No country in the history of the world has treated Catholicism as cruelly as Japan, which stands in stark contrast to its beloved neighbor South Korea. In 2014, 30% of South Korea's population was Catholic, and Catholicism has become the largest religion in South Korea.
Abandon the religion, abandon the religion! Lord, save them! Don't leave that to us! - Shusaku Endo, "Silence"
<h1 class="ql-align-center" > "to that enchanting country."</h1>
The introduction of Catholicism to Japan begins with the encounter of two people. One of the most famous saints in Catholic history, francis Xavier, a Spaniard, and Yajiro, a Japanese fugitive.
Francis Xavier (1506–1552)
Yajiro lives in Satsuma Domain and flees after committing a murder. On the way, Yajiro traveled to Malacca and met Xavier, who was preaching in the East. Infected by Xavier, Mijiro decided to follow Xavier and return with him to Goa, India, the base camp of the Jesuits in Asia at that time. There, Yajiro further studied Portuguese and Catholic doctrine and was baptized as "Holy Faith Paul", becoming the first Japanese Catholic on record.
And the shock of this encounter to Xavier is probably far greater than that of Yajiro. Although Portuguese merchants had long been exposed to Japan, the well-read missionary had never heard of such a fascinating kingdom in the world.
According to Yajiro, described by Xavier, Japan was ruled by a "king" who was well-ordered, strictly lawd, and civilized. People knew Dali, believed in "religion", and regularly went to "churches" and "priests" to communicate. The Religion of the Japanese, like Catholicism, worships a Creator God. The founder and Jesus Christ are in a similar situation, they were also born of a dream by God, and when they grew up, they preached around to persuade people to abandon the old god and convert to a new religion. For thousands of years, not only did it convert its own people, but it also succeeded in converting Chinese, and Protestantism was transmitted from China to Japan. In addition, the founder also said that the only Creator God had made five precepts (not to kill, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to cling to irredeemable things, and to forgive harm)—which Xavier probably felt somewhat similar to the Ten Commandments of Moses. He obviously did not know that the kingdom of God that Yajiro was talking about was close at hand, and it was the India where he was located.
Yajiro also promised Xavier that the Japanese would be rational and self-absorbed, and that they would be baptized in full within 6 months. In this way, Xavier decided to go to the charming capital and complete his mission. With permission, Xavier set out with Yajiro and two other Jesuits and two servants to land on Kagoshima in August 1549 and begin his missionary work in Japan.
<h1 class="ql-align-center" > "flip-flop face"</h1>
Under Xavier's effective missionary strategy, many people were baptized, even daimyōs (feudal lords), becoming "Gillichidan" (Catholics). In 1563, Kyushu Daimyo Ōmura Junchu was baptized as the first "Gilichidan Daimyō". In 1570, he dedicated a place called Nagasaki to the church, and from then on Nagasaki opened its port, the Jesuits and other Europeans had a base in Japan, and Nagasaki became the most important port of trade between Japan and Europe. By the second half of the 16th century, there were hundreds of thousands of believers in Japan.
However, the turn of the face of the authorities Toyotomi Hideyoshi caused the situation of the Japanese Catholic Church to take a sharp turn.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
In July 1587, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had just unified Kyushu, came to Hakata and met father Coelho, the head of the Jesuit Japanese diocese, on a Portuguese merchant ship. The guests and hosts had a good conversation, and Hideyoshi promised to give the Jesuits a piece of land in Hakata City.
In the middle of the night, Coelho was suddenly called up by Hideyoshi's messenger, asking him to answer several aggressive questions at once: Why are you forcing others to convert? Why destroy Buddhist and Shinto monasteries? Why feed on such beneficial livestock as horses and cattle? Why did the Portuguese sell the Japanese overseas as slaves?
Confused, Coelho responded in confusion that missionaries had never used violent means to force the Japanese to convert, never ate horses except occasionally, and could not even eat beef in the future. He also blamed the Catholic daimyo for destroying the Buddha god and said that the Jesuits did not support the slave trade of Portuguese merchants. These responses were clearly of little use, and Hideyoshi did not question at all, but rebuked (quoted from Song Nianshen's Discovery of East Asia).
The next day, Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued the famous "Companion Tenren Pursuit Order" (Companion Tenren is the priest). The expulsion order began by saying that Japan was a god's kingdom and that the Catholic Church was a cult, ordering all missionaries to leave the country within 20 days. But the order also said that the Portuguese could still trade in Japan.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi's "Companion Heavenly Pursuit Order"
Why did Toyotomi Hideyoshi suddenly turn his face? Of course, the denunciation of Buddhas, the eating of beef, and the slave trade were not the main causes. It is said that that night, his cronies Shi Yaoyuan Quanzong reminded him that the increasing power of the Catholic Church, and the support of powerful daimyo such as Takayama Right Neighbor, would sooner or later become a threat.
Hideyoshi's belief in Catholicism has long been there. Like Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi was very sensitive to the involvement of Buddhist forces in Japan during the Sengoku period, and he did not want Catholicism to eventually develop into a new political sect. At a time when power was gradually being re-centralized, the unifiers were particularly wary of the wall.
In October 1596, a merchant ship sailing from Manila to Mexico was blown by a storm to Tosa, Japan. Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent people to seize the merchant ship for interrogation. As a result, the captain of the big mouth, in response to interrogations, boasted of Spain's colonial achievements around the world and revealed that missionaries always served as a precursor to conquest. This made Toyotomi Hideyoshi more convinced of the Colonial ambitions of the Catholic Church. He ordered the arrest of 26 clergy and believers in Kyoto and Osaka, and publicly executed the following year for violating the prohibition. The martyrdom of 26 people in Nagasaki opened the prelude to Japan's large-scale purge and persecution of Catholicism.
<h1 class= "ql-align-center" > "to unload the Donkey-Killing to the Tokugawa Shogunate"</h1>
In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who unified Japan, opened a shogunate in Edo. At this time, Xavier had been coming to Japan as a missionary for more than 50 years. During this period, the number of Catholics in Japan increased sharply to 700,000 to 750,000, and it is said that even Ieyasu's personal maids were devout Catholics.
Tokugawa Ieyasu
As a feudal ruler and a Buddhist Pure Land religious, Ieyasu had no personal affection for catholicism, especially the Catholic doctrine that God is above life and death and secular doctrine. However, Ieyasu did not strictly ban religion at the beginning, but provided a relatively relaxed development environment for it. First, it prevented Christians from joining forces with the remnants of Toyotomi to form an anti-shogunate force. Second, Spain and Portugal often "bundled" trade and missions, and if they want to profit from them, they must be skillfully weighed.
After a brief spring, Tokugawa Ieyasu died in 1616, leaving the Catholic issues left to the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada and the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu not as complicated as during Ieyasu's reign.
With the establishment of the shogunate system, the shogunate was able to control the daimyo to the maximum extent possible and collect rice, and the straight-waisted shogunate no longer had to tolerate Catholicism in exchange for trade benefits. At the same time, the rise of protestant states, the Netherlands and Britain, offered Japan a new solution.
In 1609 and 1613, the Dutch and British opened trading houses in Hirado, and the share of trade between Spain and Portugal was gradually lost, and missionaries and believers became increasingly unpopular in Japan. Before the shogunate formally suppressed Catholicism, the politically sensitive daimyōs of various regions sensed the shogunate's intentions and organized anti-religious activities on their own.
Between 1614 and 1635, 280,000 Japanese Catholics were executed. In 1622, two missionaries and 55 Christians of various sects smuggled into Japan by Spanish merchant ships were burned or beheaded, known as the "Great Martyrdom of Yuanhe". In the Arima region of Kyushu, the lord Matsukura Shigemasa was particularly cruel. He first burned the words "Heaven", "Lord", and "Religion" with a soldering iron on the forehead and cheek of the believer, and then hung it, sank into the sea, tied people to pillars and placed them in the sea, poured them with boiling hot spring water, or threw them directly into the hot springs. In the Hizen Shimabara area, the lord of the city, Matsukura Shigemasa, put his coat on Catholics and burned them to death. The way people are burned and rolled on the ground in their coats is jokingly called the "Dance of the Cloaks".
Hanging: The prisoner is tied upside down, the head is buried in a dug hole, and a wound is cut behind the ear, so that the prisoner slowly loses blood and dies.
By this time, Catholicism had expanded from tohoku to Ezo and had taken root among the Hao, poor peasants, and miners in the declining regions. In the beginning, the populace, like the Catholic daimyo, was ostensibly Catholic for the sake of profit. But by this time, this belief, combined with anti-power consciousness, had become a weapon for the people to rebel against feudal rule.
Compared with the daimyo who abandoned the religion one after another, the people's faith is particularly firm. Under the brutal suppression, the people established mutual aid associations, and the whole village adhered to the faith, and under the creed that "if you resist and are killed, you will not be bathed in the glory of martyrdom", and abide by the principle of non-resistance and let them be killed.
In 1637, the harsh expropriation and religious oppression finally led to the popular rebellion "Shimabara Rebellion". The people worshiped Amakusa Shiro as the "God of Coming" and called on the poor and helpless peasants to revolt.
The rebel army is said to have reached 25,000 men. Occupying the deserted castle, they looked forward to the end of the day when only Catholics would be saved, and fought bravely against the 120,000 shogunate troops, rarely surviving. (Quoted from Masamoto Kitajima's "Edo Period").
Statue of Shiro Amakusa in the ruins of the original castle
This massive rebellion completely cut off any room for détente between the Catholic Church and the shogunate. The Shimabara Rebellion made the shogunate aware of the threat of Catholicism again, and the shogunate's prohibition of religion was even more resolute. However, the shogunate did not realize that the Shimabara Rebellion was actually a war by the peasants against feudal rule. On the contrary, the Pope of Rome, who was far away, saw the nature of the matter and refused to list the Japanese believers killed in the uprising as martyrs.
At this point, the "Catholic Century" in Japan, brought by Yajiro and Xavier, officially ended. However, believers who still do not want to abandon the religion have gone underground, secretly passing on the faith of their ancestors for more than two centuries isolated from the Catholic world.
▍ Bibliography
The Edo period (1603-1867) was the last era of Japan's feudal system, an era that left a lot of heritage for today's Japan, and an era when Japanese culture was fully maturing. This is a history of singing and weeping. When you open it, it is the image of all sentient beings. When you close it, it is a sense of heaven and earth.
What did the historical Edo period look like? What kind of life did the samurai class and the common people class live and do at that time? How did the shogunate manage that society? This book reveals the most authentic life of Japanese people in the Edo period in a pictured and textual way!
Why do we always have a sense of déjà vu and untouchability in Japan and South Korea, which are separated by water? The East Asian world we are in and that we think we are familiar with is full of myths and prejudices that need to be rediscovered and understood.