Crucifixions Revisited: The Legacy of Hideyoshi’s Tableau Mourant (Research presentation for the Japan Forum Lecture series, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute, Harvard University, 14 March 2014) by Reinier H. Hesselink The University of Northern IowaesselinkH HHHH Abstract: The execution of 26 Christians on 5 February 1597, just outside of Nagasaki, is arguably the earliest event in Japanese history that is widely known in the West. Although the background of and the reasons for these executions have been debated for over four hundred years, not much attention has been paid to their specific impact on the population of Nagasaki and its surroundings. In this presentation, the speaker (who has just completed a history of Christian Nagasaki spanning the years 1560 to 1640) will illuminate the situation on the ground at the hand of accounts by four different eyewitnesses. His analysis of these testimonies will lead to new insights concerning the impact of the executions on local Japanese Christians, the ways in which Christianity was taught in Japan, and the complex set of motives that led Japan’s ruler to order them. [slide 1] The first word of the title of this presentation has been chosen with a purpose. It is supposed to set the stage for this afternoon. My audience is immediately aware that we are going to deal with the famous image, which lies at the base of the religion that takes the cross as its symbol. Your presence here this afternoon signifies your willingness to listen to a talk on a topic of sixteenth-century Japan that has been under discussion in the West for more than four hundred years. Thus, my choice of subject matter is anything but original, and if the topic were not so important, even for our present-day study of Japanese history, this would have been the place to apologize for returning to it once more. The first word of the title, on the other hand, should also sound a warning. Please be prepared for some gruesome imagery the likes of which we do not often like to confront, but which forms an indispensable element in the justification for the choice of my topic this afternoon. Apart from the voluminous writings of the European missionaries of various nationalities (but mainly Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian) who visited Japan in the late sixteenth century, usually traveling on the ships of the Portuguese thalassocracy, we have the testimony of two European laymen who came to Japan on their own, sailing on local craft. One was a Florentine merchant by name of Francesco Carletti, who upon his return to Europe in the early seventeenth century wrote down an account of his travels that is best known in English as My Voyage Around the World. Francesco Carletti, My Voyage Around the World, translated by Herbert Weinstock. New York: Random House, 1964. See also: Francesco Carletti. Reise um die Welt. Translated by Ernst Bluth from a newly reconstructed Italian text by Gianfranco Silvestro (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1958). Tübingen/Basel: Horst Erdman Verlag, 1966. Between June 1597 and March 1598, Carletti spent more than eight months in Nagasaki, a town that had been founded only twenty-six years earlier by Jesuit missionaries. The other layman writing about Japan is the Castilian Bernardo Avila Giron, who between 1594 and 1619 lived off and on in Nagasaki for twenty-five years. He wrote An Account of the Kingdom of Nippon Mistakenly Called Japan that, for lack of a better term, best be labeled a “piece of journalism.” The manuscript, of which a number of copies remain, has never been published in its entirety. To date the largest part was published by Dorotheus Schilling, O.F.M and Fidel de Lejarza [eds.]. “Relacion del Reino de Nippon por Bernardino de Avila Giron” in Archivo Ibero-Americano vol. 36 (1933): 481-531; 37 (1934): 5-48, 259-75, 392-434, 493-554; 38 (1935): 103-130, 216-39, 384-417. These two authors present information from the time that Nagasaki was a completely Christian town that one will search for in vain in the writings of the missionaries. I will start with a quote from Carletti: These people [i.e. the Japanese] . . . . deal very seriously with adultery, which they punish severely, with death to both parties if they are caught in the act or brought to judgment. Taking the adulterers, man and woman, they put them into a wagon and take them, bound and with their hands behind their backs, to the house of the husband. And in his presence they cut off the man’s penis and take enough skin from his body to make a sort of cap, this to put on the head of the adulterous woman. And from near her shameful part they cut a strip of flesh from around the vagina, making a garland of it to place on the head of the adulterous man. And thus ornamented and adorned with those members, they go naked through the city, making a miserable and shameful show of their bodies to all the people during the time when the flowing out of their blood from the wounded parts ends their lives. Carletti 1964, p. 126-7. [unquote] In this passage, it is clear that Carletti is speaking (or, at least, wants to give the impression he is speaking) of something he has witnessed himself. It is important to state that not a few times he has assured his reader already that he is making nothing up and only reports what he has seen with his own eyes, eschewing hearsay and speculation. As far as I have been able to check, Carletti is eminently accurate in everything he has written about his stay in Japan and throughout the rest of his travel account. Scholars of the Portuguese thalassocracy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries quote his account frequently, thus implying their general agreement on Carletti’s trustworthiness. Malyn Newitt. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400-1668. London/New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 165, 188-9, 192, 197, 205, 218, 261. Anthony R. Disney. A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire. 2 vols. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 102, 148, 193. Therefore, to accuse Carletti of having made this up, as some modern Japan scholars have done, Engelbert Jorissen. “Exotic and “Strange” Images of Japan in European Texts of the Early 17th Century: An Interpretation of the Contexts of History of Thought and Literature” in Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies, vol. 4 (2002), pp. 44-9, thinks that Carletti is making all of this up. But he also writes that it is possible that Carletti met Frois on his deathbed and was given a copy of the Tratado to read, while shortly after stating that it is possible that Carletti did not visit Japan at all. In short, according to Jorissen, anything is possible. What he thinks is impossible, however, (i.e. that Carletti witnessed the leftovers of the 26 martyrs on their crosses upon his arrival in Japan in June 1597), is, on the contrary, eminently possible, especially when one reads the accounts of how securely they had been fastened. Jurgis S.A. Elisonas. “Nagasaki: The Early Years of an Early Modern Japanese City” in: Liam M. Brockey [ed.]. Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World. Farnham UK/ Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009, p. 78, is a little more vague, but also clearly has this passage in mind when he disparages Carletti’s testimony. must entail explaining the reasons for his having done so in flagrant contradiction to his own stated intentions and the overall trustworthiness of the mountain of other information he presents. Carletti’s experience of Japan did not reach beyond Nagasaki, and therefore, if true, his account is based on something he must have seen there, even if he thinks that this type of punishment is a general custom of the Japanese. I have not, however, been able to find any other example of this type of public treatment of adulterers in Japan. So, in this respect at least, we will have to admit that he exaggerates. The closest is a law issued in Kanpō 1 (1741): “persons who, while attempting to commit adultery had wounded the woman’s husband, should be led through the streets, and after that decapitated and their heads exposed.” (L.W. Kuechler. “Marriage in Japan. Including a Few Remarks on the Marriage Ceremony, the Position of Married Women, and Divorce” in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan vol. 13 (1885): 132-3). As an outsider (one is tempted to call him a tourist), he may of course be forgiven for assuming that Nagasaki was representative of Japan. My audience this afternoon, however, does not need to be reminded that Nagasaki in the 1590’s was a place with a different set of moral values from the rest of Japan. In fact, rather than looking for precedents in Japan, the “Japanese custom” described here has more immediate connections with some ancient European traditions: it resembles nothing so much as a charivari [shevaree], albeit in a rare and particularly horrendous variety. Charivari used to be widespread all over Europe and around the Mediterranean littoral. They were ways in which small communities enforced their dominant morality. The objects of charivari usually were a man and a woman who had somehow offended against this morality: widows or widowers who remarried, an old man marrying a young wife, and especially adulterers. Such sinners against morality might suddenly find themselves the object, often at night, of a deafening noise made by a group of youths beating with sticks upon pots and pans [slide 2], and sometimes engaging in more violent acts, such as the breaking of windows or the kicking in of doors [slide 3]. The victims were often taken out of their house and paraded through the streets of the community – on a cart or on a donkey – and might be subjected to other physical trials such as dunking into water, as well as being led to the periphery of the community and to be abandoned there, sometimes after having been tarred and feathered. Anton Blok. “Charivari’s als purificatie-ritueel” in Volkskundig Bulletin, vol. 15, 3 (1989): 272. On occasion, such groups of rowdy young people could be paid off, more often though “just like public executions, charivari formed a welcome relief from the dreary routine and monotony of living in an isolated village or provincial town.” Ibid. Consequently, the result often was that the couple realized it was impossible for them to continue to live in the same community any longer. The literature on charivari is extensive. For France, see Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975, pp. 97-123 and Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt. Le Charivari. Actes de la table ronde organisée à Paris (25-27 avril 1977) par l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales et le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Paris/The Hague: Mouton, 1981, pp. 117-22. While most examples of charivari that have been transmitted to us from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries seem pretty tame (although not, to be sure, from the point of view of the couple involved), there are a few examples that resemble the scene described by Carletti. Here is a custom from southern France dated to 1262: “Whoever is caught in the act of adultery with a married woman, or someone else’s woman, will walk the village stark naked, with the woman going ahead holding a rope attached to the testicles of the man behind her. The town crier will precede them calling out: ‘Who ever behaves like this will be treated like this. Each of the guilty will pay a fine of 65 sous, two-thirds for the seigneur and the rest for the town consuls.’” Hippolyte Rébouis (ed.). Les Coutumes de Clermont-Dessus en Agenais 1262, Paris: L. Larose, 1881, p. 35. The passage is printed in Occitan: “E cui sera pres a femna maridada en adulteri, o molherat o autra femna, o femna maridada ab home, que corro la vila tuch nuctz e la femna ane primeira ab una corda per la colha, e la crida que va primeira en dizen; que aital fara aital penra; e cadaus d’aquels adulteris done LXV sols de justicia, las doz partz als senhors e la tersa part al cosselh.” According to the editor, similar punishments for adultery are on record among the customs of Larroque, Auvillars, Payssus, Agen, and Sérignac (pp. 55-6), places along the upper to middle reaches of the Garonne river, i.e. in the departments of Haute-Garonne, Tarn-et-Garonne, and Lot-et-Garonne. A rare edition of this work dating from 1596 seems to have an illustration of this custom. For more references see: J.A. Dulaure. Les divinités génératrices, ou du culte du phallus chez les anciens et les modernes. Paris: [sans éditeur], 1805, p. 274. For a description of a gruesome charivari from the Crimea, see: M.A. Bricteux. “Le châtiment populaire de l’infidélité conjugale” in Revue Anthropologique, vol. 32 (1922): 322-8, quoted in P. Saintyves “Le charivari de l’adultère et les courses à corps nus” in L’ethnographie, vol. 31 (1935): 29. [slide 4] The common denominator of all these practices was the public humiliation combined with some sort of torture, precisely the two elements we find in Carletti’s account. We should also mention that, although there are a few examples of this custom known to still have occurred in rural communities in the twentieth century (even in the New World), charivari have been disappearing since the end of the Middle Ages. Urban merchant communities were among the first to be ignorant of the custom, and it is relevant for our purpose here to know that charivari were unknown in the city of Florence, Richard C. Trexler. “De la ville à la Cour: La déraison à Florence durant la République et le Grand Duché” in Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt, 1981, p. 165. although they still may have occurred elsewhere in Italy in Carletti’s days. [slide 5] Having left his hometown of Florence in the company of his father at a young age, it is certainly possible that the undertone of consternation in Carletti’s account about what he had seen in Nagasaki was heart-felt and genuine. Recognizing, therefore, that to accuse Carletti of mendacity is to create more problems than it solves, let us try and assume that he is telling us the truth and see how his account fits into the special Japanese context that Nagasaki represents. In his little-known article on the background, reasons, and psychology of charivari, the Dutch anthropologist Anton Blok has provided some illuminating insights that may help us understand why Carletti’s account should be taken seriously. Blok says that, first and foremost, charivari seem to be limited to (I quote:) “small, mostly endogamous, face-to-face communities, where public opinion, to use an idea of Norbert Elias’, is ‘the foundation of everyone’s existence’.” Blok 1989, p. 267, quoting Elias’ untranslatable German term: Existenzbegründend. This is certainly applicable to Christian Nagasaki, where people tended (and were encouraged by their priests) to marry within the pool of those who were baptized. Although such marriage partners certainly often came from the outside, they would share (or adopt) the Christian norms of the Nagasaki community. It is well known, also, that Japanese society, in general, was (and to a large extent still is) particularly ‘face-to-face’ oriented. The streets of Christian Nagasaki were organized into tight block organizations, where public opinion mattered a great deal. As if he had Nagasaki in mind, Blok further adds: “these communities often have their own cultural signature and identity, they are not rarely under pressure or are confronted with some sort of demographic, economic, or political crisis.” Blok 1989, p. 268. As for the deeper psychology of charivari, the communal need they seem to fulfill, Blok theorizes as follows: “We should not forget that we are dealing here with a ritual, an effort to repair by magical means the violated boundaries of a community, to shore up and reinforce its cultural categories, which have become weakened, and to stress their importance.” Blok 1989, p. 273. The scene Carletti describes certainly fits the pattern Blok has analyzed for us. It is not impossible, therefore, that some learned padre in Nagasaki, when asked how people traditionally punish adultery in Christian countries, might have come up with the example of the charivari custom. His Japanese listeners then may have put these ideas into practice, adding some particular ones concerning adultery of their own, that show us how ready they were at the time to employ their famous blades to cut off body parts. François Caron, an impeccable witness with more than twenty years of experience in Japan, tells a similar gruesome story about private vengeance in a case of adultery. Françoys Caron. Beschrijvinghe van het Machtigh Coninckrijcke Japan. Amsterdam: Ioost Hartgers, 1648: “A man (having pretended he was going out of town) found his wife in his bedroom with another man. He killed the man and tied his wife with a leather strap [hanging from a hook] and kept her standing upright all night long. The next day, he invited all his own relatives as well as those of his wife to a feast . . . . When the guests were sitting together and were halfway through their meal, the man went out to cut the penis off the dead man’s body. He put it decorated with flowers into a lacquered box. Next, he untied his wife, dressed her in a shroud and [told her to wear] her hair loose. He gave her the box (without her knowing what was in it) and said: “You go and bring these pastries to our guests, and see if I will have pity on you and spare your life for the sake of our friends.” The woman, half dead and completely dazed, did what her husband had ordered. In this pitiful condition, she knelt before the guests. As soon as she opened the box, she fainted, and was immediately decapitated by her husband. This caused such a ruckus among the guests that they all left the house.” (pp. 19-20). * * * You have already guessed where I am going with this. Obviously, Nagasaki was going through a crisis in 1597. We have known about that for more than four hundred years. We recall that Carletti had arrived in Nagasaki a mere four months after twenty Japanese Christians and six Franciscan friars, some of them almost haphazardly picked up off the streets of Kyoto and then deliberately transported to Nagasaki, had been executed there. These were the first Christians actually executed for their faith in Japan. Let us briefly revisit the scene. In October 1596, the Manila galleon San Felipe, richly laden and bound for Acapulco, was thrown off course by a violent storm, and ended up being blown all the way to Shikoku. Severely damaged but still afloat, she was pulled ashore by local beachcombers in order to be plundered. Her captain, Matias de Landecho, protested to Hideyoshi, who promptly confiscated the cargo for himself. The story that the Taikō was informed at this point by the ship’s pilot, Francisco de Olandia, to fear the Spanish king whose spies, the missionaries, were already in his realm softening up the population for an eventual take-over is too famous to be repeated here. If it is not apocryphal, as many have claimed, its importance has certainly been greatly exaggerated. As will become clearer in a few minutes, by 1596 Hideyoshi no longer needed anyone to inform him of the risks the missionaries represented. He had, after all, been wrestling with this problem for over a decade, and had already come to some definite conclusions of his own. More to the point is that the Superior of the Franciscans in Japan, Pedro Bautista Blasquez (1542-1597), made the mistake of getting involved in the affair, meeting on 29 October with a Spanish delegation from the ship, Michael Cooper. Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China. New York/Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1974, p. 133. and claiming afterwards that much of the cargo belonged to his order. Carletti writes that that was too much effrontery for the Taikō to swallow. Notified of the claims by the Franciscan, he reports that Hideyoshi had exclaimed: How does it come about, then, that these monks, who say that they are so poor, now say that the stuff from this ship is theirs? Certainly I say that they must be men of evil affairs, false and deceitful. Further, having commanded and prohibited their impertinent religion, I know perfectly well that, in spite of my prohibition, they have taught and converted many to Christianity. And they have stayed at this court and in everything acted contrarily. For that reason, they having transgressed against my will, I now command that they be taken prisoners and crucified, together with all who have accepted their religion, in the city of Nagasaki.” Carletti 1964, p. 119. The last remark marks this fragment as a summary in Carletti’s own words, rather than Hideyoshi’s, for the decision to have the executions take place in Nagasaki was only made in January 1597. As a result of Hideyoshi’s order, Pedro Blasquez and five other Franciscans of the Kinai, as well as fifteen Japanese were jailed on 9 December 1596. The Japanese arrested were mostly converts and servants of the Franciscan mission in the Capital. Three men connected with the Jesuits were also arrested by mistake just because they happened to be in the neighborhood. Schilling & Lejarza 1934: 524. On 6 January 1597, Blasquez and his fellows were taken out of their prisons and led on carts through Miyako with their arms tied and with ropes around their necks. They were preceded by a sign, which bore the sentence to which they had been condemned. At a temple along the way, a part of the left ear of each of the prisoners was cut off. Schilling & Lejarza 1934: 536-9. The next day they were led around Fushimi in the same manner. On 8 January, the whole group was brought to Osaka on horseback, where great throngs of people crowded the streets, because Hideyoshi had just arrived there as well. Schilling & Lejarza 1934: 540. On 9 January, they started their long journey from Osaka to Nagasaki. Cooper 1974, p. 136. Along the way, two men from Kyoto insisted they be included in the group to be martyred, bringing the total number to twenty-six victims. By 1 February 1597, the group had reached Karatsu in northern Kyushu, the castle town of the Governor of Nagasaki at the time. Terazawa Hirotaka (1562-1633) being in Korea, they were met by the Governor’s younger brother Hanzaburō, who was to be in charge of their executions. Cooper 1974, p. 137. On 4 February, they reached Sonogi on Ōmura Bay. This is present-day Higashi Sonogi-chō on Ōmura Bay. Here, the whole train of dead men walking embarked with their guards in three boats to cross to Tokitsu on the other side of the bay, and traveled from there non-stop over land to Nagasaki. In Sonogi, too, Murayama Tōan (1562–1619) and the Jesuits João Rodrigues (1561-1634) and Francisco Pasio (1553-1612) came to meet them as representatives of the town where they were condemned to die. Cooper 1974, p. 137. That night, Pasio heard the confessions of the three men among the prisoners, who had been connected with the Jesuit mission in the capital. At the same time, Rodrigues heard the confessions of the Franciscan group. Franciscans: 1. Fray Pedro Bautista Blasquez; 2. Fray Gonzalo García (1557-1597); 3. Fray Francisco de la Parilla (1544-1597); 4. Fray Martin de la Ascension de Aguirre (1567-1597); 5. Fray Francisco Blanco (1569-1597; 6. Fray Felipe de las Casas (1567?-1597). Japanese converts: 1. Cosme Takiya (1559-1597); 2. Miguel Kozaki (1551-1597); 3. Ventura de Miyako (1570-1597); 4. Gabriel from Ise (1578-1597); 5. Thomas Dangi (1555-1597); 6. Paulo Suzuki (1548-1597); 7. Francisco Yokichi (1551-1597); 8. Thomas Kozaki (1582-1597); 9. Pablo Ibaraki (1543-1597); 10. Leon Ibaraki Karasumaru (1548-1597); 11. Juan Kinuya (1569-1597); 12. Matthias; 13. Joaquin Sakakibara (1557-1597); 14. Luis Ibaraki (1585-1597); 15. Antonio de Nagasaki (1584-1597); 16. Pedro Jukijiro; 17. Francisco Gayo of Kyoto (1570-1597). Three Jesuits: 1. Iruman Pablo Miki (1564-1597); 2. Juan de Goto (1578-1597); 3. Diego Kisai. (1533-1597) (Uyttenbroek 1958, p. 21). For more information on these individuals, see José Luis Alvarez-Taladriz [ed.]. Documentos Franciscanos de la Christiandad de Japon (1593-1597). San Martin de la Ascension y Fray Marcelo de Ribadeneira Relaciones e Informaciones. Osaka: [the editor], 1973. The next morning, 5 February, all twenty-six were crucified on the spot where the ‘Western Slope’ or Nishizaka of Mt. Tateyama reaches the water of Nagasaki Bay. This was Nagasaki’s habitual execution ground, located not far from the St. Lazarus chapel. The crosses were erected in a semi-circle, with those of the Franciscans in the middle. In the center stood a sign with the inscription: “Condemned to death on the cross because they preached the forbidden Christian law.” Thomas Uyttenbroek. Early Franciscans in Japan. Himeji: Committee of the Apostolate, 1958, p. 28. [slide 6] Bernardo Avila Giron writes: Although they did not allow the Japanese to approach, there were a large number of people, men as well as women, on top of the mountain at the foot of which this slope is situated. Many others watched from the tops of the roofs of their houses and these were the upper class of the town, whose moans rose up to heaven and echoed back at them. Everywhere, in the streets, the mountains, and the valleys these echoes went back and forth until they became one single lament. Schilling & Lejarza 1934, p. 546. [unquote] Marcelo de Ribadeneira (1560?-1610) and his fellow Franciscans of Nagasaki were watching from the carrack of the Portuguese fidalgo Ruy Mendes de Figueiredo, whereto, on 13 January 1597, they had been moved as a precaution against a possible outburst of popular sympathy. They would remain under guard on the ship until her departure on 21 March. The carrack had probably anchored, as usual, not far from the mouth of the Urakami river. From her masts, she would have provided a good view of the execution grounds from the waterside. Ribadeneira’s account is the best informed we have of the public reaction to the executions. The news of the impending executions had spread throughout the town on the day before. Ribadeneira writes: Everyone was very emotional because of their love for the holy friars and because they knew what injustice was being done here. And hearing the cries of those who were close enough to see when the executioners started to drive their lances through the bodies of the victims, who had been raised on their crosses, no one could contain their tears. Even the hardest heart would have melted at something so strange and sad. Ribadeneira 1947, lib. V, ch. XVIII, p. 476. For a more detailed description of the execution, see also chapters XIX, XX, XXI of Ribadeneira’s account. Ribadeneira reports that everyone was dead by 10 am. Ribadeneira 1947, p. 496. Next, the Portuguese and the Japanese Christians went to catch the blood of the martyrs on pieces of cotton and taffeta that they had brought with them for just that purpose. And the onrush of the Christians who wanted to take home relics was such that the gentiles were powerless to stop them from taking what they coveted, although they wounded many and one person was seriously hurt in the head. But it was no use: they could not prevent them from taking the blood or the soil on which it had dripped. The Christians also cut whatever they could from the crosses and the clothing of the holy martyrs, showing how much they valued these holy relics. When the guards, who had been keeping the ropes and some mantles of the holy friars, saw this they later sold these articles of clothing to devout Christians for a very good price. Ribadeneira 1947, p. 483. [unquote] The town and its surroundings became obsessed with the corpses. Here, once more, is the testimony of Ribadeneira: And this quest for pieces of clothing went so far that it became necessary to cover the nakedness of the corpses with rags and mats, and to place many more soldiers to guard them. When the martyrdom became known in the Christian villages around Nagasaki . . . . many more Christians came, and such was their devotion that they were not content just to kiss the clothing and the feet of the martyrs, but took away the ground on which the martyrs had stood and their blood had fallen. The number of men, who had been put there to guard the corpses, was still not enough to prevent the onrush of the faithful. [unquote] The magistrate understood that if Hideyoshi heard about this he would get very angry with him. He suspected, further, that the Christians might come at night to steal some of the corpses, which had to stay on their crosses, like their sentence said, until the bodies fell apart by themselves, as is the custom in Japan. For all these reasons, he ordered a fence or palisade to be put around the crosses so that no one would be able to get near them. Even this, however, nor the fear of death did suffice to prevent many from entering inside the fence in order to worship the blessed corpses. And when they were not able to come close to them, they worshipped them from afar. Both the Portuguese as well as the Japanese felt guilty if they spent a day without going to recite something in their presence. Ribadeneira 1947, p. 497. [unquote] It was a cold winter. After the initial rush for relics, the bodies of the twenty-six executed Christians froze solid and so remained more resistant to crows and other predators. This, of course, immediately led to stories about their miraculous resistance to decay. On 21 March 1597, the carrack São Antonio left Nagasaki Bay, carrying apart from the four Franciscans left in Japan also the story of this “miracle.” Juan Pobre, Agostin Rodriguez, Bartolomeo Ruiz, and Marcelo de Ribadeneira (Uyttenbroek 1958, p. 32). Next, Avila Giron describes what happened on 18 April, Good Friday, after spring had come and the bodies had thawed out. Blood was seen to drip once more from the wounds of the crucified. I quote: At two o’clock in the afternoon, seventy-two days after the holy martyrdom, there were many people on their knees before the holy martyrs praying, as they did out of devotion, especially on a day like that. Suddenly, blood started to flow from the body of the Holy Commissary, Fray Pedro Bautista, out of the wounds made by the lance thrusts, in such quantity that it crossed the body to drip down to the foot of the cross . . . . The Japanese present there were struck with wonder and many of them carried the news back to the town. As soon as the news spread, the town immediately went into an uproar over this miraculous coincidence . . . . Men and women started to run to the execution grounds in such crowds that at a distance of more than four hundred paces from the corpses there was no way of getting through, although the road was as wide as the widest street in town. Schilling & Lejarza 1934: 549-50. [unquote] By June, according to Carletti, the corpses were still hanging on their crosses. Carletti 1964, p. 105. Ribadeneira 1947, p. 504, mentions that the corpses hung on their crosses for nine months. Avila Giron’s account essentially agrees with this, see Schilling and Lejarza 1935: 105-6. Carletti himself remains vague about when exactly they were taken down: “during my stay” (Carletti 1964, pp. 120-1). It seems that their last remains were taken down and buried in October. Again Carletti: “And each of them was given a proper burial, even though from many of them – and especially from the religious – many of their members, and chiefly their heads, Cf. “los castellanos de la nao San Felipe, que aun estaban en Nangasaqui, incitados de su mucha devoción, atreviéronse a tomar de noche las cabezas y la mayor parte de los cuerpos de los bienaventurados frailes y de todos los mártires, cogiendo también lo que pudieron los japones cristianos; y los padres de la- Compañía (según se dijo) mandaron recoger las cabezas de los tres benditos hermanos suyos.” (Ribadeneira 1947, p. 504). had been taken, this despite the fact that there had been guards and despite the prohibitions issued by the King and by the Jesuit bishop of those Christians, who had both forbidden their being touched under grave penalty.” Carletti 1964, pp. 120-1. As far as I have been able to ascertain, nobody has ever pursued an answer to the obvious question why these men, who had all been arrested in the Kinai, could not have been executed there on the spot? The fact that they had to travel all the way to Nagasaki means that, for Hideyoshi, the location where the example was set was the important thing, not the victims themselves. The Taikō may even have been waiting for an incident that would provide him with an excuse to set this example. Of course, it is no coincidence that the European victims were all insolent Spanish friars, and not Jesuits who had given ample proof they feared Hideyoshi. With this execution, Hideyoshi killed several birds at once. First, he could confiscate the cargo of the San Felipe, valued at more than a million and a half silver pesos, of which the executed friars had unwisely claimed a large part as their own. This allowed him to replete his treasury, which his Korean campaigns had left empty. J. H. Gense and A. Conti. In the Days of Gonzalo Garcia 1557-1597. Bombay: St. Xavier College, 1957, pp. 283-4. Second, he was putting fear into the hearts of the Christians throughout Japan, but especially those of Christian Nagasaki, and made clear that he was really serious about his prohibition of their religion. Third, he was finally able to strike a heavy blow at the Spanish Governor in Manila, the Viceroy of Mexico, and the King of Spain, all three of whom had been first ignoring, then temporizing, and finally belittling his diplomatic overtures since 1592. Irikura, James K. Trade and Diplomacy between the Philippines and Japan, 1585-1623. PhD dissertation Yale University, 1958. Hideyoshi seems to have gone out of his way to provide Padre Gil de la Mata with two complete sets of high quality Japanese armor packed in their usual lacquered boxes, when on 9 October 1592 the missionary left Japan to travel back to Europe. Gil de la Mata met with Philip II for two hours on 18 December 1594 to present the gifts (Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Rome), hereafter abbreviated as ARSI, Hispania 138, f. 67, quoted in Jesús López Gay. El matrimonio de los japoneses. Problema, y soluciones según un ms. Inédito de Gil de la Mata, S.J. (1547-1599). Roma: Libreria dell’Università Gregoriana, 1964, p. 111; cf. also Josef Franz Schütte. Documentos sobre el Japon conservados en la Coleccion “Cortes” de la Real Academia de la Historia. Madrid: Imprenta y Editorial Maestre, 1961, p. 20). To the pressure caused by the executions were added Hideyoshi’s strict orders that the bodies of the crucified should stay where they were until they had rotten and fallen off their crosses by themselves. The Taikō had provided detailed instructions to fasten the bodies more securely than was usual, so that this example should last as long as possible. Carletti writes: “And instead of nails they used iron straps hammered into the wood and holding the wrists, the neck, and the legs close to the feet.” Carletti 1964, pp. 105-6. This last detail is also confirmed in both the Jesuit and mendicant accounts of the crucifixions. ARSI JapSin 58b, f. 172v-3r. The account includes a drawing of the iron straps or rings (argollas). The use of these iron straps was unusual, for normally in Japan the bodies were fastened to the cross with ropes. Ribadeneira remarks that such iron bands “had never been used up to this time.” Marcelo de Ribadeneira. Historia de las Islas del archipiélago filipino y reynos de la Gran China, Tartaria, Cochinchina, Malaca, Siam, Cambodge y Japón. [Barcelona 1601] edicion J.R. de Legísima. Madrid: La Editorial Católica, 1947, p. 481. There can be no doubt that, with all this, the population of Nagasaki got Hideyoshi’s message, loud and clear. But as Christianity is a religion about life after death, which holds that not life but death is the real thing that counts, the population became, if anything, more Christian because of the example set by their martyrs. The latter had all died without a complaint: preaching, praying, or singing, full of joy even, because the death of a martyr for the faith, according to Catholic doctrine, leads straight to heaven. The executions, then, sharpened everyone’s awareness of what it meant to be a Christian in Japan. For those who did not yet get the message, the Spanish Padre Pedro Gomez, Jesuit mission Superior during the 1590’s, wrote a short pamphlet described in one of the Jesuit letters as being “about what martyrdom is, its dignity, its rewards, and what is required for it to be valid, and above all what frame of mind and what gear one needs at such a moment.” ARSI, JapSin 54a, f. 4r. This was translated into Japanese, printed and distributed in great numbers among the Christians of Nagasaki. Alas, not a single copy seems to have survived. Joseph Franz Schütte. “Drei Unterrichtsbücher für Japanische Jesuitenprediger aus dem XVI Jahrhundert” in Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, vol. 8 (1939): 242. Thus, after the example Hideyoshi had set, Nagasaki is likely to have been left more fervently Christian than ever before, now that it had its own set of martyrs, who had preceded them to Heaven, and now that it owned a rich collection of their relics: pieces of clothing soaked in their blood, body parts, even skulls. Many of these had even been exported, see Ribadeneira 1947, pp. 503-4. What is more, the Christian town had, for the first time, come face to face with one of the most central images promoted by the church everywhere in the world: that of the crucifixion. * * * The Roman Catholic Church has mastered to a high degree the use of images that bypass rational thought and appeal directly to the emotions. The Jesuits were the trendsetters of this device in Japan. As one of their brethren in India wrote on the subject: The speech [of an image] is an abbreviated book and brief worship. It is something that speaks without talking and is heard without the ear; something written that everyone understands; a letter that everyone can read; a book for the learned; an attribute that makes manifest things, which are past and ancient . . . . Furthermore, . . . . [images] pass deeper into all the interior senses, and the more subtle they are the more easily they enter and take hold, until the intellect becomes aware of these things, like . . . . phantoms. British Library Harley 5478, fol. 280a, quoted in Gauvin Alexander Bailey. “ ‘Le style jésuite n’existe pas’: Jesuit Corporate Culture and the Visial Arts” in John O’Malley e.a. [eds.] The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540-1573. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, pp. 88-9. [unquote] It was, therefore, always of prime importance for the mission in Japan that a sufficient supply of quality pictures was available to help the missionary effort. This was not easy to assure. Importing them was uncertain, haphazard, and expensive, and therefore not a long-term option, for there never were enough pictures for every missionary and for all the churches, which moreover periodically burned or were torn down. The first mission Superior after Francis Xavier (1506-1552), Cosme de Torres (1510-1570), is already likely to have pushed for a solution, but it was while Francisco Cabral (1533-1609) was mission Superior in the 1570’s that finally someone was found in Europe who was young, talented, and trained enough to be sent to Japan. His name was Giovanni Cola (1558-1626), Giovanni Cola died 16 March 1612 and was buried in the Madre de Deus church of the Jesuits in Macao, see: Pacheco Diego. “Giovanni Cola, S.J. (Nicolao) el hombre que hizo florecer las piedras” in Temas de Estética y Arte (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Santa Isabel de Hungría, Sevilla), no. 17 (2003), p. 109. and he was known in Japan as Brother Nicolao. After he arrived in Nagasaki late in July 1583, John E. McCall. “Early Jesuit Art in the Far East I-V” in Artibus Asiae, vol. 10, 2 (1947): 127, gives 20 July 1583 as the arrival date; Josef Franz Schütte. Monumenta Historica Japoniae I: Textus catalogorum Japoniae aliaeque de personis domibusque S.J. in Japonia informationes et relationes 1549-1654. Rome: Apud “Monumenta Historica Soc. Iesu”, 1975, p. 1254, has 25 July 1583; José Luis Alvarez-Taladriz. “El Padre Viceprovincial Gaspar Coelho ‘Capitan de Armas o Pastor de Almas’” in Sapientia, no. 6 (1972): 45, n. 5, has 27 July 1583. he started behaving with the willfulness and capriciousness often associated with young artists, but generally not with Jesuit brothers. He clearly understood, therefore, the power his skills afforded him in Japan. One year later, Frois was already dissatisfied with him, but in the following annual letter of 1584 he seems resigned to the fact that Nicolao cannot be forced. I quote: Brother Giovanni Nicolao, the painter, who has already been here and in India for two years, still has not produced anything else but two altar paintings, one in Nagasaki and one in Arima. As we need more than 50,000 pictures for all the Christian households in Japan, we all beg of Your Paternity that you may send some brother to Japan with some ready-made plates, materials, and instruments so that we can start printing pictures here to be distributed among our flock. The images that would be most useful at this moment are: one of the Savior with the world in his hand, the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, Christ praying in the Dark, images of Our Lady, and the Adoration of the Infant Christ by the Magi, as well as some images of the saints the size of one sheet of paper, and also a lot of paper, for the Christians here would be greatly consoled with such images. ARSI JapSin 9 II, 329: Frois’ Anua of 13 December 1584. [unquote] Two post-Tridentine images especially carry the emotional appeal important for the Church: that of a mother with her newborn child and that of a dead man hanging on a cross. At first sight, these two images represent birth and death, a beginning and an end. However, it is revealing to observe that, until Hideyoshi’s executions, the second of these two images had remained largely unused, suppressed even, by the Jesuits in Japan. The policy of the Jesuits to omit mention of Christ’s suffering and the crucifixion can be found in the 1596 and 1610 translations of Thomas a Kempis’ Imitatio Christi (in Japanese: Contemptus mvndi jenbu and Kontemutsusu munji) and in the 1599 translation of Luys de Granada’s Guia de Peccadores (Kia to Hekataru), see William J. Farge. The Japanese Translations of the Jesuit Mission Press, 1590-1614. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002, pp. 27-8; 58-60. Typically, when Frois asked in 1584 for engraved plates to print images in Japan, he did not mention a depiction of the crucifixion. Even in its present, expurgated form, I.e. the presence of a loincloth. Jesus-on-the-cross is such a crude, sledgehammer-like image it can only be shown with the approval and active support of the worldly authorities. It is an image depicting the very essence of worldly authority: the application of the death penalty. Among new converts to Christianity in Mexico, for example, used as they were to extremely bloody displays of power, this image may have been an effective, even civilizing, substitute for what had happened on the steps of the Aztec pyramids. But in Japan, where the stateliness of Buddhist imagery had set the tone for the past thousand years, this image could not be shown without offense to the uninitiated. Of this the Jesuits were well aware. In the same vein, they also avoided any public mention of the Eucharist, for fear of being labeled cannibals in Japan. For this reason, church paintings were often hidden under a curtain, or inside a lacquered cabinet, the doors of which were often decorated with mother-of-pearl inlay. [slide 7] Thus, the oil paintings were usually kept hidden or even locked away from eyes that were unprepared for their impact. Here is how such a situation in the Jesuit church of Kyoto is described in an anti-Christian tract, the Nanbanji kōhaiki: Rolling up a curtain of gold brocade, the priests then showed [the believers] the image of a young woman of exquisite beauty holding a small child which, they instructed orally, was the supreme saint who had suckled on her breast. She had a crown of precious stones on her head and was dressed in a coat studded with the seven gems. Ebisawa Arimichi. Nanbanji kōhaiki. Jakyō tai’i. Myōtei mondo. Hadaiusu. Tōyō bunko no. 14. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1964, pp. 30-1. [slide 8] [unquote] It was extremely important that the first impression of the uninitiated should be positive, as expressed here in the phrase ‘exquisite beauty,’ and not be the one of horror that a crucifixion might invoke. On paintings such as the fifteen stages of the rosary, the scene of the crucifixion would be painted, purposely, at the very top where it could remain hidden under a rolled-up curtain even when most of the other stages were being shown. [slide 9]　As in so many European churches, at most the image of the scene on Golgotha was abbreviated to the depiction of a Maria Dolorosa, with one out-sized tear rolling down a lovely cheek to symbolize all the sorrow of a mother who sees her son executed on the cross. The secrecy, therefore, with which the crucifixion was surrounded had made it into a larger Mystery in Japan than elsewhere in the Roman Catholic world at the time. Although not unknown in Japan to punish certain crimes such as arson, crucifixion (like infanticide) had not been practiced in Nagasaki. Hideyoshi’s insistence that the Franciscans arrested in the Kinai should be executed in Nagasaki thus acquires a new dimension. He was, in fact, giving the town its first sustained look at one of the two most essential images of its own religion, multiplied by a factor of twenty-six. What was Hideyoshi trying to do? It is no use arguing, as Catholic historians have done over the past four hundred years, that he was just being a crude and cruel ruler, no different from the Romans who crucified Christ. On the contrary, for a Japanese unbeliever, he was showing a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of the religion brought by the European missionaries. He may even have been aware of the church custom to use tableaux vivants to teach the faith, that is by putting together a scene with living people enacting a crucial episode from church mythology, such as we still do today with the birth of Christ at the manger. He was, in other words, providing Christian Nagasaki with a ‘tableau mourant.’ We may assume that he was aware that knowledge of the crucifixion had been denied in its pictorial form to most Japanese Christians, even in Nagasaki itself. That is why it was so necessary that these men were transported all the way from the Kinai to western Japan: it was to get a maximum number of Japanese Christians to view it and receive a lesson about their own religion from the ruler of the tenka himself. The Taikō’s concern, furthermore, that his victims should be securely fastened to their crosses and be displayed until their flesh had decayed to the point of falling off the cross can only be explained by his knowledge of the Christian myth of the resurrection. It was as if he was trying to prove that, at least for these victims, there would be no body left to resurrect. As Dr. Michael Cooper and others have described, this kind of detailed knowledge about Christian custom Hideyoshi is likely to have acquired through his conversations with the Jesuit interpreter João Rodrigues during the decade following his initial prohibitions of 1587. Alvarez-Taladriz 1973, p. 179, n. 45; Cooper 1974, pp. 83, 88, 107, 116. These conversations, in themselves, prove that Hideyoshi remained concerned and was keeping a close eye on Nagasaki and the Jesuits. What is more, even in his own household, Hideyoshi had not been able to prevent several women, among whom his daughter Gō, from embracing the faith. Gonoi Takashi. “Hideyoshi no shūhen ni okeru kirishitan no katsudō – komonjo kaisetsu” in Itō Genjirō (ed.). Ebora byōbu no sekai. Kamakura: Kamakura Shunjusha, 2005, pp. 75-105. Kitagawa Tomoko. “The Conversion of Hideyoshi’s Daughter Gō” in Journal of Japanese Religious Studies, vol. 34, 1 (2007): 9-25. His continuing eagerness, therefore, to learn about Christian doctrine may even signal a degree of concern on his part about whether he had done the right thing when he proscribed Christianity in 1587. Therefore, the crucifixions of February 1597, while mainly functioning as threats to the population of Nagasaki, should also be interpreted as containing elements of a brutal demystification and bold challenge to the missionaries and their converts, to the Spanish of the Philippines, and indirectly to the Crown of Spain and Portugal as well as to the Pope himself. On the other hand, the executions may have radicalized the population of Nagasaki as a whole to the point where it could treat adulterers in the fashion described by Carletti. I would suggest, therefore, that we view the Nagasaki charivari as a sort of human sacrifice, an attempt to appease the wrath of God and avert other calamities. The Florentine also wrote with admirable insight: “Now that that region has been bathed in the blood of those missionaries and of other crucified Christians, that the [Christians] will increase each day is not to be doubted.” Carletti 1964, p. 120. Hideyoshi died the next year. He probably never realized that his example had backfired, at least in the short term, that the Christians of Nagasaki had become more, and not less, Christian. It took his successor sixteen years before he came to the conclusion that Hideyoshi had been right and that he, too, needed to proscribe Christianity throughout Japan. Clearly, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616) agreed with Hideyoshi on all points: the faith was unnecessary, ridiculous, pernicious even, and certainly undermining all normal samurai relationships. The trade, however, needed to be preserved. This was, as the Jesuit Pedro Gomes noted on 14 March 1597, in his account of the executions, the reason why there were still padres in Japan: Taikō Sama remained convinced that the friars and all other missionaries were either spies for their King, or used their preaching of the Gospel as a cover to conquer the land, just as the pilot [of the San Felipe] had said. This would entail throwing all of us out of Japan completely. But happily, the Good Lord has seen fit to implant in his heart the idea that without our presence there can be no trade between the Japanese and the Portuguese, thus tying his hands where throwing all of us out is concerned. ARSI, JapSin 52d, f. 306r. [unquote] Therefore, the problem remained how to uncouple the trade brought by the Portuguese from the religion brought by the missionaries, who had served, since the early 1560’s, as the interpreters and go-betweens for merchants from opposite sides of the globe. See my “The Capitães Mores of the Japan Voyage: A Group Portrait” in International Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 9,1 (2012): 1-41. Hideyoshi’s legacy of brute force showed how the Tokugawa would eventually go about accomplishing this same goal, first expelling the missionaries and adopting increasingly strict laws prohibiting the faith, then forcing large-scale apostasies through public torture and execution of the remaining faithful, organized street by street throughout Nagasaki, and finally cutting off trade with the Portuguese in an attempt to seal the country off from the subversive ideas of the Christians. What was left was an anti-Christian paradigm that pervaded the intellectual, legal, and diplomatic framework of the early modern period. Thank you for your attention. * * * 21