Crosses on Both Sides: The Christian Daimyō at Sekigahara and the Victory That Ruined Them, 1600

The Fog That Lifted on Both Armies

Christian Banners and Crosses on Both Sides at Sekigahara, 1600

Around eight o'clock on the morning of 21 October 1600, the fog sitting in the basin at Sekigahara thinned enough for the men standing in it to see who they were about to kill.

What they saw, in among the mon of the great houses, the paulownia and the hollyhock and the bellflower, was a considerable quantity of Christian iconography. The Cross of Calvary, jūjika, appeared on every major form of war banner in use that morning: on the hata-jirushi hung from a crossbar, on the tall vertical nobori, and on the sashimono, the small flag strapped upright to a soldier's back so his commander could find him in a press of ten thousand men. Where a family preferred discretion, it used the kutsuwa, a horse-bit crest that resolves on inspection into a cross inside a circle, or simply the kanji for ten, 十, which is a cross and is also just a number.

Devout metalsmiths had engraved arquebus barrels and cast stirrups with the instruments of the Passion, which meant that a certain number of men in the valley were shooting at each other with the crucifixion inlaid on their firearms. Banners and vermilion seals carried the word STIAGO, for Santiago, the Iberian patron of soldiers, and "Santiago!" was shouted in the Japanese field as a war cry, borrowed intact from Portuguese and Spanish practice along with the gunpowder and the bread.

Rosaries had by then become a fashion. Wooden beads were carried by Christian and non-Christian samurai alike as a mark of gallantry, the way a man might carry an expensive sword-guard.

All of this was visible from both ends of the valley.

Some 163,000 men were deployed at Sekigahara that day, and divisions commanded by baptized officers accounted for something on the order of eleven or twelve percent of them. Christian samurai fought for Ishida Mitsunari and Christian samurai fought for Tokugawa Ieyasu, in roughly comparable quantities, under roughly identical banners, with the same saint's name in their mouths.

The crosses faced each other. Nobody on either side appears to have found this remarkable.

Three Hundred Thousand Souls and Fourteen Lords

Japan's 300,000 Christians and at Least Fourteen Baptized Daimyō in 1600

Bishop Dom Luís de Cerqueira, writing to Rome on 12 January 1603 and describing the position as it had stood before the war, put the number of Japanese Christians at approximately 300,000. Against a national population of perhaps twelve million, that was about two and a half percent of Japan, more than double the Christian share of the country today.

They were served by roughly two hundred churches and more than twenty Jesuit residences. Alessandro Valignano counted 190 Jesuits on the ground. The mission had never been larger or better organized, and the two years immediately before the campaign had been its most productive: something like 70,000 baptisms in 1599 and 1600 alone, driven in large part by Konishi Yukinaga's determined effort to bring his entire Higo domain to the font before the political weather changed.

He was right about the weather. He was wrong about how much time he had.

The legal situation was peculiar. Toyotomi Hideyoshi's edict of expulsion of 1587 had never been repealed. It had simply stopped being enforced, in the manner of an inconvenient statute that everyone agrees to remember only when useful, and the padres consequently operated in a condition of tolerated illegality. They knew that whichever party won would be entitled to notice them.

Above the ordinary converts, and holding the whole structure up, sat the lords. At least fourteen daimyō were openly baptized at the time of the battle, and several more had been baptized privately, or so long ago and so quietly that the record can no longer establish it. This was not incidental. It was the mission's operating model, and both Valignano and Cerqueira said so in writing, without embarrassment, in documents meant for internal consumption.

Their reasoning was administrative rather than spiritual. In a fragmented country, a missionary who converted one provincial lord obtained, by that lord's authority over his own people, the mass conversion of a domain, and if the lord or his successor turned hostile the padres could walk over the border into the next fief and continue. The century of warring states that had made Japan a patchwork of competing military households was the precondition for everything the Jesuits had built there.

Which meant that the mission had an institutional stake in Japan remaining ungoverned, and that the man who was about to finish governing it was the most dangerous thing that could happen to them, regardless of what he believed.

The Arithmetic of a Fief

How Koku Ratings Set Troop Numbers: Konishi's Higo and the 1893 Figures

To understand what the Christian lords could actually bring to a battlefield, it helps to follow the money, because in Japan in 1600 the money was rice and the rice was soldiers.

A domain was rated in koku, a koku being the notional annual yield of rice sufficient to feed one adult for a year, roughly 180 liters. The rating came from the cadastral surveys ordered by Hideyoshi, and it was a valuation rather than an income statement. Valignano, who had spent years watching Japanese lords try to pay for things, observed that a lord's real disposable revenue ran well below his nominal kokudaka, typically a third to a half of it, the remainder being absorbed by the retainers who actually farmed and garrisoned the place.

From that valuation came the military obligation. The standard mobilization formula applied under Ieyasu was three men per hundred koku. Konishi Yukinaga's Higo holding is given in the literature at either 200,000 or 240,000 koku, and the sources do not agree. At the higher valuation the formula yields something like 7,200 men. At Sekigahara, Konishi fielded 4,000.

The gap is not evidence of shirking. It is evidence of what the word "army" concealed. The surviving retainer registers of Kimata Morikatsu and Ōtani Yoshitsugu allow the composition of a division to be broken out. In Kimata's unit of eight hundred, only about three hundred were warriors, some thirty-six percent; the rest were grooms, cooks, porters, bearers of armor and medicine. A lord who mobilized six thousand brought four thousand combatants, and both numbers were true.

Nearly every troop figure quoted for Sekigahara descends from a study made by the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Army in 1893, which filled the holes in the surviving records by applying the three-men-per-hundred-koku formula to each house's known kokudaka, and the results have been repeated ever since with a confidence the compilers did not claim.

For the mission, the arithmetic ran in the other direction. A lord's fief was a parish. Konishi's southern Higo contained over 100,000 Christians served by seven Jesuit houses and eighty-seven churches, a concentration unmatched anywhere in Japan, and that population existed because Konishi held the land. It was not a congregation gathered around a doctrine. It was one organized around a landlord, in a country where the landlord's confession settled the question for everyone below him.

Land could change hands in an afternoon. The Jesuits knew this perfectly well, and had built on it anyway, because there was nothing else to build on.

The Hostages in Osaka

The Osaka Hostage Crisis Before Sekigahara, 1600

Ieyasu opened the campaign by leaving. On 13 June 1600 he announced a punitive expedition against Uesugi Kagekatsu at Aizu, in the far northeast, and marched out of the capital region with his best generals, deliberately leaving Osaka and Kyoto uncovered. His departure is dated variously to 16 June and 26 July, the confusion arising from a lunar month translated straight into the Western month of the same number, an error that has propagated through the English literature on this campaign for a century.

The bait worked. Ishida Mitsunari, Ōtani Yoshitsugu and the monk-diplomat Ankokuji Ekei met at Sawayama and covenanted to destroy him, and Mōri Terumoto was installed in Osaka Castle as nominal supreme commander of what became the Western Army.

Mitsunari's first operational act was not military. The great lords maintained mansions in Osaka and kept their families in them, and Mitsunari moved to seize the wives and children of every lord aligned with Ieyasu and hold them in the castle as surety for their husbands' behavior. It was a reasonable idea, executed by a man who was very good at administration and less good at people.

The highest-value target was Hosokawa Tama, baptized Gracia, wife of Hosokawa Tadaoki, one of Ieyasu's most valuable field commanders. Tadaoki, before leaving, had given his steward Ogasawara Shōsai Hidekiyo standing orders: if Gracia's safety or honor were threatened in his absence, she was to be killed, the mansion burned, and the household to die with her.

When Mitsunari's troops surrounded the compound on 25 August 1600, after five days of fruitless negotiation, Ogasawara refused to hand her over, and Gracia refused to kill herself. She had faced the identical question in 1595, during the Hidetsugu purge, had consulted her confessors, and had concluded that suicide was a mortal sin and that commanding her own murder was the same act at one remove. She sent every maid, gentlewoman and child out of the building over their objections, then knelt in her oratory and bared her neck, and Ogasawara struck. The retainers covered her, laid powder through the rooms, disemboweled themselves in the main hall and fired the charge.

Mitsunari abandoned the hostage plan almost immediately. It had produced one dead noblewoman, one burned mansion, and a number of wavering lords who now understood exactly what kind of security their families enjoyed under the Western command, and who hardened permanently against him.

Damião in the Vanguard

The Christian Daimyō Who Fought for Ieyasu: Kuroda Nagamasa and the Eastern Army

The Christian lords who chose Ieyasu were not a bloc, and they did not choose him for religious reasons, since he had no religion they shared. They chose him the way everyone else did, on the reading of who would win.

The most consequential of them was Kuroda Nagamasa, baptized Damião in 1583, who held Nakatsu in Buzen and commanded 5,400 men in the Eastern vanguard. Nagamasa's real contribution to the day was not made with those men. He was one of the principal negotiators of the defection of Kobayakawa Hideaki, the twenty-year-old commander of 8,000 men sitting on Mount Matsuo above the Western left, whose change of sides around midday converted a stalemate into a rout. The politics of that bargain belong to the battle itself; what matters here is that the man who did most to bring it about wore a baptismal name.

His father, Kuroda Yoshitaka, known in religion as Simeão and in retirement as Jōsui, was baptized in the same year and was the more formidable of the two. He did not come to Mino at all. The Jesuit letters of this period complain that he was lukewarm in the faith, a judgment the padres were in the habit of passing on Christian lords who declined to take their instruction on secular matters.

Beside them stood a scattering of others. Kyōgoku Takatomo of Iida in Shinano, rated at 80,000 to 100,000 koku, had been baptized in secret in 1596; the sources cannot agree whether his baptismal name was João or Simão. His brother Kyōgoku Takatsugu, holding Ōtsu in Ōmi, had also been baptized in secret, and his Christian name has not survived at all. Tanaka Yoshimasa, baptized Bartholomew, brought 3,000. Oda Nagamasu, called Uraku, brother of Oda Nobunaga and a convert of 1588, brought between 450 and 500, a force appropriate to a man whose principal occupation by then was the tea ceremony.

And then there was Terazawa Hirotaka, lord of Karatsu in Hizen at 80,000 koku and, by appointment, Governor of Nagasaki. He had served Hideyoshi as an efficient persecutor in the 1590s and had turned conciliatory after the old man's death. He is reported to have been baptized Agostinho in 1595 and to have apostatized after 1597, and the sources hedge; one tradition has it only as a rumor of a secret baptism. The hedge matters, because Terazawa was posted directly opposite the center of the Western line, and what he did there is either a Christian attacking a Christian or merely a lapsed one doing it.

None of these men had the standing of Takayama Ukon, who had already been stripped of his fief in 1587 for refusing to give up his faith and who was living on a Maeda stipend in Kanazawa while all this happened. That was the point. The lords who kept their domains were the lords who had never been asked to choose.

The Sieges That Kept Men Out of the Valley

The Sieges of Fushimi, Ōtsu and Gifu Before Sekigahara

Sekigahara was decided in six hours by armies that had spent two months not arriving. The Western Army opened by investing Fushimi Castle on 27 August against a garrison of 1,800 under Torii Mototada, who had been left there by Ieyasu with the explicit understanding that he would die, and who did so on 8 September. Two further sieges that autumn were Christian business.

At Ōtsu, Kyōgoku Takatsugu declared for Ieyasu and shut his gates on the highway into Kyoto. Tachibana Muneshige sat down in front of him on 13 October with a force estimated at fifteen thousand, and Ōtsu surrendered on 21 October, the same day the main battle was fought and lost some seventy kilometers to the east. Takatsugu's siege was a defeat and it was worth more than most victories.

At Gifu, Oda Hidenobu, grandson of Nobunaga, held the castle guarding the road into Mino with 6,500 men. He had been baptized, though the record fights itself over the details: one tradition gives his name as Sancho and his baptism as a secret one performed by Valignano in 1591, while the better-documented account gives him as Paulo, baptized by Organtino in 1595, and notes that the name Sancho properly belongs to Ōmura Yoshiaki. Whatever he was called at the font, the castle fell between 28 and 30 September, and he was sent to Mount Kōya to be a Buddhist monk. Roughly two thousand of his men made their way west and fought at Sekigahara under Konishi's direction.

On the night of 20 October, in freezing rain, the Western Army abandoned Ōgaki and marched eight miles west along the Makita road into the Sekigahara basin, guided in the dark by the campfires of Chōsokabe Morichika's 6,600 men on Mount Nangū.

They arrived cold, soaked and unfed, and they got into line in the dark and waited for the fog to lift.

The Governor of Nagasaki Attacks the Center

Konishi Yukinaga's Christian Division at Sekigahara and the Nagasaki Governor's Attack

Konishi Yukinaga's presence in the Western Army was a debt being repaid. Born to a Sakai merchant family, an origin that was normally a life sentence, he had been raised by Hideyoshi to a great lordship and a naval command, and he owed his existence as a nobleman to the Toyotomi house, which at that moment consisted of a seven-year-old boy in Osaka Castle. He went west.

His division was 4,000 combatants out of some 6,000 mobilized, drawn largely from the veteran Christian samurai, a good many of whom had been through the Korean campaigns and knew exactly what a modern battle cost. They marched under banners bearing the cross.

At Sekigahara they held the center of the Western line, immediately to the left of Ukita Hideie's 17,000. Ukita was not a Christian, but his division was directed by his kinsman and chief vassal Akashi Morishige, known also as Kamon and Teruzumi, baptized João in Korea in 1596, who commanded the left advance guard. Akashi is given variously as Ukita's cousin, as his brother-in-law, and by Delplace as Konishi's brother-in-law instead, and kinsman and chief vassal is as far as the record safely goes.

Opposite Konishi stood Terazawa Hirotaka with 2,400 men.

The Governor of Nagasaki, the official responsible for the port through which every Jesuit, every crucifix and every bar of Macau silver entered Japan, went straight at the division of the most powerful Christian lord in the country, and did it well. His frontal assault threw Konishi's left into confusion and forced the line backward before anything else had gone wrong for the Western Army. It was the sort of attack that gets remembered when the day is won, and Terazawa's day was won.

The rest happened between noon and half past. Hideaki came down off the mountain into the flank of Ōtani Yoshitsugu, and four further Western commanders changed sides in his wake. Under Terazawa's pressure in front and the defectors' in the flank, Konishi's division came apart, and by two o'clock he and Ukita were in flight.

The most vivid thing the missionaries recorded from the field happened in that collapse. Akashi Morishige, forbidden by his faith to kill himself, resolved instead on a soldier's death and rode into the melee looking for it. What he found was Kuroda Nagamasa, his old friend and coreligionist, fighting on the other side. Kuroda recognized him, called on him to surrender, offered him quarter, took him prisoner, and afterward interceded with Ieyasu until Akashi was pardoned outright.

The Jesuits, reporting all this, drew the only conclusion available. The lords, they wrote, pursued their own interests first and those of their religion second.

What the Faith Forbade

Christian Doctrine Against Suicide at Sekigahara: Konishi's Capture and Execution, 1600

The doctrine that suicide is a mortal sin was, in Japan in 1600, a tactical constraint, and it produced consequences on the ground that no European theologian had anticipated when the rule was framed. A defeated commander of rank was expected to perform seppuku, an act that settled his account, protected his family and denied his enemies a prisoner. It was so standard that its refusal read as either cowardice or madness.

Konishi fled northwest into the mountains after his division broke, and spent four days on Mount Ibuki in freezing rain, living on husks, contracting a severe dysentery. On 25 October he came down to the village of Kusakabe and asked a villager to arrest him, explaining what the reward would be. The man objected that it was not proper to lay hands on so great a lord. Konishi told him that he could not kill himself because his religion forbade it, which is the sentence for which he is chiefly remembered in Japan, and which he must have known would be repeated. Japanese temple records add that he had been denounced by a local Buddhist priest, Hayashi Zōsu; he was formally taken into custody by Takenaka Shigekado.

With Ishida Mitsunari and Ankokuji Ekei he was blindfolded, bound, seated backward on a donkey and paraded through Kyoto, Osaka and Sakai, the standard procedure for the public disposal of a rebel. On 6 November 1600 the three were taken to the execution ground at Rokujōgawara, on the bed of the Kamo river.

The Jesuit account of what followed comes from the annual letter. A Japanese Christian sent by the padres got past the guards and asked Konishi whether he wished to make a perfect act of contrition; he replied that he had already made one. He refused the Buddhist rites being administered by the bonzes attending the other two condemned men. He said his beads, holding an image of the Virgin and Child which the chronicle asserts had been sent to him by the Queen of Portugal, a provenance no one has been able to confirm, knelt, and commended his soul. The chronicler adds that it took three strokes.

His eldest son, twelve years old, was sheltering under safe-conduct in Mōri Terumoto's territory; Mōri had him killed and sent the head to Ieyasu as a gesture of goodwill. The gesture misfired. Ieyasu, who understood better than most men what a safe-conduct was worth as an instrument of state, is reported to have received it with the liveliest indignation.

Two Christian commanders, in the same week, could not do the thing their culture required of the defeated. One walked out of the mountains and asked a farmer to hand him in. One rode into a melee hoping to be killed and met a friend who would not oblige him. Both were remembered by their countrymen as men who had held to something.

The Other War, in Kyūshū

The Kyūshū Campaign: Ishigakibara and Katō Kiyomasa's Siege of Konishi's Castle

The main battle lasted six hours. The Kyūshū campaign, where the Christian population actually lived, lasted five weeks and settled the fate of the mission more directly than anything that happened in Mino.

It opened at Ishigakibara in Bungo on 19 October, two days before Sekigahara. Kuroda Yoshitaka had raised his levies for Ieyasu at his own expense, and against him came Ōtomo Yoshimune, baptized Constantino, son of the great Ōtomo Sōrin whose patronage had built the Church in Bungo. Yoshimune had apostatized under Hideyoshi's pressure in 1587, had been stripped of his lands in 1593 for incompetence in Korea, and saw the war as his chance at recovering his ancestral province. Yoshitaka's seasoned troops routed him in a single day, and then the lukewarm Christian spared the lapsed one. Yoshimune died in exile and poverty in 1605, and the missionaries wrote him up as an exemplary Christian, which is a generous verdict on a man whose entire public career had been a sequence of surrenders.

Higo was the real prize, and it was already divided. The south belonged to Konishi and the north to Katō Kiyomasa, a militant adherent of the Nichiren school who regarded his neighbor's religion with a loathing sharpened by twenty years of rivalry that had survived a joint invasion of Korea and gotten worse for it. When Konishi's 4,000 marched to Mino, southern Higo was left undefended, and Kiyomasa invested Uto Castle, Konishi's capital, on 26 October.

Inside the walls, along with the garrison, were five Jesuits, two fathers and three brothers, and a number of Japanese catechists. Rather than storm a castle held by men who believed their commander's cause was also their God's, Kiyomasa opened negotiations with Valignano and the Vice-Provincial at Nagasaki, offering to spare the entire garrison if the trapped missionaries would persuade it to surrender. The Church was thereby invited to broker the liquidation of its own largest Japanese domain, on terms that saved lives and cost it everything else. Uto capitulated on 25 November, once Konishi's death was confirmed.

To the north, in Chikugo, Yoshitaka joined Kiyomasa and Nabeshima Katsushige in front of Yanagawa from 16 November. The castle belonged to Tachibana Muneshige, and its neighbor at Kurume to Mōri Hidekane, baptized Simão, married to Sōrin's Christian daughter Maxentia and celebrated by the missionaries as the virtuous Simon. Both surrendered. Both were stripped of everything.

Kiyomasa took Konishi's Higo and began, methodically, to unmake it.

The Letter That Was Not Lost

The Jesuit Sources on Sekigahara and How Many Christians Fought There

James Murdoch, writing his monumental history in the early twentieth century, complained that the Jesuit annual letter for 1600 appeared to be lost, and that the Sekigahara campaign was consequently handled badly by Charlevoix and by Léon Pagès.

The letter was not lost. It was misfiled by an empire.

The original draft was signed at Nagasaki on 25 October 1600 by Valentim Carvalho, by commission of the Vice-Provincial, and it survived the destruction of the Japan mission, the expulsions, the persecutions and the fire. In 1759 the Marquis of Pombal suppressed the Society of Jesus in the Portuguese dominions and seized its Far Eastern archives at Goa, and the papers began a second migration. The 1600 letter now sits in London, among the Marsden Manuscripts, as British Museum Additional MSS 9859, folios 94 to 148. Chapters ten through twenty-two of the first volume of Fernão Guerreiro's Relaçam Anual, printed at Évora in 1603, derive directly from it, which makes that book one of the fullest European accounts of the campaign in existence and explains why its details, the three strokes at Rokujōgawara, the man who got past the guards, the image of the Virgin, run through the Western literature on Konishi's death.

Reading any of this material requires knowing who was being lied to and why. The Jesuit letters are excellent on dates, regional troop movements and municipal statistics, because the men who wrote them had spent decades in the country and dealt directly with the lords; they were also fundraising documents, and their editors at Macau, Goa and Rome removed internal scandals, commercial disputes and failures as a matter of routine.

The Japanese chronicles carry the opposite distortion. Most were compiled in the middle and late Edo period, when a connection to Christianity was a capital matter, and chroniclers writing under the inquisition erased, softened or reframed any association between their patrons' ancestors and the Christian lords. The Japanese record of Christian participation at Sekigahara was edited, by frightened men, for two centuries.

Between a mission writing for money and a country writing for its life, no source tabulates the Christians in the valley. The estimate has to be built out of divisional strengths under baptized commanders: Konishi's 4,000 to 6,000 plus the two thousand survivors of Gifu who fought under him, some seven to ten percent of an 83,000-strong Western Army, against Kuroda Nagamasa's 5,400, Kyōgoku Takatomo's 3,000, Tanaka Yoshimasa's 3,000 and Oda Nagamasu's 450 or 500, nearly fifteen percent of the Eastern 80,000.

Somewhere between eleven and twelve percent of the men at Sekigahara served under a commander who had been to the font. Nobody will ever put a firmer number on it than that.

The Ledger After

After Sekigahara: What the Christian Daimyō Lost, 1600–1615

Of the 214 lords holding more than 10,000 koku at Hideyoshi's death, eighty-seven fought for the Western Army, and eighty-one of those eighty-seven were executed or dispossessed. This was not vindictiveness; it was the largest transfer of landed property in Japanese history, and the mechanism by which Ieyasu converted a battlefield result into two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. The Christian share of that carnage was disproportionate, because the Christian lords had been concentrated in the west and the west had backed the loser.

Konishi's Higo went to Katō Kiyomasa. The domain that had held over 100,000 Christians was handed to the one major lord in Japan with a doctrinal grievance against them. Kiyomasa destroyed the churches and forced recantation across the province, and the Christian population of Higo fell to about 20,000. The other eighty thousand did not evaporate. Thousands of Konishi's former samurai and Christian farmers went over the water to Amakusa and up the coast to Shimabara, and their grandchildren rose in 1637 in the last and worst rebellion the Tokugawa ever had to put down.

The lord of Amakusa lost his fief. Ukita Hideie, not a Christian himself but a patron whose household had given influential Christian retainers a free hand, was exiled permanently and Bizen was taken. Sō Yoshitoshi of Tsushima, baptized Dario, read the situation with commendable speed, apostatized at once and divorced his Christian wife Maria, who was Konishi's daughter. Arima Harunobu, baptized Dom Protásio in 1580, and Ōmura Yoshiaki, baptized Dom Sancho in 1570, had spent the campaign sitting quietly on the fence in Hizen; Harunobu was pardoned through the intercession of Kuroda Yoshitaka, while Ōmura, judged by some Jesuit records to have effectively sided against Ieyasu, was obliged to retire.

The winners did no better in the long run. Kuroda Nagamasa was rewarded with Fukuoka in Chikuzen, 523,100 koku, and at first told the missionaries he would be their protector at the new court. Under sustained pressure from Ieyasu he stopped saying so, then stopped protecting them, and eventually persecuted them. Terazawa Hirotaka had Karatsu raised from 80,000 to 120,000 koku with the Amakusa islands attached, fell out with Ieyasu within two years over municipal and trade disputes, and in 1603 or 1604 lost the governorship of Nagasaki altogether.

The confiscations also manufactured a new social class: masterless Christian samurai, many of them Korean veterans, barred from taking service with other lords, drifting toward Nagasaki or hiding as farmers in the hills of Arima and Amakusa. In 1614 and 1615 they came out of the hills and into Osaka Castle, marching under standards bearing the Cross, the Savior and Santiago, with Jesus, Maria and Santiago written on their helmets and the same war cry in their mouths that had been heard in the Sekigahara fog. Akashi Morishige, pardoned in 1600, led some three thousand of them; one source gives his force at 54,000, which is larger than the entire garrison and cannot be right.

At the fall of the castle on 3 June 1615, Akashi's column was checked in the city lanes before it could reach Ieyasu's rear. His end is disputed. Most of the records have him escaping and dying in hiding, a pauper, in 1618. The Jesuit letters preserve something else: his daughter, captured and brought before Ieyasu, was recognized, spared, given silk clothes and told to remain a faithful Christian and to commend to her God the soul of her father, who had just perished.

The Fourteen Best Years

Why the Church Grew After Sekigahara Until the 1614 Expulsion

Everything above suggests that the Church in Japan should have collapsed in the winter of 1600. It did the opposite. The fourteen years after Sekigahara were, by every measure the mission used, the best it ever had.

Ieyasu declined to enforce Hideyoshi's dormant edict. He found João Rodrigues, the Portuguese Jesuit who spoke better Japanese than any European alive, indispensable to the silk trade, and issued three go-shuin, vermilion-seal letters patent, authorizing the padres and Japanese Christians to use their churches and practice their religion in Nagasaki, Kyoto and Osaka. In practical terms that annulled the 1587 edict. Between 1598 and 1612, in the whole of Japan, twenty-eight Christians were executed for their faith, and only four or five of some three hundred daimyō persecuted at all. The Jesuits recorded 152,900 adult baptisms between 1598 and 1614, and the Franciscans another 15,000 between 1611 and 1614.

What the total Christian population reached at the peak is unknowable; Michael Steichen's estimate of a million baptized by 1614 counts children and unregistered converts, and a claim that 750,000 were already registered by 1605 is hard to square with 152,900 recorded adult baptisms across sixteen years.

The tolerance was transactional throughout. Ieyasu was a practicing Buddhist who wanted the Macau silk and needed the only competent European interpreters in his country, and he attached one condition that made the whole arrangement a trap. No daimyō, no noble, was to convert. The padres were instructed to confine their preaching to the middle and lower orders, which is to say that the Church was permitted to grow in every direction except the one that had ever protected it. The fourteen baptized lords of 1600 were to have no successors.

Six months before the battle, in April 1600, a Dutch ship had drifted into Usuki Bay in Bungo with two dozen survivors aboard. The Liefde yielded eighteen heavy European cannon and a quantity of ammunition, all of which Ieyasu confiscated and some of which may well have been in the valley in October. The Portuguese merchants and the Jesuit interpreters urged him to execute the crew as pirates. He declined, on the stated ground that men who had done Japan no injury should not be killed for their countries' quarrels, and questioned William Adams at length about navigation, shipbuilding and the wars of Europe. Adams and Jan Joosten explained the Protestant schism, and the impression the Jesuits had spent fifty years maintaining, that Christendom was one undivided body with one head, did not survive the conversation. When the Dutch opened at Hirado in 1609 and the English in 1613, Ieyasu had suppliers who carried no priests.

In 1614 he expelled the missionaries.

The lords who might have sheltered them had been dead, dispossessed or forbidden to exist for fourteen years by then. What Sekigahara destroyed was not the Christian population of Japan, which was larger in 1614 than it had ever been, and not any article of belief, and not even, in the immediate term, the freedom to preach. What it destroyed was the map. The mission had grown in a country of two hundred sovereign-ish military households, in which a padre driven out of one fief walked into the next one by the afternoon and resumed work, and Ieyasu's victory converted that country into a single administrative machine in which no lord could shelter a banned sect, change allegiance or take in a fugitive without permission from Edo.

In 1614 there was nowhere left to walk.

Sources & Further Reading

Boxer, C. R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650. University of California Press, 1951. The standing English account of the mission, and the source for the Jesuit demographic estimates, the mission's dependence on daimyō patronage, and the survival and location of the 1600 annual letter among the Marsden Manuscripts.

Bryant, Anthony J. Sekigahara 1600: The Final Struggle for Power. Osprey Publishing, 1995. The standard short English order of battle and campaign chronology, including the divisional strengths that descend from the 1893 Imperial Japanese Army General Staff reconstruction.

Chaplin, Danny. Sengoku Jidai: Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu: Three Unifiers of Japan. CreateSpace, 2018. A detailed modern narrative of the campaign, and a useful specimen of the lunar-to-Gregorian conversion trap that has misdated the fall of Gifu in most English accounts.

Clements, Jonathan. Christ's Samurai: The True Story of the Shimabara Rebellion. Robinson, 2016. Traces the line from the dispossessed Christian samurai of Konishi's Higo and the Amakusa refugees to the rising of 1637.

Cooper, Michael. Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China. Weatherhill, 1974. The fullest account of the interpreter whose commercial usefulness to Ieyasu bought the mission its letters patent and its fourteen years of tolerance.

Delplace, Louis. Le catholicisme au Japon. Albert Dewit, 1909. An early comprehensive Catholic history drawing directly on the Jesuit letters, valuable for the Christian daimyō prosopography and instructive in its errors, including its dating of Hosokawa Gracia's death to 1603.

Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 1973. The essential guide to reading Jesuit correspondence and Edo-period Japanese chronicles as documents with institutional purposes, and to the political logic of Tokugawa anti-Christian policy.

Glenn, Chris. The Battle of Sekigahara: The Greatest, Bloodiest, Most Decisive Samurai Battle Ever. Frontline Books, 2021. Detailed treatment of the night march from Ōgaki, the deployment of the Western divisions and the sequence of defections, with dating that requires checking against the lunar calendar.

Guerreiro, Fernão. Relaçam Anual das Cousas que Fizeram os Padres da Companhia de Jesus nas Partes da Índia Oriental. Lisbon, 1603. The printed vehicle for the Nagasaki annual letter of 25 October 1600, and the ultimate source of the European account of Konishi Yukinaga's capture, refusal of Buddhist rites and execution at Rokujōgawara.

Moran, J. F. The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth-Century Japan. Routledge, 1993. Establishes Valignano's own analysis of the mission's dependence on political fragmentation and his skepticism about the relationship between nominal kokudaka and real seigneurial income.

Murdoch, James. A History of Japan, Volume II: During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse, 1542-1651. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1925. The classic narrative of the campaign in English, and the origin of the long-repeated belief that the Jesuit annual letter for 1600 had been lost.

Turnbull, Stephen. The Samurai and the Sacred. Osprey Publishing, 2006. Documents the material culture of Christian warfare in Japan: the cross on nobori and sashimono, the kutsuwa crest, Passion motifs on arquebus barrels and stirrups, and the adoption of Santiago as a Japanese battle cry.