Roman Catholic propagandism in Oriental countries has been to remove the converts beyond the unchallenged control of the civil authorities and to elevate their spiritual guides to the rank of secular protectors. The members of the Christian community learn to believe that their conversion differentiates them from the mass of their unregenerate nationals, and opens to them a tribunal of appeal against any exaction or injustice to which the latter may be exposed. Modern diplomatists have often ​been required to consider that outcome of missionary enterprise in China. A cognate problem forced itself on the attention of Japanese statesmen from a very early period. The Emperor Shirakawa (1073–1087), who, at the zenith of his power, complained that only three things in his realm defied his authority,—the chances of the dice, the waters of the Kamo River, and the priests of Buddha,—was ultimately obliged to invoke the assistance of the military nobles against the contumacious proceedings of the Buddhist prelates, thus inaugurating between the followers of the sword and the disciples of the sutras an era of feuds which culminated in the fierce exterminations resorted to by Oda Nobunaga. From the outset a similar spirit of independence was educated by Christian propagandism in Japan. It is characteristic of human nature that men conspicuously prone to encroach upon the sphere of another's rights are proportionately conservative of their own. The Roman Catholic priest's stout defiance of pagan interference in the foreign fields of his labour was but another form of the zeal that impelled him to protect orthodoxy with the faggot and the rack in Europe. Iyeyasu mounted the administrative throne at a time when these things forced themselves upon political attention. He had seen Franciscan monks trample upon the veto of the Taikō within the very shadow of the latter's castle. He had seen Christians in Nagasaki successfully ignore the ​orders of the men appointed by the Taikō to restrain them. He had seen the Padres resume their preaching almost immediately after the issue of a prohibitory edict. He had seen the unprecedented spectacle of heimin (commoners) accepting from the alien creed a commission to oppose samurai authority. He had seen the persecuting intolerance of the foreign faith constitute a new menace to the tranquillity which it was his hope, and seemingly his mission, to restore to his tired countrymen. It can scarcely be doubted, therefore, that Iyeyasu was opposed to Christianity from the first. Besides, whether from policy or conviction, he was himself a devotee of Buddhism. He carried in his bosom an image of Amida, and in seventy-three battles he had donned no armour, avowedly trusting solely to the protection of the god he worshipped. The quality of this great leader's piety is not here a matter of concern. He may have been prompted mainly by a desire to win to his cause influences which, when opposed, had shown themselves strong and mischievous. But that a man who encouraged his followers to regard him as an incarnation of one of Yakushi's Arhats, and professed to consider a miniature effigy of Kuro Honzon better protection than cuirass or hauberk against sword or arrow, should ever have seriously entertained the idea of countenancing Christianity, is an unreasonable supposition. On the other hand, conciliation and tolerance were essential factors in ​the administration of Iyeyasu. He never resorted to violence where his end seemed capable of being compassed by tact. Thus, although, in the year 1600, he proclaimed his policy by means of an edict banishing Christian propagandists, as the Taikō had done in 1587, like the Taikō he took no conclusive steps to enforce the order. For a moment, indeed, it seemed as though the edict would be followed by drastic measures. Shortly after its issue the Christian places of worship in Kyōtō were destroyed and several followers of the faith met their death. But active persecution ceased there, so far as the central authorities were concerned.
In the provinces, however, the Christians had to endure suffering. They reaped as they had sown. The detailed story need not be told. It bears further testimony to the fact that the fortunes of the Western creed in each district depended on the prejudice or caprice of the feudal chief governing there, and were consequently exposed to many of the intrigues, jealousies, and ambitions which disfigured the era. Iyeyasu made no attempt to interfere between the victims and their local persecutors. He had announced his disapproval of Christianity and he waited on the course of events.
Meanwhile, despite local opposition and the nominal ban of the central Government, the foreign creed constantly gained. In the year 1605 the number of converts was estimated ​at six hundred thousand, and from Sendai in the north to Kagoshima in the south its propagandists preached openly and its adherents worshipped in their own churches. The time had come to choose between final toleration or resolute extirpation.
Iyeyasu chose the latter. On January the twenty-seventh, 1614, he issued a proclamation ordering the banishment of the propagandists and leaders of Christianity, the destruction of their churches, and the compulsory recantation of their doctrines. "The Christians," his edict said, "have come to Japan not only to carry on commerce with their ships, but also to propagate an evil creed and subvert the true doctrine, to the end that they may effect a change of government in the country and thus usurp possession of it. This seed will produce a harvest of unhappiness. It must be eradicated." That Iyeyasu was fully persuaded of the truth of these words, there can be little question. It only remains to inquire the proximate causes by which he was led to exchange his previous attitude of negative disapproval for one of positive extermination.
Several reasons present themselves. The first is the issue of a Bull, in 1608, granting to all orders of Christianity free access to Japan. From the point of view of Rome the step was natural. Japan had hitherto been a papally forbidden land to all save the Jesuits. Paul the Fifth simply ​rescinded the veto. But from the point of view of Iyeyasu the incident assumed a very different aspect. The Taikō had issued an interdict ordering the withdrawal of all Christian propagandists from Japan. The Shōgun had repeated the interdict. The Pope of Rome ignored both vetoes and authoritatively threw Japan open to Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, anybody and everybody wearing a cowl or carrying a Testament.
The second reason is that Iyeyasu found in Christianity a formidable obstacle to the realisation of his own political projects. After the battle of Sekigahara there remained only one source of possible peril to the peace which it was the Tokugawa leader's highest ambition to secure for his country. That source was Hideyori, the Taikō's son. He and his supporters intrigued to effect the overthrow of the Tokugawa, and the Jesuit Fathers threw in their lot with them, as did also a multitude of Christians. The castle at Osaka, with its stupendous battlements and almost impregnable defences, became a resort for persecuted or discontented Christians from all parts of the Empire. The Padres cannot be reproached for the part they chose at that crisis. Scarcely a faint hope remained that their faith would ever be sanctioned by the Tokugawa, whereas, with the Taikō's son at the head of the administration and owing his elevation in a large degree to Christian aid, there might have dawned for the Fathers and their flock an era not merely of State ​tolerance but also of official patronage. Then, indeed, events might have justified the premature pœan of the Dillingen chronicler, that Japan had been "won over and incorporated into the true fold of the Christian Church." Such a prize was worth playing for at heavy risks. The Padres played for it and failed. Iyeyasu's sentence of banishment and extermination overtook them in 1614, and in the following year Osaka Castle was given to the flames after a struggle that is said to have cost a hundred thousand lives.
Yet another reason for the Tokugawa chief's recourse to drastic measures must be noted. The Dutch, concluding a commercial convention with Japan in 1610, naturally sought to oust the Portuguese from the monopoly that they held of Japanese trade, and to that end they roundly accused both Portuguese and Spaniards of prostituting Christian propagandism to political intrigue, and of concealing designs against Japan's integrity under the cloak of her religious regeneration. The English, who soon afterwards gained access to Japan's markets, adopted the tactics of the Dutch. It was easy to show from contemporary history that such accusations rested on bases at least highly plausible. Nobunaga had more than suspected something of the kind thirty years before either Dutch or English preferred the accusation; the Taikō had shared the suspicion, and Iyeyasu, with a wider range of experience to guide him, would probably have passed from sus​picion to certainty even without the testimony of Hollanders or British. A good deal has been urged in modern times by way of apology for the conduct of the English and the Dutch. Some have even denied the charge on behalf of one, or the other, or both. There is no occasion for either repudiation or extenuation. Considering the relations between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, between England and Spain, and between Holland and Portugal at that era, and recalling the canons of commercial combats and the rules of the religious lists at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that things fell out in Japan exactly as might have been predicated.
The facts here set down compel an impartial historian to admit that what Japan did in 1614, most European States would have done under the same circumstances at the same epoch. An impartial historian will probably go a great deal farther. He will conclude that the measures of expulsion and eradication adopted by Japan in 1614 would have been adopted forty or fifty years earlier by any European State under pressure of the same incentives. No European State would have tolerated for a moment the things that were perpetrated in the name of Christianity between 1560 and 1576 in Nagasaki and Bungo, and between 1597 and 1600 in Higo. No European State would have suffered the propagandists of a foreign faith to settle within its borders and excite a section of its ​population to make a holocaust of the national places of worship, and to stone, slaughter, and banish their priests. If Japan endured these outrages for a time, it was because her strength of national self-assertion was paralysed by division. The central administration had no power to prescribe a uniform policy to the multitude of irresponsible and semi-independent principalities into which the country was divided, and in the rival ambitions of the various territorial magnates whose cause the missionary promoted with arms and gold, he found temporary safety and patronage. The integration of the Empire, first under Hideyoshi, subsequently and more completely under Iyeyasu, was the signal for recourse to measures which, were they embodied in a chapter of contemporary Occidental history, would not have seemed either incongruous or abnormal.
There is no occasion to describe in detail the struggle that ensued between religious fanaticism and the exterminating zeal of officials who believed themselves to be obeying the highest instincts of patriotic statecraft. The story has already occupied many pens. Terrible things were done, things worthy of Torquemada and Ximenes, and the long tragedy culminated in a rebellion which involved the death of from thirty to forty thousand Christians and the final expulsion of the Portuguese from Japan. This rebellion—celebrated in history as the "Shimabara Revolt"—was brought to a close in the spring ​of 1638. Shortly before its outbreak an edict of the most drastic nature was promulgated. It declared that any Japanese subject attempting to go abroad, or any Japanese subject already abroad who attempted to return home, should be executed; it directed that all foreigners professing Christianity should be imprisoned at Omura; it forbade Eurasian children to reside in Japan, and it decreed banishment for any persons adopting an Eurasian child and severe punishment for their relatives. Four years later, the Dutch were required to confine themselves to Deshima. They had succeeded in effectually prejudicing the Japanese against the Portuguese and the Spaniards, but they had not succeeded in preserving any large measure of respect for themselves.
These cruel and illiberal measures crowned Japan's policy of restriction and isolation,—a policy which may be said to have commenced on a radical scale with the proclamation of Iyeyasu in 1614, and to have culminated in the imprisonment of the Dutch at Deshima in 1641 by his grandson, Iyeyasu, the third Tokugawa Shōgun. In that interval another step, wholly destructive of maritime enterprise, was taken by the same Iyeyasu. It has already been alluded to. He ordered that all vessels of sea-going capacity should be destroyed, and that no craft should thenceforth be built of sufficient size to venture beyond home waters.
Nakajima, Nagasaki.
However unwelcome the admission, it is apparent that for all these changes Christianity was responsible. The policy of seclusion adopted by Japan in the early part of the seventeenth century and resolutely pursued until the middle of the nineteenth, was anti-Christian, not anti-foreign. ​The fact cannot be too clearly recognised. It is the chief lesson taught by the events outlined above. Throughout the whole of that period of isolation, Occidentals were not known to the Japanese by any of the terms now in common use,—as gwaikoku-jiri, seiyo-jin, or i-jin, which embody the simple meaning, foreigner, or Western, or alien: they were popularly called bateren (padre). Thus completely had foreign intercourse and Christian propagandism become identified in the eyes of the people. And when it is remembered that "foreign intercourse" associated with Christianity had come to be synonymous in Japanese ears with foreign aggression, with the subversal of the Mikado's sacred dynasty, and with the loss of the independence of the Country of the Gods, there is no difficulty in understanding the attitude of the nation's mind towards this question. In these considerations, too, is found a reason for the lack of any element of national ambition in the ultimate policy of Iyeyasu, and from first to last in the policy of his greatest successor, Iyemitsu.
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