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 55 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 70 years and was driven underground in 25. A guided tour of the demographic curve, the contested numbers behind it, and the men who pushed it up and down.
She taught Pure Land doctrine to Hideyoshi's wife and spat in a Buddhist priest's face from inside a rice sack on a frozen riverbank. He brought 2,000 men under the cross into Kyoto and carried a peace embassy to Beijing. In 1614 the Tokugawa put brother and sister on the same ship to Manila.
Before the Tokugawa destroyed the Church in Japan, the Church in Japan spent 40 years trying to destroy itself, in protocols, papal briefs, excommunication orders, prison letters, and public manifestos written on the very day its authors were marched onto the deportation ships.
A shogun who listened for three days and nights, a servant who crossed the world and came back with an answer, and a single quoted paragraph in an English history book of 1903 that is the only evidence any of it happened. Ibi Masayoshi was sent by Tokugawa Hidetada to inspect Christianity in Europe, and the archives of two continents have never produced his name.
On a January night in Edo Castle, a samurai-born 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.
A Japanese priest carried a Latin-dedicated book from Nagasaki to Rome, then apostatized at Ōmura in 1619 and spent a quarter century helping the magistracy that hunted down the missionaries who had trained him. He signed that Roman dedication presbyter, priest, and that single Latin word is nearly the only thing about his life that historians agree on.
A samurai came home to a country that had decided his journey was treason, and a godson of the King of Spain was branded and sold as a slave. In an Andalusian river town, 800 people carry the surname Japón and until 1989 believed they were descended from fishermen.
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; it hastened the end of the Fleet of Defense and the English factory, and ended Dutch hopes of fighting their anti-Portuguese war from Japanese waters.
A gift of sharkskin and gunpowder that left two Tokugawa councillors asking who had sent it, a votive ship lost to a shrine fire, and a governorship that was a promotion and a dismissal in the same document. A Japanese merchant became one of Siam's most powerful men, and a 1942 schoolbook turned his career into a national glory it never actually claimed.
On September 10, 1622, 55 Christians were burned alive or beheaded on Nishizaka hill while a crowd of some 30,000 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, criminalizing 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 sakoku edicts, and a persecution so morbid it drove the faith underground for over two centuries.
In 1626 a Macao merchant sailed into Nagasaki with six galliots and a fortune in Chinese silk, and left having signed away the priests who had made him rich. 14 years later the same man knelt on Martyrs' Mount with his neck against a Tokugawa sword.
In May 1628, a Spanish commander sent to punish the Siamese went hunting for Japanese instead. He took 42 prisoners, stole the Shogun's vermilion-seal pass, 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, 12 years later, with his head on a stake above Nagasaki.
A six-day municipal ceremony held every New Year in Nagasaki, 20 brass plaques cast in 1669 from confiscated metal, and a Sicilian Jesuit who sailed in 1643 to rescue the most famous apostate in Asia. This is the documentary spine of the most famous novel ever written about Christian Japan, and the exact places where the novel walks away from it.
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.