The Portuguese in Yamaguchi

If you had asked a well-informed Portuguese merchant in Malacca in 1551 where the center of the Japan trade was going to end up, he would almost certainly not have said Nagasaki. Nagasaki in 1551 was a minor fishing inlet nobody in Lisbon had heard of. Hirado was a contender, in the way that a brash upstart harbor is always a contender. Bungo looked promising because its young lord was hungry for firearms and willing to do deals. But if you wanted to put money on one Japanese city becoming the great European entrepôt of the archipelago — the place where silk would be unloaded, sermons preached, daimyō entertained, and empires quietly rerouted — the smart wager was Yamaguchi.

Yamaguchi had everything. It was the seat of the Ōuchi clan, the richest and most cosmopolitan warlord house in western Japan. It had ten thousand inhabitants, a refugee court of displaced imperial nobles, and a lord — Ōuchi Yoshitaka — who held a monopoly on the official tally trade with Ming China and patronized poetry, painting, and tea ceremony on a scale the bankrupt emperor in Kyoto could only envy. Contemporaries called it Nishi no Kyō, "the Kyoto of the West."

Six years after the city's lord formally received Francis Xavier as an ambassador and granted him the run of a Buddhist monastery to preach in, Yamaguchi did not exist. Its palaces had burned. Its refugee nobles had been hacked to death in the streets. Its daimyō had disemboweled himself at a temple in Nagato, the Jesuit church had been confiscated and handed back to a Buddhist priest, and the Ōuchi clan itself — a lineage that had ruled western Honshū for two hundred years and claimed descent from a Korean prince — had been erased from history by a smaller, meaner, more efficient neighbor who understood that the future did not belong to people with good taste.

This is the story of those six years.

The City That Already Was

Why Yamaguchi Was Already Rich: The Ōuchi Clan and the Ming Tally Trade

Yamaguchi did not become important because the Portuguese arrived. The Portuguese arrived because Yamaguchi was already important.

Inland from the Inland Sea, tucked into the mountains of western Honshū, the city had grown up around the headquarters of a daimyō family whose wealth came from an unusually clear-eyed grasp of geography. The Ōuchi sat astride the Kanmon Strait, the narrow channel that every ship passing between the Sea of Japan and the Inland Sea had to negotiate. The port of Akamagaseki — modern Shimonoseki — lay on the strait's northern shore, and its customs house was an Ōuchi customs house. Everything that moved through western Japanese waters in the early sixteenth century paid, one way or another, to an Ōuchi functionary holding a ledger.

The family had used this position to muscle its way into the most valuable single asset in sixteenth-century East Asian commerce: the official tally trade with Ming China. The kangō system required Japanese delegations to carry numbered authentication slips issued by the Chinese court, which they exchanged upon arrival for the right to trade on favorable terms. Possession of the tallies was functionally a license to print money. By the 1530s, after a series of violent disputes with the rival Hosokawa clan, the Ōuchi had seized an effective monopoly. Ōuchi ships sailed to Ningbo in 1539 and 1547 as the sole legal representatives of Japan at the Ming court. The silk, porcelain, and bronze coinage that flowed back through Akamagaseki funded the gilded world of their capital.

And what a capital it was. Yoshitaka's father and grandfather had attracted artists, scholars, and displaced courtiers from the ruined imperial city of Kyoto — ruined by the Ōnin War and the endless provincial violence that followed. The kuge, the hereditary court aristocracy, had watched their palaces burn and their stipends evaporate, and many of them had simply walked west until they reached a place where the lord could afford to feed them. In Yamaguchi, they found patronage that the actual emperor could no longer provide. Yoshitaka himself, whose cultural pretensions were genuine rather than performed, paid for the coronation rites of Emperor Go-Nara in 1536 — because the imperial court itself could not.

This was the peculiar arrangement into which Xavier walked in the autumn of 1550. A daimyō who owned the trade routes to China. A city full of refugee noblemen running a shadow court. A ruler who sponsored the emperor's own ceremonies because he was the only person in Japan wealthy enough to do so. And, in the daimyō's private life, an aesthetic world of tea houses, brocades, and Chinese poetry that would have made a Medici envious.

It was not, on paper, an obvious place to preach Catholicism.

The Beggar at the Gate

Francis Xavier's Failed First Visit to Yamaguchi in 1550

The first attempt went badly. Spectacularly so.

Xavier had come from Kagoshima, where his initial patron Shimazu Takahisa had turned frosty after Portuguese merchant ships sailed past Satsuma to anchor at Hirado instead. The lesson the daimyō had taken from this was the obvious one: if hosting Jesuits did not actually guarantee the Portuguese trade, there was no reason to annoy his Buddhist abbots by permitting it. Xavier, stung by the betrayal, had decided to aim higher. He would go to Kyoto. He would request an audience with the emperor. He would convert the sovereign, and the archipelago would follow.

On the way, in November 1550, he stopped in Yamaguchi.

He was traveling with Juan Fernández, the trilingual Spanish lay brother who served as his translator, and a Japanese convert named Bernardo. All three were dressed in the way Xavier believed a holy man ought to be dressed: in rags, barefoot, conspicuously filthy. The logic of apostolic poverty had worked in India, where ascetic self-denial was culturally legible as a sign of spiritual authority. It did not work in Japan. The Japanese of the sixteenth century — from the peasant in the rice field to the silk-clad daimyō at court — regarded poverty as evidence of social failure, not holiness. A man who could not keep himself clean and decently clothed was a man whose words did not deserve a hearing.

Yoshitaka granted him an audience anyway, because Yoshitaka was curious and it cost nothing. Xavier, making the best of his chance, instructed Fernández to read aloud from a Japanese translation of a Christian catechism he had brought with him. The text ran through the virtues and vices in conventional Catholic order, and it did so with the bluntness of a document that had never been edited by anyone who had actually met a Japanese nobleman. Among the vices denounced at considerable length was sodomy.

Ōuchi Yoshitaka, whose romantic interests ran in directions the Catholic catechism took a dim view of, listened to this with progressively less patience. At a certain point he ended the audience. Xavier and his companions were politely but unmistakably shown the door. The Jesuits left Yamaguchi in December, with nothing to show for their visit except the mild traumatic memory of having denounced their host's private life to his face and then watched him decide to be merciful about it.

They walked to Kyoto through the snow.

What Xavier found in the capital broke something in him. The imperial city lay gutted by a century of civil war. The emperor could not afford a proper court. The shogun was a ceremonial irrelevance. Audiences at the palace cost bribes the Jesuits did not possess, and would have purchased nothing had they been paid. The most powerful men in Japan were the regional warlords, and the regional warlords were not in Kyoto. Xavier had walked across the country to discover that the country's official center was a husk.

He turned around and walked back to Yamaguchi. But the man who arrived in the spring of 1551 was not the man who had been dismissed from Yoshitaka's audience chamber four months earlier.

The Ambassador in Silk

The Gifts Xavier Gave Ōuchi Yoshitaka in 1551 and the Daidō-ji Mission

The second approach was, in every sense, a different approach.

Xavier shed the rags. He dressed himself in fine silk robes. He requested an audience with Yoshitaka not as a wandering priest but as the official ambassador of the Viceroy of Portuguese India and the Bishop of Goa, credentials he possessed in the sense that he could produce the parchment documents, and which he had not bothered to mention during his previous visit because humility had seemed more apostolic. And he brought gifts.

The gifts had originally been assembled for the emperor in Kyoto, and they constituted the cream of Portuguese India's diplomatic inventory. There was a chiming mechanical clock — an object of such profound novelty in a country without mechanical timepieces that it became, on its own, a diplomatic sensation. There was a musical box. There were pairs of spectacles, Venetian mirrors, bolts of brocade, crystal glassware, Portuguese wine, and — as the centerpiece — an elaborately worked three-barreled matchlock musket, the kind of firearm a Sengoku daimyō looked at the way a petrolhead looks at a Ferrari.

Yoshitaka was, on this occasion, delighted. He offered Xavier a considerable sum of gold and silver in exchange for the gifts. Xavier declined the money and asked instead for permission to preach the Christian faith within the Ōuchi domain. The refusal of the reward, in Yoshitaka's value system, was probably more compelling than any of the gifts themselves. A man who turned down treasure in order to teach a doctrine was, at minimum, a man with real convictions. The daimyō issued public decrees guaranteeing the missionaries' freedom to evangelize, protected any of his subjects who chose to convert, and bestowed on them an unused Buddhist monastery in the city — the Daidō-ji — as their residence and church.

For the first time since the beginning of the Portuguese presence in Japan, the Jesuits had a proper base of operations inside a major Japanese city, with the full institutional backing of its ruler. The mission that followed was the most successful Xavier would run in his life. Approximately five hundred people were baptized in Yamaguchi during 1551, many of them from the samurai class. The daimyō's visible endorsement had flipped the social calculation: accepting the foreign religion was no longer an act of deviance but, arguably, a form of cosmopolitan sophistication. The court nobles who had deserted Kyoto for Yamaguchi's flesh-pots now found themselves listening to sermons about the Trinity alongside their host.

The logic of the arrangement, which Xavier articulated with his usual clarity, was that you converted Japan from the top down. You did not argue with peasants in market squares. You charmed the lord, and the lord's permission descended through the ranks of his vassals until baptism became, effectively, policy.

It was a good theory. It depended entirely on the lord remaining the lord.

The Portuguese Who Were Not There

Where the Portuguese Carracks Anchored Instead of Yamaguchi, 1550–1562

There is a quiet footnote to the grandeur of Portuguese Yamaguchi that the period's chroniclers tended to suppress, because it complicates the story. The Portuguese merchant ships themselves — the great carracks whose arrival was the whole economic point of hosting the Jesuits — never actually docked at Yamaguchi. They could not. The city lay inland, reachable only by an overland slog, and a 1,200-ton Portuguese carrack was not a vessel that negotiated the inner coast of the Inland Sea if it could help it.

Between 1550 and 1562, the carracks overwhelmingly confined their anchorages to Kyūshū: Hirado, Funai in Bungo, or occasionally Kagoshima when the Shimazu political weather was favorable. The commercial benefit Yoshitaka was actually buying, when he tolerated the Jesuits, was not the ships themselves but the expectation that ships might come, and the softer value of Portuguese goodwill: the possibility that a carrack bound for Hirado might, if conditions favored it, divert to Akamagaseki or some other Ōuchi-controlled harbor in the Kanmon Strait.

This arrangement was perfectly rational from the daimyō's perspective, because Yamaguchi's trade portfolio did not need the carracks to succeed. The city was already fabulously rich on the kangō trade with China, on piracy along the Chinese coast by Ōuchi-sponsored freebooters, and on transit tolls at the strait. The Portuguese were a speculative investment, a hedge against the day the Ming court might close the tally system for good. Tolerating Xavier cost nothing except some Buddhist monks' displeasure, and it opened a door that might, in time, yield something substantial.

It is worth noting who else was hanging around Yamaguchi in this period. Among the merchants and pirates in the early 1550s was a Chinese captain named Wang Zhi, sometimes called Wufeng. Wang Zhi had, eight years earlier, been the owner and commander of the junk that had been blown off course in a typhoon and washed up on the beach at Tanegashima carrying the three Portuguese men whose arrival accidentally began the entire Nanban century. He was now running the largest smuggling network in the East China Sea, and he operated openly within Ōuchi territory because Yamaguchi welcomed any merchant or pirate whose business enriched its harbors. Few historians have known quite what to do with this coincidence. It is simply, characteristically, the way the Nanban period worked. Everybody, eventually, turned up in the same room.

Eight Days of Blood

Sue Harukata's Coup of 1551 and the Death of Ōuchi Yoshitaka

The arrangement at Yamaguchi lasted five months.

In September 1551 — Xavier himself had already left for Bungo, leaving Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernández to run the mission in his absence — the military establishment of the Ōuchi clan finally moved against its own lord. The resentment had been building for years. Yoshitaka was, from the perspective of his senior samurai retainers, an extravagant aesthete who had spent the clan's treasury on poetry, Chinese calligraphy, imperial ceremonies in a Kyoto nobody cared about, and the upkeep of a parasitic population of refugee courtiers whose only discernible function was to flatter the lord's literary vanity. His plan to formally settle the imperial court in Yamaguchi — to transplant the emperor's household from Kyoto to the Ōuchi capital at Ōuchi expense — was the final insult. It would, the samurai calculated, reduce their own status within the clan to an ornamental background behind the courtiers they already despised.

The leader of the opposition was Sue Harukata, also known as Sue Takafusa, the chief military vassal of the clan. He had command of the clan's professional fighting men and the authority to call them out. On 28 September 1551, he did. His forces moved against the Ōuchi capital in a coordinated strike that took the city by surprise. For eight days, Yamaguchi was in flames. Palaces were burned. Courtiers were hunted through the streets and killed. The kuge refugees who had made the city the Kyoto of the West were cut down in the houses they had been given, along with the wives, children, attendants, and patrons of the literary salons Yoshitaka had spent twenty years cultivating. The surviving sources say that the city "overflowed with blood."

Ōuchi Yoshitaka, run down as he tried to flee toward Nagato Province, took refuge at the Tainei-ji temple. On 30 September 1551, he committed seppuku. He was forty-three. The refined, eclectic, genuinely cultivated world he had spent his adult life building around himself had been dismantled, militarily, in a little over a week.

The Jesuit mission, against every probability, survived. Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernández had gone into hiding as the violence began and were sheltered by Christian converts. When the smoke cleared, the Jesuits emerged.

The Puppet Years

Ōuchi Yoshinaga and the Yamaguchi Mission's Revival, 1552–1554

What followed was one of those curious Sengoku interludes in which a rebellion, having killed the lord, discovers that it cannot quite bring itself to claim the title.

Sue Harukata did not take over the Ōuchi clan in his own name. Instead, he imported a puppet. The man chosen was Ōtomo Haruhide, the younger brother of Ōtomo Sōrin of Bungo — the same Ōtomo Sōrin who was, not incidentally, the most pro-Christian daimyō in all of Kyūshū and would eventually be baptized as Dom Francisco. Haruhide was installed as the official head of the Ōuchi clan under the name Ōuchi Yoshinaga. He had an inherited sympathy — perhaps affection — for the Jesuit mission that had flourished under his predecessor.

Under the nominal rule of Ōuchi Yoshinaga, the Yamaguchi mission experienced a genuine second spring. The church property was restored. A new church building was constructed. The Jesuits were permitted to operate openly again, and the congregation grew from the five hundred of Xavier's original campaign to around two thousand. For a few years — 1552, 1553, 1554 — Yamaguchi regained something of its old function as a center of European contact, now stripped of its imperial courtiers and its cultural grandeur but still, from the Jesuit perspective, a working mission field inside a tolerant domain.

This was an illusion, and everybody in the room knew it. Ōuchi Yoshinaga ruled because Sue Harukata permitted him to rule, and Sue Harukata's position depended on his ability to suppress a growing list of enemies — exiled Ōuchi loyalists, allied clans demanding revenge, and above all a small but lethally competent neighbor in Aki Province named Mōri Motonari.

The Exterminator

Mōri Motonari, the Battle of Itsukushima in 1555, and the End of the Ōuchi

Mōri Motonari is one of the finest tactical minds the Sengoku period produced, and he is almost entirely unknown to readers outside Japan. By 1551 he was already fifty-four years old, a man who had spent his entire career turning a minor Aki Province holding into a regional power by the simple expedient of outliving and outmaneuvering anybody who stood in his way. He had been a vassal and ally of the late Ōuchi Yoshitaka. The murder of his former overlord by Sue Harukata gave him a casus belli so pristine that it might as well have been wrapped in lacquered paper and presented with a bow.

The war he fought against Sue Harukata was a masterclass in what later military theorists would call economy of force. Motonari had fewer troops and less money than Sue. What he had instead was a gift for intelligence work — cultivating informants inside the Sue camp, turning Sue's own vassals, feeding false information through calculated leaks. At the Battle of Itsukushima in October 1555, Motonari defeated a numerically superior Sue army by luring it onto the sacred island of Itsukushima in the Inland Sea, closing off its escape by sea with his own fleet, and cornering the force in terrain where numbers could not deploy. Sue Harukata, finding himself boxed in on the island that housed the most important Shintō shrine in western Japan, committed suicide on the beach.

With Sue dead, the puppet daimyō Ōuchi Yoshinaga was left without a protector. In the spring of 1557, Mōri forces advanced on Yamaguchi. Yoshinaga fled. He was eventually cornered in Nagato Province and forced to commit seppuku. With his death, the Ōuchi clan — two centuries of accumulated power, wealth, culture, and tally-trade monopoly — was formally extinct.

Mōri Motonari was a devout Buddhist. Unlike Yoshitaka, who had regarded Buddhism, Christianity, and Shintō with the untroubled eclecticism of a man who saw all religions as potentially useful, Motonari regarded the Christian mission as a foreign contamination imported by an aesthete lord who had deserved what he got. Motonari strictly proscribed Christianity across his new domain. The properties that had been deeded to the Jesuits were confiscated and handed back to a Buddhist priest. Father Torres and the last of the missionaries, urged by their converts to flee before the Mōri troops arrived at the church door, escaped to the friendlier province of Bungo. Most of the leading Christian samurai fled with them.

No priest or catechist would be permitted to return to Yamaguchi for the next three decades. The Christian community — two thousand strong at its brief peak — dispersed, went underground, or converted back to Buddhism under Mōri pressure. The city itself, its palaces gone, its courtiers massacred, its daimyō line extinct, and its economic rationale destroyed along with the Ōuchi monopoly, never recovered its pre-1551 eminence. By the time Alessandro Valignano arrived in Japan as Jesuit Visitor in 1579, the Kyoto of the West was a provincial town whose role in the Nanban story was over.

What Yamaguchi Teaches

The Yamaguchi Bargain: Patronage in Exchange for Portuguese Trade

The Portuguese presence in Yamaguchi lasted, in its initial phase, six years. Measured against the 101-year arc of the Christian Century, it is a footnote. Measured against what it actually demonstrated about the way the Nanban encounter was going to work, it is something closer to a template.

The arrangement Xavier struck with Ōuchi Yoshitaka was the original version of the bargain that every successful Jesuit mission in Japan would subsequently strike with a Sengoku daimyō: religious patronage in exchange for the promise of Portuguese trade. Ōtomo Sōrin in Bungo, Ōmura Sumitada at Yokoseura and Nagasaki, Arima Harunobu in Hizen — each of them would, in his turn, run the same calculation that Yoshitaka ran in 1551, and each would be tested by the same vulnerability. The bargain depended entirely on the daimyō's own survival. The moment the patron fell — to rebellion, to a larger neighbor, to a failed succession, to the 1587 edict of an overlord, to the 1614 expulsion issued by a shogun in Edo — the mission fell with him. A religion that stakes its presence in a country on the personal favor of one warlord is a religion that lives, by definition, inside that warlord's political lifespan.

Xavier had learned an immense amount during his brief time in Yamaguchi. He had discovered that Japan would not be converted from Kyoto, because Kyoto was empty. He had discovered that silk robes commanded more respect than bare feet. He had discovered that mechanical clocks and three-barreled muskets opened doors that doctrinal argument could not. He had discovered that political patronage, not preaching, was what actually multiplied converts. And he had discovered, although he did not live long enough to watch the full implications play out, that the daimyō system which made his successes possible also made them precarious in a way no Jesuit mission in any other part of the world was precarious. In Goa, the Portuguese themselves were the sovereign power. In Yamaguchi, they were the guests of a man whose chief vassal could end the arrangement in eight days with a sword.

The fall of Yamaguchi in 1551 also offers a sobering reminder that the Sengoku daimyō most sympathetic to Portuguese contact were not, on the whole, the most politically secure. Yoshitaka was killed for being too cosmopolitan. Ōtomo Sōrin would see his Bungo domain nearly destroyed. Takayama Ukon would be stripped of his lands by Hideyoshi. The early Christian daimyō were, almost without exception, men whose cultural openness placed them at a certain remove from the clan orthodoxy that surrounded them, and the clan orthodoxy — when it organized itself — tended to win. The Portuguese had arrived in a country whose political structure rewarded military competence above all other qualities. The warlords most interested in their religion, their goods, and their company were, by temperament, disproportionately likely to be the warlords least equipped to survive the competition.

And yet the encounter at Yamaguchi had been, on its own terms, something extraordinary. For five months in 1551, a European priest and a Japanese court aesthete had sat across from each other in a silk-hung audience chamber and negotiated the terms of mutual access to two worlds that, eight years earlier, had not even known the other existed. Xavier's gifts had included a chiming clock that marked European hours in a country that kept time by the hours of the ox and the hare. Yoshitaka's patronage had included an entire Buddhist monastery turned over to a foreign creed. They had met, in the loosest possible sense, as equals: an ambassador of the Viceroy of Portuguese India and a daimyō of western Honshū who paid for the emperor's rites. Both men would be dead within twenty months — Xavier of fever off the coast of China in December 1552, Yoshitaka at Tainei-ji by his own hand in September 1551. The world they had briefly built between them would be erased by a cultivated neighbor with no interest in sustaining it.

It is the pattern, in miniature, of the whole Nanban century. Two men of different continents find a way, against the grain of every political force around them, to do business. Politics reasserts itself. The arrangement does not survive its creators. The next version of it is tried, with different names, in a different city, under a different lord.

Yamaguchi was where that cycle began.

Sources & Further Reading

Boxer, Charles R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951; reprinted Carcanet, 1993. Still the foundational English-language narrative of the Portuguese-Jesuit enterprise in Japan. Boxer's account of the Yamaguchi mission draws directly on the early Jesuit letters and remains the authoritative starting point.

Elisonas, Jurgis. "Christianity and the Daimyō." In The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 4: Early Modern Japan, edited by John Whitney Hall, 301–372. Cambridge University Press, 1991. The essential modern analytical treatment of the missionary-daimyō bargain, with extended attention to the Ōuchi and Ōtomo cases as templates for the later Christian daimyō of Kyūshū.

Arnesen, Peter J. The Medieval Japanese Daimyō: The Ōuchi Family's Rule of Suō and Nagato. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. The definitive Western-language study of the Ōuchi clan's rise, governance, and fall. Indispensable for understanding what Yamaguchi actually was before, during, and after its brief European moment.

Berry, Mary Elizabeth. The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Essential context for the exodus of kuge courtiers from Kyoto to western provincial capitals, and for the cultural world the refugees reconstituted under Ōuchi patronage.

Moran, J. F. The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth-Century Japan. London: Routledge, 1993. The standard study of Jesuit adaptive strategy in Japan, with important material on how the lessons Xavier learned at Yamaguchi were codified by Valignano into formal mission policy a generation later.

Turnbull, Stephen. Warriors of Medieval Japan. Oxford: Osprey, 2005. A readable survey of the military culture of the late Sengoku period.

Hall, John Whitney, Nagahara Keiji, and Kōzō Yamamura, eds. Japan Before Tokugawa: Political Consolidation and Economic Growth, 1500–1650. Princeton University Press, 1981. The standard collection of scholarly essays on the political economy of the late Sengoku, with essential material on the kangō tally trade and the commercial foundations of Ōuchi wealth.

Souyri, Pierre-François. The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society. Translated by Käthe Roth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. A sweeping reinterpretation of late medieval Japanese society that places the Ōuchi within the broader context of the mercantile and provincial powers reshaping the archipelago in the sixteenth century.

Fukuo Takeichirō. Ōuchi Yoshitaka. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1989. The standard Japanese biography of the daimyō whose patronage made Xavier's Yamaguchi mission possible and whose assassination ended it. Available only in Japanese but heavily cited in English-language scholarship.

Ruiz-de-Medina, Juan G. Documentos del Japón, 1547–1557. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1990. The critical modern edition of the earliest Jesuit correspondence from Japan, including Xavier's own letters from Yamaguchi and Cosme de Torres's firsthand account of the 1551 rebellion and its aftermath.

Sansom, George B. A History of Japan, 1334–1615. Stanford University Press, 1961. Dated in some respects but still unrivaled as a narrative treatment of the political and military context in which the Ōuchi rose and fell.

Farris, William Wayne. Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. For the demographic context of sixteenth-century urban Japan, including comparative figures for Yamaguchi, Kyoto, and the emerging commercial centers of the Inland Sea.