The Commissioner Who Left No Wake: Ibi Masayoshi and the Seven-Year Journey to Europe, c. 1615–1622

The Three Days and Nights

Somewhere in Edo, in a year that cannot be fixed with certainty, a man knelt in front of the second Tokugawa shogun and started talking.

He had been abroad for seven years. He had been sent, by that same shogun, to establish by direct observation what the Christian religion actually was in the country that produced it, and he had come back with an answer. He was summoned to the palace at once, without the rest a returning envoy might reasonably have expected, and he began his report.

Tokugawa Hidetada listened attentively, day and night, without any interval, until the man had finished speaking. At some point the courtiers told him he was exhausting himself to the detriment of his health. His reply survives in translation: he asked how his own fatigue compared to the sufferings, the privations, and the dangers his envoy had endured in the face of his mission. Then, having heard everything, and after long consideration, Hidetada concluded that the Christian religion was detrimental to Japan and renewed the interdict against it.

The man's name was Ibi Masayoshi, written 伊比正義, and he appears in the Western historical record exactly once.

Not once per source, or once per archive. Once. The paragraph summarized above is quoted in the second volume of A History of Japan, published in 1903 by James Murdoch, who was not writing from his own archival work. He introduces it as a passage from an official History of Japan. He does not say which one. He does not name its compiler, its date, or the person who translated it for him.

One Paragraph in English

Murdoch was a Scot who taught in Japan and assembled a three-volume history for an English-reading audience that had almost nothing else. His second volume remains useful in the specific sense that it gathered material nobody else had gathered and reproduced it at length. It is also casual to a degree a modern editor would find alarming.

The Ibi passage is a fair sample. Inside the quotation Murdoch inserts a bracketed aside describing the concerned courtiers as superior flunkeys, which tells the reader a great deal about Murdoch's attitude toward the Tokugawa court and rather less about the courtiers. He then supplies his own chronology. From other Japanese sources, he writes, without identifying those either, he had learned that this Ibi Masayoshi, whom he also renders as Ibi Yoyemon, had been sent abroad in the first years of Genwa, meaning the Genna era, which began in 1615. From that, plus the chronicle's seven years, he arrives at a return that probably must be referred to 1622.

The index of that volume lists him as Hidetada's commissioner for investigation of Christianity, at pages 624-5 and note, and 685. The phrasing matters, because it describes not an errand but an office. Somebody, either Murdoch or the chronicle he was reading, understood the man to have held a formal position with a defined brief. The reference to a note is the most promising unread line in the case, since a footnote is exactly where a historian of Murdoch's generation would have identified the work he was translating, if he identified it at all.

There is one other trace. C. R. Boxer, whose The Christian Century in Japan has been the standing English account since 1951, indexed the name and pointed it at page 364. An index entry is not an argument, but the most meticulous English-language scholar of the Nanban period thought the name worth listing, which is a small weight on one side of the scale and no more than that.

The documentary chain, then: an unnamed chronicle of unknown date, compiled by persons unknown, rendered into English by a translator whose identity is not recorded, quoted by a schoolmaster in Kobe in 1903 who dated it by inference and never returned to it.

Recorded about the man himself: a name, with variants, the personal forms Yoyemon and Yoeyemon being the sort a samurai of middling rank would use in daily life. That he was a subject of Hidetada. That he was sent to study the principles of the Christian religion. Seven years. An audience, and its consequence.

Not recorded: birth, death, family, fief, stipend, rank, or any office before or after. Not recorded: his own religion, which for a man sent to investigate a proscribed faith is an omission of some consequence, since a Christian investigator, an apostate investigator and a hostile Confucian investigator would produce three entirely different reports. Not recorded: the ship, the port he sailed from, the flag he sailed under, the language he traveled in, or the name of a single companion, interpreter or host.

The Question He Was Sent to Answer

The mission makes sense only against what became of the Tokugawa relationship with Christianity in the three years before Genna began, which was that it collapsed from the inside.

The catalyst was a bribe. Arima Harunobu, the Christian daimyō of Hizen, wanted territory his house had lost and paid Okamoto Daihachi, a Christian secretary in the service of Ieyasu's senior councillor Honda Masazumi, to arrange its recovery. Okamoto took the money and produced forged documents, which is the customary outcome when a man sells access he does not have, and the arrangement was uncovered along with allegations of a plot against the governor of Nagasaki. Okamoto was burned alive in front of his wife. Arima was stripped of his fief and beheaded. Arima's son Naozumi apostatized and kept the domain, which established the exchange rate between faith and land for everyone watching. The affair was not a scandal about theology. It was a scandal about treason moving through the inner household, the shared foreign religion making everything a little more suspicious.

Then, on 27 January 1614, came the comprehensive national decree, drafted by the Zen monk Konchiin Sūden at Edo Castle and issued under Hidetada's vermilion seal. It declared Japan the shinkoku, the Land of the Gods, branded Christianity a pernicious doctrine, and accused the Christians, in the flat administrative language that such documents use for their most extraordinary claims, of intending to change the government in order to make Japan their own possession.

That last accusation is the hinge. The 1614 edict asserted a fact about the outside world: that the religion arriving on Portuguese and Spanish ships was the advance instrument of a conquest. Whether that was true was, in principle, a checkable question. It was checkable by sending somebody to look.

The deportations followed in November 1614, when over 350 people embarked at Nagasaki for Macau, Manila and Siam, among them the daimyō Takayama Ukon. Roughly two thirds of the Jesuits in Japan went with them; several dozen clergy went underground instead. The population they left behind can only be estimated, not counted: contemporary Jesuit figures run from 250,000 to nearly 300,000, and Gonoi Takashi has argued for around 370,000 by 1615. Nobody will ever know, because no census of belief was ever taken, and the men producing the numbers were reporting to a headquarters that funded missions according to results.

The Arithmetic of Genna

Murdoch's date is the hinge of the whole story, and it repays being taken apart.

The Genna era did not begin on the first day of 1615. Eras in Japan were declared, not scheduled, and Genna was declared on the thirteenth day of the seventh lunar month of that year, in the aftermath of the destruction of the Toyotomi at Osaka. The renaming was a political act, a formal announcement that the wars were over. Anything that happened in the first half of 1615, including the summer campaign that ended the siege of Osaka, happened in Keichō 20, not in Genna 1.

That removes one possibility entirely. A departure in the first years of Genna cannot have occurred before the late summer of 1615, and cannot be pushed back into 1614 to align with the expulsion edict, however tempting that alignment is.

Murdoch's 1622 is therefore consistent with the arithmetic. It is not, however, derived from it. Read his sentence in the order he wrote it. The return must probably be referred to 1622, he says, the year when the foreign priests began to be dealt with in earnest. He is not reasoning from an era name to a year. He is reasoning from what 1622 meant. That was the year of the Great Martyrdom, the year the persecution went from severe to systematic, and a historian looking for the moment when a shogun renewed his interdict after hearing a devastating report will find it irresistible. The chronology permits the date and the drama selects it, and those are not the same operation.

The seven years, at least, come from the chronicle itself. That figure is the one piece of quantitative information in the account, and the piece most worth testing, because whether it fits the world as it was in 1615 can be answered from the sailing schedules.

One further detail Murdoch attributes to those unnamed other Japanese sources, and it is the most famous of all. The three consecutive days and nights are not in the chronicle he quotes. The chronicle says only that Hidetada listened day and night without any interval. The figure of three days arrives from elsewhere, unattributed, and has been repeated ever since as though it were the primary text.

The best-known fact about Ibi Masayoshi is a second-hand embellishment of a second-hand account.

Two Ways to Cross the World

In 1615 a Japanese traveler who wanted to see Europe had two options, and they were not remotely equivalent.

The Portuguese route went west and south: Nagasaki to Macau on the summer monsoon, then Malacca, then Goa or Cochin, then the long haul around the Cape and up the Atlantic to Lisbon. The distance is the least of it. The problem was the timetable, because none of these legs could be sailed whenever a traveler was ready. The India-bound ships left Macau in November; the Portugal-bound fleets left India around the turn of the year; a traveler who arrived a season late waited a year. The India to Lisbon leg alone took about six months of continuous sailing, most of it out of sight of land, on ships that lost men to scurvy at rates their captains recorded without comment. The whole passage from Nagasaki to Lisbon ran roughly two and a half years one way, and the realities of the voyage were understood by everyone who undertook it, which is why so few undertook it twice. A letter sent from Japan to Europe with a reply carried back took five or six years as a matter of routine.

The Spanish route went east: Japan to Manila, across the Pacific to Acapulco, overland to Veracruz, then the Atlantic fleet to Sanlúcar de Barrameda. It was substantially faster, and everyone involved knew it. J. F. Moran noted that mail sent by way of New Spain reached Europe about a year earlier than mail sent by the Cape. Hasekura Tsunenaga left Japan in late October 1613 and was at Sanlúcar by early October 1614: just under a year, ocean to ocean to ocean.

So a seven-year round trip is entirely consistent with the Cape route, with the waiting built in. It is long for the Spanish route, though not impossible, and Hasekura's own party, delayed and then detained, took nearly seven years door to door.

Neither route could be taken on a whim. Departure was an administrative act. The instrument was the shuinjō, the vermilion seal permit, and a ship carrying one sailed with the shogunate's formal endorsement into a trading world that ran from Taiwan to the Malay peninsula. That trade was real, profitable and licensed, and it produced communities: in Manila, Japanese and Chinese lived together in the parián outside the walls. A man from Edo bound for Europe would have moved through a network of his own countrymen for the first several thousand miles.

None of which solves the actual problem, which is that the leg from Asia to Europe belonged to the Iberians. A traveler bound for Lisbon boarded a Portuguese vessel, most likely the great annual carrack out of Macau, the nau do trato, as the guest or protégé of somebody in the Portuguese establishment. A traveler bound for Seville boarded a Spanish galleon out of Manila with the permission of the Spanish governor. There was no third option. The oceans between Asia and Europe in 1615 were Iberian corridors with Iberian paperwork, and every passenger on them was somebody's responsibility, entered in somebody's ledger.

A commissioner sent by the shogun who had just expelled every priest in Japan would have been an awkward passenger. That is not an argument that the voyage did not happen. Portuguese merchants had every reason to accommodate a Tokugawa official who might report favorably on them. It is an argument that the voyage required cooperation from the very institution it was sent to investigate, and that such cooperation would have been noticed, discussed and recorded by an organization that recorded everything.

What a Documented Journey Left Behind

The story is so difficult to assess because the record shows exactly what a Japanese journey to Europe looked like, twice, in two of the best-attested diplomatic episodes of the century.

The Keichō Embassy overlaps his supposed mission almost exactly. Date Masamune sponsored it with the retired Ieyasu's approval; Ieyasu's own admiral oversaw the shipbuilding; the San Juan Bautista was built in Japan out of cryptomeria. Departure 28 October 1613, Acapulco January 1614, Sanlúcar 5 October, Madrid 20 December, audience with Philip III on 30 January 1615, baptism at the Descalzas Reales with the Duke of Lerma standing as godfather, Rome by late 1615 with a public reception by Paul V and honorary Roman citizenship, and back at Nagasaki on 22 September 1620.

The Tenshō Embassy of a generation earlier is documented to the same standard: Nagasaki on 20 February 1582, eleven months waiting at Macau for a ship, Lisbon in August 1584, a reception by Philip II, a formal consistory with Gregory XIII in March 1585, and home on 21 July 1590 to families who did not recognize them. Their observations were compiled by Alessandro Valignano and printed in Latin in 1590.

Two embassies. Two papal consistories, two royal audiences, baptismal registers, municipal honors, a printed Latin volume, and dated port entries across three continents.

For Ibi Masayoshi there is one sentence.

That asymmetry cannot be argued away by observing that his mission was smaller or less formal. A single traveler generates less paper than an embassy of 180. He does not generate none. Somebody sold him a passage. Somebody fed him. Somebody, in a Europe that treated the arrival of a Japanese visitor as a civic event worth staging processions for, would have written it down.

The Other Ways Edo Learned About Europe

Against all of that stands a consideration that cuts the other way. The bakufu wanted precisely the information Ibi Masayoshi was supposedly sent to obtain, and it spent forty years acquiring it by every other available means.

The Iberian monopoly on that information broke in 1600, when the Liefde made landfall with William Adams aboard and Ieyasu discovered that Europe contained Christians who regarded other Christians as enemies and were prepared to explain the arrangement at length. In 1610 Maurits of Nassau wrote to Ieyasu warning that the Society of Jesus intended to use religion as cover to divide Japan and provoke civil war. That is not merely similar to the thesis of the 1614 edict. It is the thesis of the 1614 edict, arriving four years early, from an interested party.

The interrogations continued. In 1621 the English factor Richard Cocks was summoned from the factory at Hirado to Edo, questioned about the differences between English Protestantism and Iberian Catholicism, and pressed to help identify priests hiding in Japan. That was the year before Ibi Masayoshi is supposed to have returned. The bakufu was hunting for exactly the information its commissioner was allegedly at that moment carrying home across the Indian Ocean.

Later the method became institutional. Under Iemitsu, the inquisitor Inoue Masashige worked on captured priests until six European fathers apostatized and wrote pamphlets explaining their former faith, which officials then studied in order to refute it. After the Dutch were confined to Deshima in 1641 the machinery was formalized as the Oranda fusetsugaki, the annual news reports extracted from each arriving ship and forwarded to Edo. Engelbert Kaempfer, physician at Deshima at the end of the century, concluded that the elaborate surveillance of the Dutch served scarcely any purpose other than keeping the Japanese informed of what passed elsewhere in the world.

A shogun who sent a commissioner to Europe in 1615 would have been doing something unprecedented in scale and entirely characteristic in intent.

The Shape of an Exemplary Tale

There is another reading of the passage, and it does not require anyone to have gone anywhere.

Consider the story as a piece of construction. A loyal servant is sent on a mission of extraordinary difficulty. He endures sufferings, privations and dangers, which the text names in a rising triad without specifying a single one of them. He returns after seven years, seven being the number folklore reaches for when it wants to mean a long time. He is summoned at once, without rest, which underlines both his devotion and the shogun's urgency. The shogun listens so intently that his courtiers fear for his health, which establishes the ruler's diligence, and rebukes them by comparing his own comfort to his servant's hardship, which establishes the ruler's virtue. And then the ruler, having considered everything with proper deliberation, concludes that the policy already in force was correct.

Every element in that sequence does moral work. Nothing in it does documentary work. There is no place named, no date given, no third party identified, no detail of the report's content, no consequence that can be independently checked. The narrative arrives already interpreted, and what it interprets is the persecution, which it converts from a reflex into a considered judgment based on evidence. Tokugawa-period chronicles were often compiled generations after the events they describe, frequently by men in the service of the institutions they were describing, and the genre's purpose was as much exemplary as documentary.

That does not make it false. Moral scaffolding erected over an incident is not evidence that the incident did not occur, and governments really do commission investigations that confirm the conclusions their commissioners wanted. What the shape of the story means is only that its shape cannot be used as evidence for itself.

Set the two columns side by side and the case remains genuinely open. In favor: the seven-year duration matches the sailing realities of the Cape route with unusual precision, which is a hard thing for an inventor to get right; Hidetada had a concrete policy motive, since his own edict had made a factual claim about Europe that somebody ought to have verified; the bakufu demonstrably pursued this kind of intelligence by every other channel; Murdoch's index describes an office and not an errand; and Boxer indexed the name.

Against: there is no primary source of any kind, the chronicle is unidentified and undated, no ship or port or companion or European trace has ever been produced, the dating is Murdoch's inference and was shaped by the drama of the year he chose, the most famous detail is second-hand even within Murdoch's own account, and the whole thing is shaped like a parable.

The decisive test is obvious and has never been run. Somewhere in the Spanish, Portuguese, Roman or Vatican archives there either is or is not a record of a Japanese visitor between roughly 1616 and 1621 unattached to the Keichō party. Until somebody looks, the question stays open.

The Year He Came Home

If Murdoch's chronology holds, Ibi Masayoshi stepped ashore in 1622, and 1622 was not a year in which a returning traveler could have missed what had changed.

On 19 August, at Nagasaki, three men were burned alive after an English and Dutch fleet intercepted the Elizabeth carrying disguised priests: the Augustinian Pedro de Zúñiga, the Dominican Luis Flores, and Joachim Díaz Hirayama, the Japanese Christian captain who had carried them. They survived in the flames for three-quarters of an hour.

On 10 September, on the hill at Nishizaka above Nagasaki, fifty-five people were executed together in the Great Martyrdom. Roughly half were burned and half beheaded, though the sources disagree, and the disagreement runs through every figure connected with the day. Among the burned were Carlo Spinola, the Italian Jesuit who had lectured on mathematics and astronomy in Kyoto, and Jacinto Orfanel, the Spanish friar who had been writing the chronicle of the persecution he became part of. The fires were built small and set at a distance, so that the burning took hours. This was not incompetence. It was the method, chosen because a man dying slowly might still recant.

The beheaded were laypeople, for the most part householders who had sheltered priests, together with their wives and children: thirteen women and seven young children among them. Antonio Coreia was executed together with the seven members of his jūningumi, the neighborhood association of Hama-no-machi ward, and five of his relatives. That last detail is the policy in miniature. The association was an instrument of collective responsibility, and executing it entire made every household in Japan an inspector of its neighbors.

Murdoch reckoned more than a hundred and twenty martyrs in 1622. Rômulo da Silva Ehalt counts 132, of whom at least sixty-four died for sheltering priests. The counts disagree because the record-keeping was done by the men being killed and the men doing the killing.

Into this, if the chronology holds, walked a man with seven years of observations and the conclusion that the shogunate had been right.

The Interdict Renewed

Whatever was said in that audience, what followed is not in doubt.

In 1623 Hidetada retired in favor of his son, and Iemitsu's investiture was marked by a renewed interdict that stigmatized Christianity as treason and made it punishable by death. Roughly five hundred people were killed across the Tokugawa domains that year, fifty of them burned on the heights at Takanawa in December. At a second Edo execution that month, thirteen of the thirty-seven who died were not Christians at all; one was a bodyguard of Iemitsu's who had unknowingly assisted them. The distinction between belief and proximity had ceased to matter.

Then the doors closed, one bolt at a time. In 1624 relations with Spain were severed entirely. The edict of 1633 prohibited the return of Japanese settled abroad and established rewards for informers. The edict of 1635 ended the red-seal trade absolutely: no Japanese ship and no Japanese person was to go abroad, on pain of death. The edict of 1636 confined the remaining Portuguese to Deshima and deported 287 Eurasians and their relatives to Macau. In 1639, after the Shimabara rising, the Macau trade was terminated permanently. Macau tested that provision in 1640 with an unarmed embassy of seventy-four people, and sixty-one of them were beheaded at Martyr's Mount, the survivors sent back with the message that if the King of Portugal, or the God of the Christians in person, dared to enter Japan, the penalty would be the same. The closure was complete. Within twenty years of the date Murdoch assigns to Ibi Masayoshi's return, the journey he is said to have made was punishable by death in both directions.

Murdoch used the passage once more, in a counterfactual. He imagined what might have happened if Ieyasu rather than Hidetada had received that exhaustive report on European Christianity, on the manner in which the Spaniards had possessed themselves of Mexico and Peru, and on the manifold atrocities committed in the name of religion. Such a man, Murdoch suggested, might have been persuaded to adopt Matsukura Shigemasa's proposal of 1630 to strike at the root of the standing menace by conquering Luzon and taking Manila, on the reasoning that Manila was where the missionaries came from. The counterfactual is impossible twice over: Ieyasu died on 1 June 1616, before any traveler who left in the first years of Genna could have reported to him, and Matsukura's memorial came fourteen years after that. Murdoch was not reconstructing a missed opportunity. He was using two events that could never have met in order to say something about Hidetada, and what he was saying was that the son had received the intelligence and done nothing with it but write another prohibition.

Which returns the matter to where it began, and where it will remain until somebody opens the right box in Simancas, or Lisbon, or the Vatican, or finds the chronicle Murdoch was reading. A man may have left Japan in the late summer of 1615 on a Portuguese ship, waited out a monsoon at Macau, endured six months of open ocean between Goa and the Tagus, walked through the capitals of a Christendom then tearing itself apart, and come home seven years later to a country burning its neighbors alive on a hillside above a harbor. Or a compiler with a point to make about the virtue of the second shogun wrote a paragraph. The record preserves a name, a duration, and a conclusion, in that order, and offers nothing to hold them down.