A
Summer Storm, Part II
( website: Kirishtan.com )
( website: Kirishtan.com )
Toku-un was not
only Hideyoshi’s private quack; he was also his dedicated procurer of
virgins. With high hopes Hideyoshi had sent
him into the Kirish’tan domain of Arima, where the girls were known for their
beauty, but Toku-un came back empty-handed and insulted to boot: the Kirish’tan of Arima would not give up
their daughters for the ruler’s debauching.
This was one prelude to the explosion—indeed perhaps the very powder in
the keg—that would rock all Christendom throughout Japan. But certainly there must have been more to it
than that.
Historian
James Murdoch, writing at the hatching of the Twentieth Century, painted
Hideyoshi as a recklessly-fearless commander; Luis Frois, a contemporary of
Hideyoshi’s who knew him well—and personally—painted him as something of a
paranoid. I will lean on the primary
source (rather than the latter one) for my own closer look at the man who first
put the sledgehammer to Christ in all Japan’s domains.
A
prelude to Hideyoshi’s explosion at Hakata:
earlier that month, at Yatsushiro on the west coast of the island, the
conqueror had fêted Father Coelho and his entourage on their
coming to pay their respects, and he declared on their leaving, “I am the
Padre’s disciple.” The lilt of those
lighthearted words may have been a smokescreen meant merely to hide Hideyoshi’s
intentions: his imminent crackdown on the Church once his conquest was done. I wonder, though, if those words weren’t in
fact intended to hide his suppressed resentment at having been asked in public
by the Padre to pardon a mass of prisoners of conquest whom the ruler had peremptorily
sentenced to death. Hideyoshi acceded to
the Padre’s request at once, said request having been made in front of all the
ruler’s assembled commanders at his annexed headquarters—a Buddhist
temple—after he had given the Padre’s delegation a welcome worthy of emissaries
of, well … God.
To
top this off, after meeting furious resistance from the Satsuma samurai at the
battle of Sendaigawa, the shaken Hideyoshi unveiled his fear to his Christian
general Takayama Ukon: he ordered Ukon
to prepare a private escape route for his own person in case of dire
extremity. An extremity that never came
about, given that Hideyoshi soon managed to panic the lord of Satsuma by
launching a surprise seaborne assault on his capital: 60,000 troops appearing out of nowhere to
spearhead into Satsuma’s rear guard from behind. (Their commander, the lord of Satsuma’s
brother, saved his own skin by escaping on horseback, he and fifty mounted
swordsmen cutting an escape route through the invading horde at a gallop.) This coup led to the lord of Satsuma’s
surrender in short order, completing Hideyoshi’s conquest of Kyushu and putting
him on top of the world.
Now
back to where our story began: in the
wake of his 1587 conquest of all Kyushu, Hideyoshi was refreshing himself in
Hakata, a cornucopia of debauchery, where he was visited by the Jesuit Vice-Provincial,
Father Gaspar Coelho. The Padre had come
to pay his respects, having perhaps been deluded by that tactical jest of
Hideyoshi’s—I am the Padre’s disciple —and,
unwisely, he had sailed into Hakata’s harbor in his prize Portuguese fusta, a nimble sailing-ship very well
laid out with fine Portuguese cannon to defend herself against pirates on the
high seas.
The
Padre’s fusta soon became the most
popular tourist destination in Hakata: a steady stream of well-placed locals came
requesting tours of the vessel, and news of this marvel lost no time in
reaching Hideyoshi’s ears. He came and
insisted on being shown every last nook and cranny of the marvelous fusta, and left in apparent good humor—at
least as far as the Padre could tell—taking with him a gift of Portuguese port
wine. He had been given countless
delicacies too, but, afraid of poisoning, had his underlings pass them on to the
locals milling about the docks.
Soon
he would be lounging in his camp with Toku-un and his other intimates, drinking
himself silly with the Padre’s gift of wine.
One can only imagine the witch’s brew of lies, fears and resentments simmering
in the conqueror’s heart that would presently erupt into volcanic explosion. Just as the twenty-four megaton eruption of Mount
Saint Helen’s in 1980 flattened the forest for miles around, Hideyoshi’s 1587 blow-up
would level the hopes and the peace of all Christians in Japan.
