A Brief History of the Samurai by Jonathan Clements

Author:Jonathan Clements
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472107725
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

7

THE FAR WEST

EUROPEAN CONTACTS AND THE KOREAN CRUSADE

Guns were not the only thing that had arrived from the West. First the Portuguese, then the Spanish and then the Italians sent Christian missionaries, determined to spread the Bible to the Japanese. Exotic and alien, Christian belief achieved virulent proportions in Japan, with such large number of converts that Japan effectively became the largest non-European diocese in the world by the end of the sixteenth century.

The rise and fall of the missionaries during the period 1549–1650 is often known as ‘Japan’s Christian Century’, a problematic term.1 In the south-west, in particular on the island of Kyūshū, there was a strong upwelling of interest, particularly after missionary orders stopped targeting the poor, sick and needy, and adopted the Buddhists’ strategy of preaching to the upper classes, in the hope that their subjects would follow their lead. This led to a couple of generations of Japanese nobility with Christian names, as converts adopted baptismal names from the distant West – amongs others, we see a Dario Sō in the ruling clan of Tsushima, a lord André of Arima, and the zealous lord Bartholomew of Ōmura, who briefly granted Jesuit missionaries authority over the harbour town of Nagasaki.

Sometimes these conversions were genuinely devout, such that missionaries pronounced Japan as the most fertile ground in the world for seeding the Gospel. On other occasions, it was more pragmatic, with local lords accepting baptism in the hope that it would also bring European traders, guns and technology into their realms. Japan undoubtedly gained Christian believers of outstanding devotion, as shown by the many martyrdoms of the seventeenth century, but also many half-hearted ‘converts’ created by lordly fiat. In other parts of Japan, Christianity flourished in accordance with other foreign fads. Hideyoshi himself was once spotted wearing a crucifix, not as a sign of his belief, but as a fashion accessory.

The first Christian missionaries were mistaken for emissaries from yet another Buddhist sect. The guns they supplied, however, made the likes of Hideyoshi worry about the power that Europeans might be able to unleash. Strangely for a nation reared on reincarnation and noble suicide, Japanese non-Christians also reacted badly to the notion of a heavenly paradise, regarding it as an empty promise sure to sway believers into selfless acts. Selfless acts were all very well when pursued in the name of Hideyoshi or the Emperor, but the concept of the Pope was harder for the samurai to swallow. The translation into Japanese presented the Pope as a distant God-King with uneasy similarities to the meddling Retired Emperors of old – he had no official, temporal power, but still out-ranked kings and emperors; he was a humble priest, but was able to sway armies. In short, he came to be regarded as something of a threat: missionary preaching about the Bishop of Rome started to make the Pope sound like a new force in Japan’s volatile political mix – an alien potentate from the same place that had provided Nobunaga with the regime-changing, enemy-toppling tanegashima firearms.

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