User:Soranin/Sandbox4

Echoes of Shadows

Timeline

Onin War

Onin War, running from 1467 to 1477. Huge damage done to Kyoto in the process of this war. It begins as a kind of succession dispute within the shogunate, but an enormous proportion of Kyoto is destroyed in fire. Lots of these different warrior constables from around the country end up coming to the Kyoto region to get involved. When that war ends, some of them go back to their provinces to find that someone else has usurped them. And that's someone else who has usurped them, manages to solidify their own power until they become what we would call daimyo, this real independent warlord. And in other cases, the warrior constables, when they go back to their provinces, they're the ones who managed to do that. Because this war, this Onin War, this 10 year conflict, pretty much destroys the idea of a functional shogunate. And so there really is no one in Kyoto anymore that you have to answer to.

So it's a period when central authority in Japan has completely gone. So you've still got the emperor in Kyoto, but as we were saying a moment ago, they're kind of impoverished and not really able to do very much politically or militarily. You've also still got a shogun in Kyoto. So if we go to the end of the Onin War, 1477, which is also pretty much the beginning of this Sengoku era, you've got a shogun there, but they're also extremely poor.

This is the exact period after the Onin War when the Ashikaga shogunate is descending really into complete impotence. Their writ doesn't run far outside Kyoto and they haven't got much income. So they simply couldn't afford to put the silver on there.

So you mentioned the Onin War there, 1467 to 77, a bit of a succession crisis. Should we view that as the catalyst for the Sengoku period? I think that's right, yes.

Honnō-ji incident

By the time that he died in the 1580s as a result of treachery on the part of some of his own men, actually, he had controlled most of Japan's main island of Honshu and he was on the verge of going to its second biggest island, Kyushu, down south. He actually at that point looked unstoppable.

he's just setting out in early part of 1582 for the next part of that campaign staying at a temple called Honnoji in Kyoto when he's attacked actually not by his enemies but by someone who is supposed to be on his side one of the famous treacherous figures I suppose in Japanese history man by the name of Akechi Mitsuhide who persuades his men to turn their guns on Oda Nobunaga and his own men and so you have these stories of Oda Nobunaga shouting out treachery or traitors or something like that trying to fight them off himself the temple ends up in flames and Oda Nobunaga retreats further into the temple and dies by his own hand.

so immediately he [Toyotomi Hideyoshi] rushes from where he's been fighting over to take care of the traitors and he brings the traitors head back to Kyoto to effectively lay at the feet of Oda Nobunaga's body to say here we are you know I've taken care of this for you and Hideyoshi really then becomes the inheritor I think of this project to try to unify Japan and his major next step one of the steps that Oda Nobunaga would have taken had he lived was to attack Kyushu

Ishiyama Hongan-ji War

I suppose there's a really good example of siege warfare involving Oda Nobunaga. So in Japan, you have these different Buddhist sects and one of them, Ojoro Shinshu, was particularly powerful and particularly worrying for Oda Nobunaga because the people in this particular sect could be almost pitted out at the last minute to become a kind of pop-up army so that the patriarch, for want of a better word, of this particular sect could issue a statement against Oda Nobunaga as he did, declaring him an enemy and saying that people would be rewarded in the next life if they stand up against him. And the followers of this sect included some fairly wealthy merchants who could effectively equip themselves and feed themselves. So the danger of these pop-up armies appearing almost out of nowhere was extraordinary for Oda Nobunaga and he worried about it and he actually resented it very much. And so he launched a siege against the main compound in Osaka of the Jodo Shinshu sect, which lasted actually for a while. It wasn't entirely successful because Osaka, of course, is on the water and so the patriarch had allies, pirate Daimyo, I suppose you could call them, who for a while would supply the castle by sea. But Oda Nobunaga managed to defeat those pirates at sea and so after a while the Jodo Shinshu sect holed up in this fortified temple complex in Osaka had to give up. They did at the last minute, the sun, I think, of the patriarch, if I've got it right, when he was forced to come out, set fire to the place just before he came out on the basis that if the Jodo Shinshu sect cannot have that fortress anymore, then Oda Nobunaga certainly can't have it either.

Siege of Mount Hiei

So there were quite remarkable sieges along the way, a company that has to be said, certainly in the case of someone like Nobunaga, with extraordinary slaughter. I think he particularly hated the idea that Buddhist sects would interfere in the running of the country. So there's another Buddhist sect, the Tendai sect, which he attacked on their mountain base called Mount Hiei, sent thousands of troops up there, killed everybody, burned everything, just destroyed the entire sect, including people unrelated to the sect who were living on the mountain. So this gives you an idea of how bloody and uncompromising some of this warfare could be.

Imjin War

Hideyoshi once he's taken Kyushu just a few years later launches invasions of Korea so he sends troops across including some of Christian warlords commanding them across to Korea wanting to use it almost as China's driveway if you think about the geography of it send these troops up through Korea take over the peninsula eventually invade and take over China and after that he also wanted to take over India as well

his Korean campaign goes badly wrong in the 1590s the Chinese finally put some men in the field and they push the Japanese troops all the way back down the Korean peninsula so it doesn't go anywhere except for poisoning relations with Korea for a very long time to come

And then Hideyoshi asked him [Gaspar Coelho], I want to invade Korea. Then you provide two Portuguese ships to help me in this invasion. And if I conquer Korea, I will make it that there are a lot of churches being built. So Koelyo said, yes, I will do that for you. And I will make sure that we have two Portuguese ships, the Karak ships, as they were called by the English, gigantic ships. So Hideyoshi could very well use them for his invasion in Korea. And then he went a step further and he said, I will make sure that the Christian warlords in Kyushu will also support you. And I think at that moment that Hideyoshi, that there was a ring bell in his head, that the Christians, the Jesuits had too much influence in Japan.

Battle of Sekigahara

great battles in Japanese history the battle of Sekigahara which happens in 1600 so you've got a couple of nervous years or a bit less than that after the death of Hideyoshi this council in place but people are wondering really whether it will stick and what happens instead I think is you get the buildup of two sides that take the form in the end of an eastern and a western army and Tokugawa Ieyasu was at the head of the eastern army and in the autumn of Sekigahara he wins out and really everything goes to him and shortly afterwards he has himself appointed shogun

he does this enormous reshuffling of territory in Japan I think it's the biggest reshuffling of territory in terms of who controls what in Japan's history so lots of the people who are on the losing side at the battle of Sekigahara either lose everything or their territory is drastically cut down or they're shipped off to another part of the country entirely perhaps all these things that are designed to damage their power

Siege of Osaka

Hideyori is still around and that really isn't taken care of until a very famous incident 1614 to 15 which is the siege of Osaka it's one of these events in Japanese history which is told and retold on the stage in books in films in art even where the forces of the Tokugawa and their allies gather around Osaka castle trying to do some kind of deal trying to force Hideyori and those around him to give up but in the end the siege turns bloody the castle is on fire and we have these famous scenes of Hideyori and his mother huddled together as everyone around them is burning up and dying so the siege of Osaka

Shimabara Rebellion

in Kyushu where you have what's called the Shimabara rebellion 1637 to 1638 where basically a ragtag bunch of peasants with a little bit of samurai leadership managed to hold themselves up in a castle and fight off wave after wave of samurai who come in to try and pacify them and take the castle and it's extraordinarily embarrassing you know these samurai try everything they send ninjas into the castle they send spies in who get caught they try and dig tunnels under the castle but the people inside the castle fill the tunnels with feces and urine they try all sorts of things and it takes months and months and months and reinforcements to finally get this rebellion under control and the story that the Tokugawa tell after the Shimabara rebellion is that this was a case of foreign interference you know these people these peasants couldn't possibly hold off samurai unless they were somehow being supported and orchestrated by these nefarious foreign christian powers and so probably the last development in this long process of unification is the shutting down almost completely of Japan's borders they'll still deal with China and Korea at particular points within Japan they'll have that trade with Southeast Asia they'll have a limited trade as well but the Portuguese are thrown out the Spanish are thrown out the English aren't terribly interested in the end anyway the Japanese will only deal when we're thinking about European powers with the Dutch and only at this little artificial island called Dejima just a few feet worth of wooden bridge off the coast of Nagasaki

Locations and Landmarks

Silver Pavilion, aka Ginkaku-ji

If anyone listening to this has been to Kyoto and they've been to see the silver pavilion, they may have been disappointed to find that there's no actual silver on it. It was supposed to be covered in glorious silver the way that the Golden Temple is gloriously covered in gold. But the pavilion was built in the early 1480s. This is the exact period after the Onin War when the Ashikaga shogunate is descending really into complete impotence. Their writ doesn't run far outside Kyoto and they haven't got much income. So they simply couldn't afford to put the silver on there.

Nagasaki

he discovered that Nagasaki had been raised up into this great port by the Jesuits who had effectively been given Nagasaki by a local warlord so the extraordinary influence that a foreign power preaching of foreign religion had in Kyushu I think upset Hideyoshi very much

in the end anyway the Japanese will only deal when we're thinking about European powers with the Dutch and only at this little artificial island called Dejima just a few feet worth of wooden bridge off the coast of Nagasaki

Gaspar Vilela is one who stands out. He was a very keen propagator of the Christian faith, and he could convert some warlords to Christianity. One of them was Omura Sumitada, who eventually would give a port to the Jesuits, which was called Nagasaki.

Groups and People

Oda Nobunaga

But he's from the small province of Owari. But he's a really good example of someone who was able to use a combination of smart tactics, smart use of weaponry, judicious use of alliances to gradually expand beyond that province. So he takes another province for himself right early on. This is the middle of the 1500s. Then he makes some alliances. By 1568, after really only a few short years, and he's still relatively speaking a young man, he's able to do what most daimyo ultimately wanted to do, which is to mount a successful march on Kyoto and have the emperor under his BDI and also have the shogun under his control.

One of the stories told about him when he was a young man, just after his father left, all the Buddhist priests who had been tending to his father, praying for him, looking after him before he died, legend has it anyway that Oda Nobunaga had them all locked inside a single building and then shot to death for what they did, i.e. failing to keep his father alive. He also had a reputation as a teenager for being just quite strange, swaggering around town, eating nuts, letting them fall out of his mouth. He had sort of disheveled hair. At his father's funeral he's said to have picked up a fistful of incense and just thrown it and walked out. So quite a strange character, probably an unpromising character early on, but he was given this motto of rule the realm by force and I think that carried him through. He had a strong sense that he was always going to do this, that he was always going to succeed and I think there's a combination of deep self-belief and ruthlessness and I suppose a degree of luck as well that really seems to carry him forward. By the time that he died in the 1580s as a result of treachery on the part of some of his own men, actually, he had controlled most of Japan's main island of Honshu and he was on the verge of going to its second biggest island, Kyushu, down south. He actually at that point looked unstoppable.

So in terms of Oda Nobunaga, not an especially promising background I think. If you think about the era into which he's born, there are roughly 120 of these states. Some of them at war with others, some of them in alliance etc. But his state or province or what he is just one of those and quite a small one at that. Plus I think it's 1551, his father dies when Oda Nobunaga is still quite young, still a teenager and he inherits control of this state and the people around him don't see him as an especially serious figure and especially compromising figure. You can imagine some of the senior vassals a little bit older than him thinking goodness me I don't know what's going to happen to our little province with this person in charge. He was I think just seen as being slightly mad, a bit of an idiot not really able to take life terribly seriously and yet within a few short years he proves himself to be this master strategist who becomes by the mid 1560s really the main player in Japan out of all these warlords.

What he succeeds in doing is very early on gaining control of a neighboring province and then he makes a very fortuitous alliance with the man who becomes Tokugawa Ieyasu. He doesn't yet have that name at this point in the 1550s but that's a great alliance. It allows Oda Nobunaga not to have to worry too much about the territory to one side of his own province and so he can look elsewhere for his focus but I think other things that seem to go in his favor include a real talent for strategy, choosing the right moment to attack, I think an extraordinary ruthlessness to him as well.

So I think by the time he dies in 1582 he has control of large parts of Japan's main island the long thin island of Honshu contains places like Tokyo as it's now called Kyoto of course Osaka for centuries really the central part of that central island really across from Osaka and Kyoto up to what we now call Tokyo has been considered as it were the business end of Japan that's where a lot of the power plays go on the culture is developed the economy is at its strongest and Oda Nobunaga has control of most of that certainly between himself and his allies in any case and he's thinking about moving into two other of Japan's main islands Kyushu which is towards the southwest and also the smaller island of Shikoku so he's got lots of plans he's still a relatively young man he's in an extraordinarily powerful position and he's just setting out in early part of 1582 for the next part of that campaign staying at a temple called Honnoji in Kyoto when he's attacked actually not by his enemies but by someone who is supposed to be on his side one of the famous treacherous figures I suppose in Japanese history man by the name of Akechi Mitsuhide who persuades his men to turn their guns on Oda Nobunaga and his own men and so you have these stories of Oda Nobunaga shouting out treachery or traitors or something like that trying to fight them off himself the temple ends up in flames and Oda Nobunaga retreats further into the temple and dies by his own hand.

So you had, for example, Oda Nobunaga, which showed great familiarity to the Christians, to for example, Fróis, who he invited in Kyoto in Gifu Castle and showed him around in the castle. So it was very positively inclined towards the Christians, but still he never adopted the Christian faith himself.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi

so Hideyoshi Toyotomi was one of those [ashigaru] now and again he carried the sandals of Oda Nobunaga Oda Nobunaga used to refer to him affectionately as that bald rat Hideyoshi's famously sort of short on a bit of hair but nevertheless he rises through the ranks to be a senior and trusted man under Oda Nobunaga so immediately he rushes from where he's been fighting over to take care of the traitors and he brings the traitors head back to Kyoto to effectively lay at the feet of Oda Nobunaga's body to say here we are you know I've taken care of this for you and Hideyoshi really then becomes the inheritor I think of this project to try to unify Japan and his major next step one of the steps that Oda Nobunaga would have taken had he lived was to attack Kyushu

yet for Hideyoshi Kyushu is a part of Japan that he simply must have so he sends around a quarter of a million men over to Kyushu to take it for himself which he manages to do in fairly short order in 1586 and 7

Hideyoshi for his part had a powerful dislike of Christians so the island of Kyushu in this period was probably the part of Japan where Christian missionaries Portuguese and Spanish mainly the Jesuits but also others as well had since the 1550s been making quite a large number of converts so some of the warlords the daimyo in Kyushu were actually Christians who had a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish and Japanese names and Hideyoshi was astounded to find when he got to Kyushu but he found some Christian missionaries offering him to kind of broker deals with warlords help him take over the island these people as far as Hideyoshi were concerned were foreigners preaching of foreign faith he discovered that Nagasaki had been raised up into this great port by the Jesuits who had effectively been given Nagasaki by a local warlord so the extraordinary influence that a foreign power preaching of foreign religion had in Kyushu I think upset Hideyoshi very much

Hideyoshi once he's taken Kyushu just a few years later launches invasions of Korea so he sends troops across including some of Christian warlords commanding them across to Korea wanting to use it almost as China's driveway if you think about the geography of it send these troops up through Korea take over the peninsula eventually invade and take over China and after that he also wanted to take over India as well

although Hideyoshi has done very well by 1590 as I say he pretty much has most parts of Japan wrapped up under his control and he's starting to think about internal administration he introduces measures for example to disarm the peasantry so if you want to end this period of all against all warfare he wants to return to a position where most people cannot bear arms and it's very clear who can and who aren't and where you sit in these various samurai hierarchies so he does all these bits of internal administration too I suppose another thing he starts to do is to launch these surveys of the land something that Oda Nobunaga had started to an extent but Hideyoshi really goes for it to get a sense of who going forward owns what in Japan what kind of tax you ought to pay so the things that you know maybe strike some fans of history as a bit dull but nevertheless a sign I think of a new order starting to entrench itself so he does all that but his Korean campaign goes badly wrong in the 1590s the Chinese finally put some men in the field and they push the Japanese troops all the way back down the Korean peninsula so it doesn't go anywhere except for poisoning relations with Korea for a very long time to come and then in 1598 Hideyoshi dies and the one thing he doesn't manage to do and I suppose fans of history from Europe and elsewhere there's similar things happen here one thing you want to do if you're a newly established ruler is make sure that the succession is in place...

And you had Otomo, which was a very powerful clan in the east of Kyushu. And then you had in the southwest, you had the Shimazu. And Otomo was losing against the Shimazu. So he asked Hideyoshi to intervene. And sometime before Hideyoshi marched towards Kyushu, he met with Coelho, which was then the head of the Christian mission in Japan, together with Fróis. And he treated Coelho very well, just like Oda Nobunaga had done with Fróis. So Coelho was really pleased with that. And then Hideyoshi asked him, I want to invade Korea. Then you provide two Portuguese ships to help me in this invasion. And if I conquer Korea, I will make it that there are a lot of churches being built. So Koelyo said, yes, I will do that for you. And I will make sure that we have two Portuguese ships, the Karak ships, as they were called by the English, gigantic ships. So Hideyoshi could very well use them for his invasion in Korea. And then he went a step further and he said, I will make sure that the Christian warlords in Kyushu will also support you. And I think at that moment that Hideyoshi, that there was a ring bell in his head, that the Christians, the Jesuits had too much influence in Japan.

And when he had conquered Kyushu, he again met with Coelho on a Portuguese ship. And Coelho again said that we will support you in whatever endeavor you will take. But the night suddenly he sent a questionary to Coelho, asking him why they came to Japan, why they are making so much converts. And why are they destroying the Buddhist temples? Of course Coelho was really shocked with that. He was so well treated and suddenly everything changed overnight. So he gave his answer that, well, they came to Japan just to propagate their faith, in good faith. And that it was not them who destroyed the Buddhist temples, but the Japanese converts. So the answer of Hideyoshi was that he made a decree that the Jesuits had to leave Japan in 20 days.

Tokugawa Ieyasu

What he succeeds in doing is very early on gaining control of a neighboring province and then he makes a very fortuitous alliance with the man who becomes Tokugawa Ieyasu. He doesn't yet have that name at this point in the 1550s but that's a great alliance. It allows Oda Nobunaga not to have to worry too much about the territory to one side of his own province and so he can look elsewhere for his focus [...]

unfortunately he dies when his son Hideyori is still too young to assume power and so you have this council of elders who are controlling things until Hideyori is old enough to rule by himself but unfortunately on that council of elders is one Tokugawa Ieyasu who while you know professing a certain amount of loyalty to Hideyori is plotting and scheming instead to take it all for himself and so he becomes our third major figure.

he stations some troops in Kyoto to keep the emperor under a watchful eye not necessarily because of what the emperor might do but what people might use the emperor for some of his western enemies you know as in in the western part of Japan might potentially take the emperor as a figurehead and launch a further action against him it's not as though after a great battle like that everyone on the losing side thinks fair enough you know you've got me I'll walk away and agree to this so he has that our establishment Kyoto his own power base is Edo this castle town that is now the great city of Tokyo so his shogunate is really run out of Edo that's where his advisors are his castle is his strong economy is and he manages to really build up Edo I think in short order the other thing he does which is really establishing this process of unification really establishing the new Japan is he does this enormous reshuffling of territory in Japan I think it's the biggest reshuffling of territory in terms of who controls what in Japan's history so lots of the people who are on the losing side at the battle of Sekigahara either lose everything or their territory is drastically cut down or they're shipped off to another part of the country entirely perhaps all these things that are designed to damage their power he also as part of that reshuffle takes over a system that Hideyoshi used to use called Sankin Kortai

Tokugawa Ieyasu, he forbade Christianity totally. And all influence of the Jesuits was razed very systematically from then on.

Toyotomi Hideyori

unfortunately he dies when his son Hideyori is still too young to assume power and so you have this council of elders who are controlling things until Hideyori is old enough to rule by himself but unfortunately on that council of elders is one Tokugawa Ieyasu who while you know professing a certain amount of loyalty to Hideyori is plotting and scheming instead to take it all for himself and so he becomes our third major figure.

Hideyori is still around and that really isn't taken care of until a very famous incident 1614 to 15 which is the siege of Osaka it's one of these events in Japanese history which is told and retold on the stage in books in films in art even where the forces of the Tokugawa and their allies gather around Osaka castle trying to do some kind of deal trying to force Hideyori and those around him to give up but in the end the siege turns bloody the castle is on fire and we have these famous scenes of Hideyori and his mother huddled together as everyone around them is burning up and dying so the siege of Osaka

Portuguese Empire

When does that contact begin? Well, that begins in the middle of the 16th century, in 1549 to be correct. The Portuguese, they travelled to the east from the 15th century on and in 1498 I think they established a sea route to India and they went even further and in the beginning of the 16th century they already were in Malacca but then it still took some time for them to reach Japan. It was in 1542 or 43, it's still being disputed, that the first Portuguese merchants reached Japan.

Francis Xavier was a Jesuit and one of the founding members of the Jesuits. He was asked to travel to Asia to begin doing missionary work there. He was asked especially by King John III of Portugal because he was very keen on trying to get as many Asians adhering to the Christian religion. Xavier had quite a correspondence with King John about all what he did in Asia and it wasn't what he expected.

Jesuits

And at the same time you had the Society of Jesus which started in 1540 and soon after the Papal Bull was ordained. Francis Xavier was a Jesuit and one of the founding members of the Jesuits. He was asked to travel to Asia to begin doing missionary work there. He was asked especially by King John III of Portugal because he was very keen on trying to get as many Asians adhering to the Christian religion.

So he had a lot of expectations for Japan and in 1549 he finally set foot on Japan. So that was really the first time that the Jesuits arrived in Japan only six or seven years after the first Portuguese came there.

You have, for example, Ōtomo Yoshishige, who became a Christian after a long time. But he was very well disposed against the Jesuits. You have other people like Takayama Ukon, who became a very fervent Christian and all his samurai also. So they were very fond of them, and they listened to the Jesuits. They asked them a lot about politics, how they could manage this or that issue. So the Jesuits got a lot of influence with some warlords and also with a lot of the peasants and the lower ranked people. So they really had some success, success that they didn't experience in other countries.

Xavier left in 1551, but soon there came more and more Jesuits.

And that information [Fróis' letters] was used by the Jesuits in Europe for propaganda. So they published, after some censorship, Luís Fróis' and Vilela's and other letters, in Italy. And they were also translated in several languages like Latin, German, French, and so on, for the Catholic Reformation in Europe. They would say, see what we can do in Asia, and especially in Japan. We probably have lost England, but we have gained another island in the form of Japan. So they did a lot of propaganda, which gave them additional financial resources and many European Jesuits who wanted to join the efforts in Japan, which was good for them for a time, but could work as a double-edged sword.

And they also had a problem that after a while you have [Francisco] Cabral, you have [Gaspar] Coelho, so two Jesuits who became the head of the Japan sector. And they weren't very keen to adopt Japanese customs. They wanted to be as strictly Jesuits as in Europe. So they already have a problem from the Jesuit side and many like Vilela or Fróis were more inclined to adopt Japanese customs. But the heads of the provincials, as they call them, were against that.

And when he had conquered Kyushu, he again met with Coelho on a Portuguese ship. And Coelho again said that we will support you in whatever endeavor you will take. But the night suddenly he sent a questionary to Coelho, asking him why they came to Japan, why they are making so much converts. And why are they destroying the Buddhist temples? Of course Coelho was really shocked with that. He was so well treated and suddenly everything changed overnight. So he gave his answer that, well, they came to Japan just to propagate their faith, in good faith. And that it was not them who destroyed the Buddhist temples, but the Japanese converts. So the answer of Hideyoshi was that he made a decree that the Jesuits had to leave Japan in 20 days. But he didn't enforce the order very strictly. And that was the same reason why the other warlords welcomed the Jesuits, because he didn't want disrupt the trade with the Portuguese. So he promulgated that decree. But afterwards, the Jesuits stayed in Japan and still continued their missionary work there.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, he forbade Christianity totally. And all influence of the Jesuits was razed very systematically from then on.

Francis Xavier

Francis Xavier was a Jesuit and one of the founding members of the Jesuits. He was asked to travel to Asia to begin doing missionary work there. He was asked especially by King John III of Portugal because he was very keen on trying to get as many Asians adhering to the Christian religion. Xavier had quite a correspondence with King John about all what he did in Asia and it wasn't what he expected. In 1542 he came to India but he didn't get good results so he tried to go to Malacca but there also there was not much interest for his propagating of the faith. And there he met with a Japanese called Anjiro, probably his real name was Yajiro, and he told him about Japan and also some Portuguese merchants who had gone to Japan told him that that will be the country where you really are going to get a lot of people converted to Christianity. So he had a lot of expectations for Japan and in 1549 he finally set foot on Japan. So that was really the first time that the Jesuits arrived in Japan only six or seven years after the first Portuguese came there.

when Xavier came in Japan, he landed in Satsuma, Kagoshima, which is in the southern part of the Kyushu island, and you had a warlord there, Shimaze Takahisa, and he welcomed Xavier very much because he had a motive. If the Jesuits would come, he thought the Portuguese merchants would follow. So he treated Xavier very well and he gave him permission to preach the Gospel in his domains, but after a year, no Portuguese ship arrived, so then he prohibited Christianity and Xavier was compelled to go to another domain, which was the Hilado domain of Matsura Takanobu, and just at that time there was a Portuguese vessel there. And when the Portuguese saw the Jesuits, so Xavier and his companions, they greeted them with utmost respect. And Takanobu saw that, so he thought, okay, I have to treat them also with respect so that the Portuguese traders could come, because those Portuguese traders, they got a lot of products.

And he thought that if he goes to the emperor in Kyoto, in the capital, that the emperor would give him permission to preach in whole of Japan, and that he would have a lot of success because he saw that the lot of a small domain, when he gave permission, he got the chance to convert a few people. If the upper lord of the country would give him permission, he thought he would be in a good position to convert a lot of Japanese. So he went to Kyoto, but that materialized not very well because Kyoto at the time was in the midst of warfare, so he didn't have the chance to meet with the emperor nor with the shogun.

So afterwards, he went back from Kyoto. He got back to Hirado, where he put on very expensive clothes and then went again to the court of Ōuchi. And then he was received very well. He also gave a lot of presents, which he had brought from Portugal. And Ōuchi was very policed with that and gave permission for the Jesuits to preach their gospel in his domains.

Xavier left in 1551, but soon there came more and more Jesuits.

Anjirō

And there [India] he [Francis Xavier] met with a Japanese called Anjiro, probably his real name was Yajiro, and he told him about Japan and also some Portuguese merchants who had gone to Japan told him that that will be the country where you really are going to get a lot of people converted to Christianity.

Xavier first met with Anjiro and this guy could speak Portuguese and he learned a lot of languages. He went to the Seminario in Goa, so he became very proficient in the Christian faith.

So afterwards, he went back from Kyoto. He got back to Hirado, where he put on very expensive clothes and then went again to the court of Ōuchi. And then he was received very well. He also gave a lot of presents, which he had brought from Portugal. And Ōuchi was very policed with that and gave permission for the Jesuits to preach their gospel in his domains. So there, Xavier saw how he had to arrange the missionary work in Japan.

Shimaze Takahisa

when Xavier came in Japan, he landed in Satsuma, Kagoshima, which is in the southern part of the Kyushu island, and you had a warlord there, Shimaze Takahisa, and he welcomed Xavier very much because he had a motive. If the Jesuits would come, he thought the Portuguese merchants would follow. So he treated Xavier very well and he gave him permission to preach the Gospel in his domains, but after a year, no Portuguese ship arrived, so then he prohibited Christianity and Xavier was compelled to go to another domain

Matsura Takanobu

ut after a year, no Portuguese ship arrived, so then he prohibited Christianity and Xavier was compelled to go to another domain, which was the Hilado domain of Matsura Takanobu, and just at that time there was a Portuguese vessel there. And when the Portuguese saw the Jesuits, so Xavier and his companions, they greeted them with utmost respect. And Takanobu saw that, so he thought, okay, I have to treat them also with respect so that the Portuguese traders could come, because those Portuguese traders, they got a lot of products.

in Hirado, when some Japanese became Christians, they became quite aggressive against the Buddhists. So you got internal strife in the Hirado domain, and that was the reason why Takanobu prohibited Christianity from then on.

Ōuchi Yoshitaka

So afterwards, he went back from Kyoto. He got back to Hirado, where he put on very expensive clothes and then went again to the court of Ōuchi. And then he was received very well. He also gave a lot of presents, which he had brought from Portugal. And Ōuchi was very policed with that and gave permission for the Jesuits to preach their gospel in his domains.

Ōtomo Yoshishige

You have, for example, Ōtomo Yoshishige, who became a Christian after a long time. But he was very well disposed against the Jesuits. You have other people like Takayama Ukon, who became a very fervent Christian and all his samurai also. So they were very fond of them, and they listened to the Jesuits. They asked them a lot about politics, how they could manage this or that issue. So the Jesuits got a lot of influence with some warlords and also with a lot of the peasants and the lower ranked people. So they really had some success, success that they didn't experience in other countries.

And you had Otomo, which was a very powerful clan in the east of Kyushu. And then you had in the southwest, you had the Shimazu. And Otomo was losing against the Shimazu. So he asked Hideyoshi to intervene.

Takayama Ukon

You have other people like Takayama Ukon, who became a very fervent Christian and all his samurai also. So they were very fond of them, and they listened to the Jesuits. They asked them a lot about politics, how they could manage this or that issue. So the Jesuits got a lot of influence with some warlords and also with a lot of the peasants and the lower ranked people. So they really had some success, success that they didn't experience in other countries.

And at the same night [that Toyotomi banned the Jesuits], Takayama Ukon, who was a fervent Christian warlord, was deprived of all his domains and eventually banished.

Gaspar Vilela

Gaspar Vilela is one who stands out. He was a very keen propagator of the Christian faith, and he could convert some warlords to Christianity. One of them was Omura Sumitada, who eventually would give a port to the Jesuits, which was called Nagasaki.

And they also had a problem that after a while you have [Francisco] Cabral, you have [Gaspar] Coelho, so two Jesuits who became the head of the Japan sector. And they weren't very keen to adopt Japanese customs. They wanted to be as strictly Jesuits as in Europe. So they already have a problem from the Jesuit side and many like Vilela or Fróis were more inclined to adopt Japanese customs. But the heads of the provincials, as they call them, were against that.

Ōmura Sumitada

Gaspar Vilela is one who stands out. He was a very keen propagator of the Christian faith, and he could convert some warlords to Christianity. One of them was Omura Sumitada, who eventually would give a port to the Jesuits, which was called Nagasaki.

And a lot of Buddhist temples were destroyed, especially in Omura, which was the domain of Omura Sumitada, who was a fervent Christian. So he just lets the Christians do what they wanted. And some Japanese began to dislike the Christians. So he got more and more opposition when they became more and more Christians.

Luis de Almeida

Luis de Almeida was the merchant and the surgeon, and he came to Japan in connection with the select trade between China and Japan. He was very wealthy, but in 1555, after three years in Japan, he decided to become a Jesuit himself. And so he gave all his wealth to the church, and he was also instrumental in establishing a hospital and an orphanage in Funai, which was the capital of Bungo, which was the domain of Otomo Yoshishige, a very powerful warlord in Kyushu.

Alessandro Valignano

And then you have, of course, Valignano, which was the visitor, as he was called, to the Orient. So he was the head of all the actions in the Orient, and he spent a lot of time in Japan, because Japan was the place where the Jesuits thought they would have the best results.

Luís Fróis

He was the historian of the Jesuits. He wrote all the lengthy reports about Japan. Every year, the Jesuits wrote a report about what they had done in Japan, about the political situation of Japan and all the Christian communities in all the places, especially in Kyushu. And that was a very lengthy report. It was mostly over 100 pages every year. And those reports are very valuable, because Fróis wrote too much for the liking of his superiors. He said, it's too much, you have to make it more compact. But because of all those reports, we have vivid impressions of what Japan was like at the time, and also all kinds of political developments within Japan.

And they also had a problem that after a while you have [Francisco] Cabral, you have [Gaspar] Coelho, so two Jesuits who became the head of the Japan sector. And they weren't very keen to adopt Japanese customs. They wanted to be as strictly Jesuits as in Europe. So they already have a problem from the Jesuit side and many like Vilela or Fróis were more inclined to adopt Japanese customs. But the heads of the provincials, as they call them, were against that.

Francisco Cabral

And they also had a problem that after a while you have [Francisco] Cabral, you have [Gaspar] Coelho, so two Jesuits who became the head of the Japan sector. And they weren't very keen to adopt Japanese customs. They wanted to be as strictly Jesuits as in Europe. So they already have a problem from the Jesuit side and many like Vilela or Fróis were more inclined to adopt Japanese customs. But the heads of the provincials, as they call them, were against that.

Gaspar Coelho

And they also had a problem that after a while you have [Francisco] Cabral, you have [Gaspar] Coelho, so two Jesuits who became the head of the Japan sector. And they weren't very keen to adopt Japanese customs. They wanted to be as strictly Jesuits as in Europe. So they already have a problem from the Jesuit side and many like Vilela or Fróis were more inclined to adopt Japanese customs. But the heads of the provincials, as they call them, were against that.

And you had Otomo, which was a very powerful clan in the east of Kyushu. And then you had in the southwest, you had the Shimazu. And Otomo was losing against the Shimazu. So he asked Hideyoshi to intervene. And sometime before Hideyoshi marched towards Kyushu, he met with Coelho, which was then the head of the Christian mission in Japan, together with Fróis. And he treated Coelho very well, just like Oda Nobunaga had done with Fróis. So Coelho was really pleased with that. And then Hideyoshi asked him, I want to invade Korea. Then you provide two Portuguese ships to help me in this invasion. And if I conquer Korea, I will make it that there are a lot of churches being built. So Koelyo said, yes, I will do that for you. And I will make sure that we have two Portuguese ships, the Karak ships, as they were called by the English, gigantic ships. So Hideyoshi could very well use them for his invasion in Korea. And then he went a step further and he said, I will make sure that the Christian warlords in Kyushu will also support you. And I think at that moment that Hideyoshi, that there was a ring bell in his head, that the Christians, the Jesuits had too much influence in Japan.

And when he had conquered Kyushu, he again met with Coelho on a Portuguese ship. And Coelho again said that we will support you in whatever endeavor you will take. But the night suddenly he sent a questionary to Coelho, asking him why they came to Japan, why they are making so much converts. And why are they destroying the Buddhist temples? Of course Coelho was really shocked with that. He was so well treated and suddenly everything changed overnight. So he gave his answer that, well, they came to Japan just to propagate their faith, in good faith. And that it was not them who destroyed the Buddhist temples, but the Japanese converts. So the answer of Hideyoshi was that he made a decree that the Jesuits had to leave Japan in 20 days.