Era
The expulsion edict and its aftermath: exile, the underground church, the martyrdoms, and trade continuing under ever-tighter control.
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The expulsion of 1614 drove the mission underground rather than out of existence. Dozens of priests slipped back or stayed hidden, ministering in secret; the shogunate answered with a machinery of detection — the fumi-e trampling ceremonies, temple registration, rewards for informers — and with exemplary cruelty. The Great Genna Martyrdom at Nagasaki in 1622 burned or beheaded fifty-five Christians before an immense crowd.
Trade and faith, once inseparable, were now pulled apart by policy. The Portuguese ships still came — the silk-for-silver exchange was too valuable to sever — but under ever-narrower supervision, while Japanese Christianity was pressed toward annihilation. Between 1633 and 1636 a series of edicts, later called the sakoku edicts, forbade Japanese subjects to leave the country or return from abroad, and gathered the Portuguese into Nagasaki under watch.
Christianity rose to perhaps 300,000 active believers in seventy years and was driven underground in twenty-five. A guided tour of the demographic curve, the contested numbers behind it, and the men who pushed it up and down.
On a January night in Edo Castle, a former samurai turned Zen abbot sat down to write the most consequential religious decree in Japanese history. By morning, the Christian Century was over.
In 1615, the largest battle in Japanese history destroyed the Toyotomi clan, and the Christian banners flying over the battlefield sealed the fate of the faith in Japan.
Between the first foreign beheadings at Ōmura in 1617 and the severed heads of the Macao embassy at Nishizaka in 1640, the Tokugawa shogunate ran what may be the earliest documented case of iterative, audience-tested state violence in the modern world. They killed in public, watched the crowds, learned from the results, and rewrote the script.
In the summer of 1621, the Tokugawa shogunate did something no European power had managed: it looked at the Dutch and English privateering fleet operating out of Hirado, waging a private corporate war on Iberian shipping, and reclassified it as common piracy. The word it chose was bahan, and it ended the Fleet of Defence, the English factory, and Dutch hopes of fighting their anti-Portuguese war from Japanese waters.
On September 10, 1622, fifty-five Christians were burned alive or beheaded on Nishizaka hill while a crowd of thirty thousand sang hymns. The shogunate had intended a spectacle of terror. It produced instead a spectacle of defiance.
The 1614 edict had banned a religion. The 1639 edict would banish a people. In between, a quieter decree dismantled the fabric of daily life that had made Portuguese Nagasaki possible, ending permanent residency, criminalising European dress, and tearing Eurasian families apart ship by ship.
The third Tokugawa shōgun never won a battle, yet turned his grandfather’s conquest into an airtight bureaucracy , the sankin kōtai, Nikkō’s gilded shrine, the sealing of the country, and a persecution so morbid it outlasted the faith it was designed to destroy.
In May 1628, a Spanish commander sent to punish the Siamese went hunting for Japanese instead. He took forty-two prisoners, stole the Shogun's personal seal, and watched his countrymen in Manila refuse to pay for it. The bill landed on the Portuguese merchants of Macau, and on one Lisbon-born factor whose career with the incident would end, nine years later, with his head on a stake above Nagasaki.
The highest-ranking Jesuit in Japan broke under torture in 1633, renounced his faith, and spent the rest of his life helping the shogunate destroy the Church he had served for three decades. His apostasy is the darkest chapter of the Christian Century.