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'''[https://northerniowa.academia.edu/ReinierHesselink Hesselink]''', Reinier H. Volver a Bibliografía Japón.
'''[https://northerniowa.academia.edu/ReinierHesselink Hesselink]''', Reinier H. Volver a [[Bibliografía Japón]].


"104 Voices from Christian Nagasaki: Document of the Rosario Brotherhood of Nagasaki with the Signatures of Its Members (February 1622): An Analysis and Translation". En Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 70, No. 2 (2016), pp. 237-265. Disponible en internet: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43864687 [consultado el 4 de agosto de 2022].
Ver el libro '''[[Christian Nagasaki]]''' y además:
 
'''"104 Voices from Christian Nagasaki: Document of the Rosario Brotherhood of Nagasaki with the Signatures of Its Members (February 1622): An Analysis and Translation". En Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 70, No. 2 (2016), pp. 237-265. Disponible en internet: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43864687 [consultado el 4 de agosto de 2022]'''.


(237) 104 miembros destacados de la Cofradía del Rosario firmaron en Nagasaki en febrero de 1622 lo que hoy es un rollo de dos metros, 11 páginas pegadas de papel japonés, conservado en la Biblioteca Casanatense de Roma (doc. 4253A: Nagasaki) en una caja que también contiene las firmas de 77 miembros de la Cofradía del Rosario de Omura (4253B: Omura).
(237) 104 miembros destacados de la Cofradía del Rosario firmaron en Nagasaki en febrero de 1622 lo que hoy es un rollo de dos metros, 11 páginas pegadas de papel japonés, conservado en la Biblioteca Casanatense de Roma (doc. 4253A: Nagasaki) en una caja que también contiene las firmas de 77 miembros de la Cofradía del Rosario de Omura (4253B: Omura).
Línea 199: Línea 201:
Again, however, the paper war was waged not only between Christians and thepolitical authorities, but also between the different missionary orders, in particularbetween the Jesuits and mendicants. In 1617, Matheus de Couros (1567-1632), the newly appointed provincial of the Jesuits in Japan, was determined to prove wrong the rumors spread by the Franciscans in Manila that the Jesuits had abandoned the Japanese mis-
Again, however, the paper war was waged not only between Christians and thepolitical authorities, but also between the different missionary orders, in particularbetween the Jesuits and mendicants. In 1617, Matheus de Couros (1567-1632), the newly appointed provincial of the Jesuits in Japan, was determined to prove wrong the rumors spread by the Franciscans in Manila that the Jesuits had abandoned the Japanese mis-


(255)
(255) sion.89 to this end, in August he requested the Jesuit brotherhoods in the country tocompile documents in evidence of their steadfastness to the faith and loyalty to theorder. Within a short period, forty-eight statements containing 755 signatures were collected from fourteen provinces.90 Despite the difficulties involved, the Jesuits in Nagasaki translated and certified these papers between September 1617 and February 1618.91 Te Jesuits involved in the effort were, apart from Couros, Bento Fernandes (1579?-1633),Christovão Ferreira (1580-1650), Jeronimo Rodriguez (1567-1628), and Sebastião Vieira (1572-1634). Te first document (APT, doc. E-2: 103-10-8) reached Nagasaki from Hirado, where it hadbeen compiled on 󰀲󰀸 August, and the last (APT, doc. E-2: 103-10-18), dated 26 November 1617,arrived from Bungo.
 
With this background in mind, it becomes possible to see the Casanatense docu-ment as part of an effort by the Dominican friar Diego Collado (the second of thetwo Spanish signatories) to produce a set of testimonies similar to those of his rivals,the Jesuits. Te creation of this document (and its companion from Ōmura) may alsohave been spurred to some extent by knowledge of the 7 April 1621 letter sent by thir-teen Nagasaki Jesuit followers to Pope Paul V (r. 1605-1621).92 Indeed, throughout hiscareer in Japan, Collado was largely responsible for bringing the rivalry between themendicant and Jesuit orders to new depths of ignominy.
 
A native of Miajadas in Extremadura, Spain, Collado...
 
(256) Casanatense document and other evidence he had collected from Japanese Christiancommunities back with him to Europe, to prove among other things that the Jesuits forbade their parishioners to join brotherhoods established by the mendicants.96
 
Te Casanatense document is dated February 1622, in the midst of these anti-Jesuitmoves by the most vociferous Dominican in Japan. It is therefore not surprising tofind in the document insistence that the Dominicans are the most virtuous of all themissionaries in the land. It asserts, for example, that in contrast to the Jesuits, the Dominicans have dedicated themselves to serving the poorer segments of the popu-lation of Nagasaki:
 
Because it has become more and more difficult for the missionaries to hide away in thehovels of the poor, they cannot take care of people’s souls. It is therefore a mark of trulyrare and praiseworthy compassion that the friars of this order take particular care of thesepeople’s souls with all their hearts. Accordingly, without the members of the order of Santo Domingo, the poor of Nagasaki would not have been able to make their last confession,and how many of them would have simply had to die [as heathens]!
 
Te authors even suggest that the greater number of Dominicans than Jesuits inprison at the moment of writing demonstrates that the Dominicans have been braverand more contemptuous of the danger of being arrested; they do not acknowledgethe possibility that the friars may merely have been less cautious than the Jesuits,who had the older organization in Nagasaki:
 
. . . of the fathers who are imprisoned [as a result of arrest in Nagasaki], most belong tothe order of Santo Domingo, and this is proof that they, more than any of the other orders,have been constantly active [in the city].
 
Yet despite the missionaries’ intent to discredit each other, it is likely that to the Jap-anese signatories, this and other similar documents served a very different purpose.Whereas every householder in Nagasaki was forced to make a public statement to theauthorities swearing on his own life, the lives of his family members, and the whole of his property that he would not lodge, feed, or otherwise support missionaries, many of them also signed secret statements such as the Casanatense document, as if to deny before God what they had promised the bakufu. As we have already seen, these testa-ments of faith may even have predated the paperwork demanded by the bakufu, open-ing up the possibility that the public documents, promising a certain hell on earth inthe case of noncompliance, had been deemed necessary in response to the privateones. Whatever the case, it is certain that both the public and secret documents influ-enced each other. In the wrong hands, the secret statements were automatic deathwarrants for those who had put their signatures to them. In the eyes of the believers
 
(257) themselves, on the other hand, they could—once sent to Rome and approved by thepope—serve as powerful instruments for assuring one’s place in heaven.
 
The Document of the Rosario Brotherhood
 
(258) Let us examine what is known about the Japanese signatories, including information that can be inferred from the list itself. Of the overwhelming majority of signatories we know nothing more than what they put on this document. Te inclusion of their family names by itself gives us an indication of the prominence within theRosario brotherhood of the first six men—Higuchi Jian 樋口自庵, Hirano Ryōkei 平野良慶, Ishimoto Rofusai 石本ろふ斎, anaka Hauro 田中者うろ (hereafer, Paulo, also Riemon 利右衛門), Ōno Ko-Ruisu 大ノ小るいす (“Little” Luis), and Kanasaki Shoan かなさきしょ庵 (João).103 From the fact that the addresses of the first four were omit-ted, we can surmise that all four of these men were in some way well known. The third and fourth signatories, discussed shortly below, were in prison at the time the document was composed. Te testament, then, is likely to have been the result of acooperative effort by the first, second, fifh, and sixth signatories. Te signatures from the seventh on were probably collected by Japanese helpers of the Dominicans as they
 
(259) We have additional information about Ishimoto Rofusai (1572-1622) and Tanaka Paulo (1576-1622), the third and fourth signatories, due to their arrest and subse-quent execution as described in another source. Te two men, who lived in the same(unknown) ward and belonged to the same group of ten householders, were arrested on 17 August 1621 for their part in hiding the Dominican friar José Salvanez de San Jacinto (1580-1622), and they were executed the following year.106
Tanaka Paulo was originally from Tosa 土佐, the domain on Shikoku facing thePacific Ocean. He came to Nagasaki around the beginning of the seventeenth cen-tury, was baptized, and married a Christian woman called Maria. The couple remained childless. Paulo had been involved in the hiding and protection of under-ground missionaries from long before his arrest. According to a report written by the Jesuit Bento Fernandes (ca 1579-1633), “when they moved away from his lodging, hewould accompany and follow them. If they were transported over water, he would volunteer to do the rowing and would not leave his guests before they were safe. Nomatter what the weather, neither rain nor snow could prevent this fervent Christian from doing his sacred duty.”107 Paulo and his wife were both executed on 10 September 1622; first, Maria was decapitated and then Paulo was burned alive.
 
Ishimoto Rofusai was arrested along with Paulo, as were the heads of the two otherhouseholds in their group. Rofusai was born on one of the Gotō 五島 islands lyingwest of Hirado in the East China Sea. In 1579, at the age of seven, he went with his father to Hirado, where he was baptized in the Jesuit mission. Tere he is said tohave met a Portuguese merchant who took him to Macao. He presumably arrivedin Macao in 1587, when he was around fourteen or fifeen years old. Over the “few years” Rofusai reportedly spent in the service of the unnamed Portuguese merchant
 
(260) in China, he probably learned to speak Portuguese and became knowledgeable aboutthe China-Japan trade. He must have returned to Japan and settled in Nagasakiaround the time of Hideyoshi’s first Korean campaign in the early 1590s. Afer thestart of persecution, he is said to have bought the freedom of a Christian womanwho had been enslaved for her religion in Ōmura. It is, however, not clear whether Rofusai married this woman or anyone else. Because his only crime was belonging toPaulo’s group of householders, his execution was a merciful decapitation.
 
Twenty-one of the signatories, or fully 20 percent, were female, which is intriguing in light of what it illustrates about some of the very basic differences between the worldviews of the Japanese Christians andthe bakufu, as well as what it may indicate about differences among the brotherhoodsin their views on gender.
110
he presence of their signatures indicates that in theeyes of their fellows in the brotherhood, these women were independent individuals
 
(261) and even principal members rather than appendages of the men in their families; this stands in sharp contrast to official bakufu documents, in which women seldomappear as independent individuals or householders. For example, the household register for Hirado-machi 平戸町 compiled in 1642 identifies all women in connection tothe male head of their household. Even households headed by widows are registerednot in their own names, but in the names of their late husbands. Moreover, thesedeceased householders are still counted, at the end of the document, among the totalpopulation “living” in Hirado-machi!111
Te independent status accorded to women within the brotherhood is seen espe-cially clearly in the names associated with Gotō-machi 五島町, which is represented by four women (nos. [82] Mariya まりや, [84] Maruta まるた, [92] Matareina またれいな [Magdalena], and [98] Rianoru 里あのる [Leonora]) versus only two men (nos. [5]Ōno Ko-Ruisu [“Little” Luis] and [61] Ōno Furanshisuko 大野ふらん志すこ [Francisco], likely members of the same family). Of these women, we note especiallyMaruta, whose signature appears before that of her fellow Gotō-machi inhabitant,no. [85] Sukawa Hashichian すかわ者志ち阿ん (Bastian). Yet another ward, Naka-machi 中町, is represented by more than one female leader of the Rosario brother-hood.112 Here again, a woman, no. [62] Rushiya るしや (Luzia) signs before her maleneighbor, [63] Ruisu るいす, something that also happens with nos. [23] Ruhiina るひいな (Rufina) and [24] Shuan 寿庵 (João/Juan) from Ogawa-machi 小川町. In allthe other wards, the men sign first. While it is probably easy to read too much into this, it is worth remembering that such inversions of the “proper” male-female orderwould be unthinkable in bakufu documents.
 
A related discovery revealed by the document is the distribution of these Christian women in the city of Nagasaki. Despite the heightening persecution facing the Rosa-rio brotherhood at the time of the document’s writing, we see from the list of sig-natures that the brotherhood still reached into forty-three different wards, fourteen in Uchimachi and twenty-nine in Sotomachi.113 In sheer numbers, the brotherhood
 
(262) leaders living in Sotomachi (sixty-six) outnumber those living in Uchimachi (thirty-eight).114 The male-female ratio is, however, much more balanced in Uchimachi (withthirteen women to twenty-five men) than in Sotomachi (eight women to fify-eightmen); in accordance with this tendency, we find Gotō-machi, the Uchimachi wardwith the largest number of signatories, to be represented by four women and twomen (as mentioned above) in contrast to the one woman and five men representingIma Shikkui-machi 今石灰町, the Sotomachi neighborhood with the most signatures.In these two instances, the differing male-female ratios can likely be attributed to cultural factors, namely, the blue-collar character of Ima Shikkui-machi (predominantly home to those in the plastering trade) versus the mercantile character of Gotō-machi, which was known for its inns.
 
With regard to the overall distribution of Rosario brotherhood members, we find,surprisingly, that a third of the signatories lived in Uchimachi, which, afer all, wasthe territory of the Jesuits. Tis may be an indication that, as the document itself suggests, by 1622 the Dominicans were, on the whole, better represented inside Nagasaki than the Jesuits. Conspicuously absent from the wards represented, however, are thesix original wards of Nagasaki, which suggests two possibilities: that they may stillhave been firmly under the control of the Jesuits, or that they became the first wardsto abandon Christianity.
115
 
(263) (264) Let us return to two of the key figures behind the Casanatense document, following their stories as they unfolded afer 1622. On 23 April 1623, Juan de Rueda set sail from Manila for Japan once more.127 A storm forced him to land on an island in theRyūkyū chain, where he continued his missionary work. Captured by the authorities,he is recorded to have been executed on Ishigakijima 石垣島 in September 1624.128
 
At the time of Rueda’s death, Diego Collado was in the midst of his journey backto Europe, discussed above, to present the papal authorities with the evidence he hadcollected in Nagasaki against the advisability of a Jesuit monopoly on the Asian mis-sion. He arrived in Rome in January 1625.129 Five months later, he had already man-aged to get into such trouble with the head of the Dominican order there, Serafino Secchi (d. 1628), that he was forced to take refuge in his homeland of Spain. Secchi’sdeath allowed him to return to Rome for a few months in 1632, during which time he published the three books on the Japanese language he had prepared in Spain.
 
In 1634, afer a decade of frenzied activity in Italy and Spain, Collado lef Europe toreturn to the Philippines, accompanied by twenty-four junior Dominicans.130 These men, who came to be called “los barbados” in the Philippines because of their longbeards, formed the vanguard of a new “Congregation of St. Paul” that Collado envi-sioned would serve in the conversion of Japan and China.131 Blair and Robinson 1973, vol. 25, ch. 15.
 
(265) Nonetheless, this document composed by the principal members of the Nagasaki Rosario brotherhood remains greatly valuable for its rarity as an original source and for its wealth of data in the form of the large number of participants who were willingto reveal themselves with their signatures, seals, and addresses. Like a group portrait,the document gives us a glimpse of Nagasaki in February 1622, reflecting the mood of the city during the final few months before the Great Martyrdoms, which occurredduring August and September of that year. At the time of the document’s signing,at least, Nagasaki’s Christian population could still hope that their religious identity would survive
 
'''"Document of the Rosario Brotherhood of Nagasaki with the Signatures of Its Members". En ''Monumenta Nipponica'', Vol. 70, No. 2 (2016), pp. 267-283. Disponible en internet: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43864688 [consultado el 4 de agosto de 2022].'''
 
(267) With great respect we offer up the following articles:
 
One. Although there are many provinces in Japan where Christianity has flourished, Nagasaki has always been like the home of [Japanese] Christendom. Tis has been particularly true since the beginning of the persecutions. While throughout Japan theanti-Christian laws [against lay believers] have been strictly observed, in Nagasaki such laws have been issued solely to suppress the missionaries. Because in Nagasaki there is no strong interference to being a Christian, those who have been exiled for their faith, those who want to come to confession in secret, and those who want tohelp apostates return to the faith all gather here from other provinces, but if they findno priests, they cannot accomplish these goals.
 
Two. In contrast with [the authorities’] lack of concern over what the common people of Japan believe, the laws against missionaries have nowhere in all of Japan beenas harsh as they are in Nagasaki. Although elsewhere in the country the authoritiesdo not search for missionaries at all, in Nagasaki they are constantly on the look-out for where they may be hiding. Especially recently, they have been depending onmonetary rewards to find places likely to offer shelter to the padres, and because theyhave started offering excessive amounts of money, the greedy who do not care aboutheaven or hell look for missionaries day and night.137 [Rewards for the denunciation of underground missionaries, known as the kenshō sonin 懸賞訴人 system, were announced in Nagasaki in the fall of 1618. Cieslik 1963, p. 40; Kataoka 1970,p. 37. Tirty bars of silver were to be offered to anyone whose information led to the arrest of apriest; this amount, at 43 monme 匁 per bar (ARSI, Jap.Sin., doc. 17, f. 238r), came to 1,290 monme,or roughly 2.4 million yen (20,000 U.S. dollars) in today’s currency. Later, half the value of the confis-cated property of the householder who had hidden the arrested missionary was added to this reward] They have all kinds of clever schemes, and any place arousing the least suspicion is immediately searched by force.Because this never ceases, there is no way for missionaries to hide in Nagasaki any longer.
 
Tree. Because in such a situation people’s hearts will, regrettably, naturally slacken [in matters of religion], the support of the missionaries is absolutely vital for Nagasaki.Te fathers of the order of Santo Domingo have been mindful of this, and throughout
 
(268) their peregrinations all over Japan they have never abandoned Nagasaki but alwaysremained hidden among us to support us in the faith. For this we are deeply indebtedto them. Especially since the recent changes in the laws [forbidding Christianity], wethought that we would no longer be able to depend on the support of missionarieseven for the last confession,138 but on the contrary the members of this order haveremained, in hiding, all over Nagasaki and have given us their spiritual guidance.
 
At a time such as this, merely the thought of hiding oneself will naturally weakenone’s will. Te faith in people’s hearts is undoubtedly also weakening in these harshtimes, and many are reverting to the ideas of the pagans. Te missionaries have dem-onstrated to us the ultimate act of love by exerting themselves ever more vigorouslywithout regard for the danger in which they find themselves. All this is clear from the fact that, even though their prison guards are very harsh, only the members of thisorder hear the last confessions of the many prisoners waiting to die a martyr’s death.Four. It is not unusual for the missionaries of any order to be not only exemplary paragons of virtue in their teachings, but also shining mirrors for us in their behavior. Te friars of the order of Santo Domingo are of similarly high caliber. [Te friars] never discriminated between the virtuous and the incompetent. Because it hasbecome more and more difficult for the missionaries to hide away in the hovels of the poor, they cannot take care of people’s souls. It is therefore a mark of truly rareand praiseworthy compassion that the friars of this order take particular care of thesepeople’s souls with all their hearts. Accordingly, without the members of the order of Santo Domingo, the poor of Nagasaki would not have been able to make their last confession, and how many of them would have simply had to die [as heathens]! Tis,undoubtedly, is what people are saying to each other.
Although there are many worthy missionary orders in Japan whose members worktirelessly to give spiritual guidance to thousands of people, of the fathers who areimprisoned [as a result of arrest in Nagasaki], most belong to the order of Santo Domingo, and this is proof that they, more than any of the other orders, have beenconstantly active [in the city].139 [All were burned aliveon 19 August and 10 September 1622. Ruiz de Medina 1999, pp. 440-59.] However, despite their extremely small number overthe last several years, the members of other sects lef in hiding [in Nagasaki], too,have accomplished nothing but amazing feats of pastorship.140 [Members of other sects lef in or around Nagasaki included five Jesuit priests (Juan Baptistade Baeça, Matheus de Couros, Bento Fernandes, Antonio Ishida, and Balthasar de orres), four Franciscans (Martín de Pineda, Antonio de San Buenaventura Casal, Diego Pardo de San Francisco, and Gabriel de Santa Magdalena), and one Augustinian (Bartolomé Gutierrez). A total of roughly sixty-four fathers and brothers still remained within Japan, of whom thirty-four wouldbe executed by the end of the year. Kataoka 1963, p. 8, relying on numbers given in Anesaki 1930].
 
(269) Six. Of old it has not been rare to see a foot of evil for every inch of good. Fromtime to time, damage has been done to the love for one’s neighbors among Christiansas well, but the friars of the order of Santo Domingo in particular have encouraged[the Christians of Nagasaki], teaching them to love and respect each other, to speak frankly of their faith with all the padres of the different orders, and to work togetherto provide them with places to stay and other necessities, each according to his or herindividual capacity and circumstances.
142
[Tey have also encouraged everyone] toseek the spiritual guidance of confession and to receive their teachings, and, wherethe matters of the brotherhoods are concerned, to not bicker among themselves,imploring each brotherhood to be mindful of everyone’s spiritual welfare, which ismore important than anything and is taught ceaselessly. We have not been in theleast negligent in such prudence
 
(270) Seven. As we have always stated, but especially since the start of the persecutions,owing to the labors of the friars of the order of Santo Domingo, a special spiritual virtue has appeared within Japanese Christianity that is hard to explain in words. Wewill therefore never cease asking for [the friars’] guidance.Although all the members of the Brotherhoods of the Rosary and of Jesus, one aferthe other, should have signed the above [to prove] that no one is of a different opin-ion in their conscience, because [the membership] runs into the tens of thousands,[the signing] has been done [in everyone’s name] by the elders of the brotherhood [ineach ward].One thousand and six hundred twenty-two years afer the appearance of Our Lord(thirteenth day of the first month of Genna 󰀱).

Revisión actual - 16:07 5 ago 2022

Hesselink, Reinier H. Volver a Bibliografía Japón.

Ver el libro Christian Nagasaki y además:

"104 Voices from Christian Nagasaki: Document of the Rosario Brotherhood of Nagasaki with the Signatures of Its Members (February 1622): An Analysis and Translation". En Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 70, No. 2 (2016), pp. 237-265. Disponible en internet: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43864687 [consultado el 4 de agosto de 2022].

(237) 104 miembros destacados de la Cofradía del Rosario firmaron en Nagasaki en febrero de 1622 lo que hoy es un rollo de dos metros, 11 páginas pegadas de papel japonés, conservado en la Biblioteca Casanatense de Roma (doc. 4253A: Nagasaki) en una caja que también contiene las firmas de 77 miembros de la Cofradía del Rosario de Omura (4253B: Omura).

(238) Comienza con un testamento japonés de 4 páginas presentado como 7 artículos sobre la situación de los cristianos en la ciudad, más 5 hojas con las firmas de 83 hombres y 28 mujeres. Siguen dos hojas con la traducción latina hecha por los dominicos Diego Collado (1589-1641) y Juan de los Ángeles Rueda (1578-1624).

Se conocen 60 testamentos posteriores a 1617 con cientos de firmas.

En el Archivo Provincial de Toledo (¿de los dominicos?) con sede en Alcalá de Henares: The collection at APT includes forty-eight documents composed by various Christian communities on Kyushu and Honshu: Bungo (14 communities), Buzen (2), Chikuzen (1), Chikugo (1),Gotō (8), Higo (2), Hyūga (1), Satsuma (2), Nagato (1), Suō (3), Miyako (1), Osaka (1), Sakai (1), and Ōshū (1). Matsuda 1967 provides a table listing these sources on pp. 115–21 and describes them ingeneral terms on pp. 1022–23. Te Bungo documents are the only ones to have been analyzed indetail, for which see Kawamura 1999, pp. 206–10; Kawamura 2003, pp. 270-76.

(239) Ejemplo de que los misioneros perseguidos quemaban la documentación en nota 6

Matheus de Couros (1567–1632), provincial of the Jesuits in Japan, writes in a 5 October 1626 letter to the general that “A great quantity of books, almost all we had owned, as well as our recordsand the letters of all the previous vice-provincials and generals of the Society went up in flames.” ARSI, Jap.Sin., doc. 37b, f. 237v; see also Morejón 1631, p. 39r.

For a recent account of the foundation, growth, and destruction of Christian Nagasaki, see Hesselink 2016.

(240) Mapa de Nagasaki, que toma de su obra de 2016.

(241) Ômura Sumitada (1533-1587) garantizó en 1580 una porción de terreno y fue rodeada por un muro, hasta 1614 virtualmente todos sus residentes estaban bautizados, 12 parroquias, gente organizada en machi, el 23 y 24 de julio de 1587 Hideyoshi issued the first anti-Christian edicts, in which he fulminated against the destruction of native shrines by Japanese Christians as well as forced conversions of the populations within the domains of Christian daimyo. He ordered all missionaries to leave Japan within twenty days.12

The hegemon also sent his men toNagasaki to oversee the destruction of the city’s fortifications. Tenceforth the townwas considered part of the personal domain of the ruler of Japan, who each year dur-ing the trading season sent his representatives to enforce his laws and regulationsconcerning commerce.13

Hideyoshi’s prohibition of Christianity, however, was directed chiefly at the activity of the Jesuits; he was less concerned with the private beliefs of Nagasaki’s population. And once he realized that the China trade facilitated by Portuguese carracks stop-ping in Nagasaki depended on the translation and mediation services of the Jesuits,he relented and became willing to allow missionaries a continued presence in thecity, albeit limited to ten members of the order.14

The Jesuits thus maintained a certain amount of influence over the city’s affairs through the Christian merchant elite

(242) From this time onward, a distinction arose between Uchimachi 内町 (“inner city”),the original settlement established by the Jesuits on land ceded to them in 1580, and Sotomachi 外町 (“outer city”), the adjacent area that started to prosper during the1590s and grow into something that, together with Uchimachi,

could properly becalled a city. At the time, Sotomachi was under the control of Sumitada’s son Ōmura Yoshiaki 大村善前 (1568–1616).15

In 1605, however, Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康 (1543–1616), who had taken over Hideyoshi’s legacy, exchanged Yoshiaki’s territories in Nagasaki’s Sotomachi, on both sides of the land tongue and farther inland along the banks of the Nakajima river, for several villages located a few miles upstream of themouth of the Urakami river.16
Although strongly opposed by Yoshiaki, this action ensured that Nagasaki developed as a city with one instead of two administrations.

The first arrival of Franciscan friars, under the patronage of Spain, from the Philippines into Japan, for example, occurred only three years later,in 1584. 17 Te friars were Juan Pobre Diaz Pardo (1514–1616) and Diego Bernal (d. 1584). See Gonoi 2002,pp. 346–47

Although they departed afer only a brief visit to Hirado 平戸, Kyushu’s northwestern trading port, their mere presence immediately aroused the ire of theJesuits—whose mission was under Portugal’s sponsorship. Afer a political contest in Rome for the support of the pope, the matter was decided in favor of the older andbetter-connected mendicants.18
Thus it was only a matter of time before the Jesuits ceased to be the only Roman Catholic missionaries in Japan

(243) 1594 the Spanish vice-provincial of the Jesuits, Pedro Gomez (1535-1600), tacitly allowed them to establish a small church in the old grave-yard of Nagasaki’s Uchimachi.20

This limited tolerance would, however, last only untilthe arrival of Japan’s first bishop, the Portuguese Jesuit Pedro Martins (1535-1598), in August 1596. No sooner had the bishop disembarked in Nagasaki than he made surehe excommunicated all Franciscans in the city,21 announced an enormous fine of onehundred taels of silver on anyone bringing friars to Japan, and threatened to excom-municate those who listened to their sermons.22
The animosity between the Jesuits and the Franciscans reached its first climax with the 1597 crucifixion of twenty-six Christians, including six Franciscan friars in Naga-saki, an event over which Bishop Martins may have cooperated with Japan’s ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi.23
With Martins’s death on 13 February 1598 and the arrival of a new and more tolerant bishop, Luis de Cerqueira (1552-1614), in August of the sameyear, the competition abated somewhat, only to flare up again all the more virulentlyover the issue of Cerqueira’s succession upon his death on 16 February 1614.

24 The succession battle came at the very moment that all missionaries, Jesuit as well as mendi-cant, were being expelled from Japan. See Costa 1998, vol. 2, pp. 700–706. To mask its part in theelection of a successor, on 25 February 1614 the Society of Jesus instructed the seven Japanese parish priests of Nagasaki to choose the Jesuit Valentim Carvalho (1558-1631) as caretaker of the bishopric. Avila de Girón 1614, f. 172v. Later that year, probably recognizing that they had been trickedby the Jesuits, the parish priests sided with the mendicants.

Meanwhile, the rivalry between the Jesuits and the Dominicans in Nagasaki, whichis central to our discussion of the Casanatense document, escalated with the 1609 arrival of the Dominican mission from Satsuma 薩摩. In southern Kyushu since 1602, the Dominicans had been expelled for failing to bring trade with Manila tothe domain; they sailed north, looking for a place to resettle,25 and one of the Christian administrators of Nagasaki, Murayama Tōan 村山等安 (1562–1619), offered thema choice piece of land in Katsuyama-machi 勝山町, just outside of Uchimachi.26

(244) There they rebuilt their church, which was called Nossa Senhora do Rosário (andalso known as Santo Domingo or São Domingo); it is to this church that the Rosariobrotherhood of our document had belonged.

Murayama’s 1609 donation of land to theDominicans in such a location—so closely situated to the traditional stronghold of the Jesuits, no less—was therefore a gesture of defiance as well as an effort to obtainsupport from a missionary body that was not as well ensconced in the city as theJesuits were.

Nagasaki developed from a small Christian settle-ment with perhaps one thousand inhabitants in 1571 into a sprawling urban centerwith a population of close to 40,000 a mere four decades later is the best gauge of the importance the city had for the Japanese economy as a hub for the trade broughtfrom China in Portuguese carracks.

Persecution

Nationwide prohibition of Christianity in Japan started on 1 February 1614 with Tokugawa Ieyasu’s edict banishing all missionaries, ordering the closure of allchurches, and prohibiting public and private Christian practice by all Japanese.28

By this time, clearly, the missionaries were no longer considered indispensable to theconduct of trade, and so this edict and others that followed, in contrast with thoseissued by Hideyoshi, were enforced with increasing severity.29
On 24 and 25 February, the missionaries and their helpers in the Kyoto-Osaka area were rounded up andtheir churches set on fire.30
They were sent to Nagasaki, where they arrived on 11 March at ten o’clock at night in eight large water transports.31
Eight months later, on 6 November, two Portuguese ships, one bound for Manila and the other for Macao,lef the Nagasaki anchorage, and over the next two days one hundred and six missionaries—the majority of those then in Japan—embarked on one or the other of these vessels at Kibachi 木鉢 and Fukuda 福田, near the entrance to Nagasaki bay.

(245) Among those who boarded the Manila-bound ship were twenty-three Jesuits (eightpriests and fifeen brothers), two Dominican friars, two Franciscan friars, and twoJapanese parish priests, while the group of Macao-bound missionaries consisted of thirty-eight Jesuit priests and twenty-nine Jesuit brothers.32

In addition to the few missionaries who managed to return surreptitiously afertheir departure,eighteen Jesuit priests remained behind in Japan. Of the nine friars of the Dominican mission, seven (Tomás de Zumarraga, Francisco de Morales,Alonso de Mena,Alonso Navarrete, José [Salvanez] de San Jacinto, Juan de Rueda,and Jacinto Orfanel) stayed, as did six Franciscans (Pedro Bautista, Apolinar Franco,Luis Gomez, Diego Pardo de San Francisco, Pedro de la Asunción, and Juan de SantaMaria), out of a total of ten. One Augustinian (Hernando de Ayala) and five of the seven Japanese parish priests ordained in Japan (Lorenço of the San [or São]Pedro church, Miguel of the Santa Maria do Monte [also known as Yama no SantaMariya] church, Francisco Murayama of the San Antonio [also known as São Antonio de Padua] church, and two men known only as Clemente and Juan) likewiseremained. All had gone into hiding several months before the other missionarieslef the country.33

In the days following the departure of the priests, nearly all churches in Nagasakiwere torn down.34

Te vast majority of the city’s inhabitants were members of one of its fifeen churches and chapels, but the explosive growth of the city was suddenlyhalted and reversed, with many Christians soon leaving for less conspicuous areas in northeastern Honshu. Even afer the loss of its churches and most of its shepherds,the city remained thoroughly Christian for about ten more years, during which newarrivals were routinely baptized by underground missionaries.35

It is difficult to say whether the Tokugawa bakufu consciously applied a policy of initial clemency toward Christianity followed by gradual severity, or whether it firstoperated under the mistaken impression that merely removing the clergy would beenough to solve, once and for all, the problem the Church had come to pose over thepast two or three decades. Although they had recently achieved a measure of stability in their power relations with Japan’s warrior class, the country’s rulers were onlytoo aware of the fragility of the compromise that had been worked out and of theneed for a common ideology that would cement the new societal arrangements.36 The story is told in Ooms 1985.

This awareness made the first three Tokugawa shoguns especially sensitive and

(246) 37 For the ideological battle between the bakufu and the Roman Catholic church, see Paramore 2009

The persecution of Christians in the rest of Japan had already claimed many lives even before Ieyasu’s edict of 1614, and in that year it became particularly gruesome in nearby Arima 有馬.38

Yet in Nagasaki not a single Christian was executed for religious reasons between 1614 and 1617.39 On 1 October 1617, Gaspar Ueda Hikojirō and Andrés Yoshida became the first citizens of Nagasaki to be executed for aiding missionaries. Significantly, however, the executions took place inconspicuously on Takabokoshima 高鉾島, an island near the entrance to Nagasaki bay, far from the city itself. Kataoka 1963, p. 9.
On the contrary, the number of missionaries in and aroundthe city greatly expanded between 1614 and 1619: in the years 1615 and 1616 alone,more than twenty missionaries, foreign and Japanese, clandestinely entered Japan.40
Smuggling priests into the country had become a respected, if foolhardy, business.41

The 1618 arrest of two such smugglers, however, revealed to the authorities theextent to which the citizens of Nagasaki were disregarding the new anti-Christianlegislation. As Masaharu Anesaki writes, “A temporary satisfaction [stemming from the arrests] was broken by disappointing shock, which was replaced by irritation,anger, and hatred; all this was intensified by the rebuke from the higher authori-ties and followed by a determination to execute the suppressive measures more vigorously.”42

On 󰀱󰀳 December of that year, a house-to-house search for hidden mis-sionaries was accompanied by a drive to compel all citizens to swear they would nothide missionaries on pain of being burned alive.43
Thereafer, persecution in Naga-saki rapidly increased in ferocity until ten years later, by which time the whole cityhad been forced into apostasy.In many ways, 1622 (when our document was signed) would prove a crucial year for the missions and the citizens of Nagasaki. In August and September, the bakufu held two spectacles very much like autos-da-fé at the execution grounds of Nishizaka 西坂, just outside the northern end of the city, where fifty-six people (includingtwenty-seven children) were beheaded and twenty-eight burned alive, more thanat any other time in the history of Nagasaki. Known as the “Great Martyrdoms”(daijunkyō 大殉教) of Nagasaki, the executions with their calculated cruelty defini

(247) tively showed that all hope for a compromise on the point of religion was futile, evenin this commercially important city.44 “Great Martyrdoms” also took place in Portugal, where in 1621 alone the authorities held sevenautos-da-fé in Lisbon, Coimbra, and Evora, in which 427 people of Jewish ancestry were burnedalive so that their property might be confiscated. Torres 1879, p. 64.

Then, in the fall of 1621, the system of organizing households into groups of ten (jūnin-gumi 十人組), with all held collectively responsible for the crimes of any member, was replaced by a system that operated along the same lines but was based ongroups of five households (gonin-gumi 五人組) only.45

Te effect of this change was to facilitate the discovery of households that habitually gave shelter to underground missionaries, for neighbors might now betray a fervently Christian family from theirold ten-household group (and reap the rewards) without running any risk them-selves.One might expect that intensifying persecution would lead the different mission-ary orders to draw closer together and overcome their rivalries. Yet, as we shall see,that was not the case.

The Brotherhoods of Nagasaki

Brotherhoods, or confraternities (Jp. komufurariya こむふらりや or konfurariya こんふらりや, also known as kumi 組), in the Roman Catholic parlance, are organiza-tions of laypeople, usually (but by no means always) under the guidance of a localpriest. Teir aim is to deepen their members’ commitment to the faith, their church,and their community through organized activities that consume large quantities of time outside of professional life. Most members of the Nagasaki brotherhoods wereJapanese; in fact, we know of only one brotherhood in the city that admitted Portu-guese residents.Te brotherhoods in Nagasaki can be classified into four types.46

The first type wasrepresented by the Misericórdia brotherhood, which was established to provide relief for the needy and to bring Japanese and Portuguese believers together.47
The Santa Maria brotherhood, or Santa Mariya no ongumi サンタマリヤの御組, representing thesecond type, arose from the need to keep the church and believers together afer thestart of persecution in 1587.48
Third were the ordines tertii (established by the Spanish mendicant orders—the Franciscans from 1594, the Dominicans from 1609, andthe Augustinians from 1612), which were originally designed to spread the faith, butwhich, afer persecution intensified from 1614 onward, functioned much as the SantaMaria brotherhood did, to keep followers together even in the absence of a priest.Te fourth type was parish based; these brotherhoods were established each time a

(248) new church was built to accommodate the expansion of Nagasaki’s population, andthey mostly assisted the Misericórdia in caring for the needy and the sick withintheir parishes.49 Examples of parish-based brotherhoods are the Santiago brotherhood, connected with thechurch and the associated hospital in Sakaya-machi 酒屋町; the São Pedro brotherhood, connectedwith the church in Ima-machi 今町; the brotherhood connected with Santa Maria do Montechurch at the foot of Mt. ateyama; the Santa Maria brotherhood connected with the Jesuit churchNossa Senhora da Assunção (or Santa Maria da Assunção) at Morisaki 森崎 from 1604; the SantaCruz brotherhood, connected with the São Antonio de Padua church between Moto Daiku-machi 本大工町 and Uono-machi 魚町 from 1606; the Brotherhood of Jesus, connected with the SãoPaulo chapel at Morisaki from 1607; the São Lorenzo brotherhood, connected with the chapel builtby the Koreans of Kōrai-machi 高麗町 from 1610; and the São Miguel brotherhood, connected withthe chapel near Rukasu-machi るかす町 from 1611.

The Misericórdia (literally, “mercy” or “compassion”), the earliest Christian broth-erhood in Nagasaki, possibly dates back to the very founding of the city.50

Over aperiod of years beginning in 1583, it admitted one hundred of the city’s principal citi-zens judged by the Jesuits to be the most reputable, stable in their faith, and capable of performing the seven “spiritual” and seven “corporal” duties.51 Costa 2007, p. 76, states that by 1609 the number of brothers had increased to one hundredand fify.
The Nagasaki Misericórdia was modeled on similar organizations existing throughout the Portuguese thalassocracy.52 Te first Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Asia was established at Cochin in 1505 and the second at Goa during the governorship (1515-1518) of Lopo Soares; the Santa Casa da Misericórdia atMacao was founded in 1569. Souza 1986, p. 28. For the Misericórdia at Malacca, see Cardon and Elkins 1947.
The other brotherhoods of the city largely modeled themselveson the Misericórdia, and this is also the Nagasaki brotherhood about which we havethe most information.At the head of the Misericórdia organization stood a prior, or provedor. It being the provedor ’s duty to provide relief for widows, orphans, and the poor, he was always chosen from among those with considerable means.53
The provedor led the board of guardians, or mesa, consisting of twelve Misericórdia members, or “brothers” (ninecouncilors; two stewards, or

mordomos; and one scribe, or escrivão) elected once a

(249) When summoned by the bell of the Misericórdia (St. Elisabeth) church in MotoHakata-machi 本博多町, the one hundred brothers assembled in their Santa Casa daMisericórdia, located next to the church—the rector of which was a Jesuit.55

Attendance was obligatory on three occasions during the year: the Maundy Tursday pro-cession of penitents during Easter week, the election of the board of guardians on theday of the Visitation (2 July), and the All Saints’ Day (1 November) procession to theNishizaka execution grounds to collect the bones of the dead and give them a properburial in the private cemetery of the Misericórdia church.56

The most important activities of the Misericórdia brothers were to visit the sickand the imprisoned, to console those who were condemned to death, and to pro- vide simple Christian burials for the poor, while also organizing impressive funerals for fellow members of the brotherhood. During funeral processions, members woreblack, hooded mantles that covered their whole bodies and made them unrecognizable.57

In the Misericórdia church the brotherhood kept a large box for clothing andother nonmonetary donations. A box for monetary donations stood on the roundtable in the meeting room of the Casa, and other boxes were placed around the citytwice a week to solicit contributions from the faithful.58
The brotherhood managed ahome for poor old men, another one for women, a leprosarium, and a hospital.59

The second type of brotherhood, represented in Nagasaki by the Santa Mariabrotherhood, was initially modeled on similar groups in Europe that aimed to edu-cate future leaders of the faithful.60

Tose preparing to join were required to par-ticipate in a week-long program of spiritual exercises and confessions.61
During hissecond visit to Japan, in 1590, Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606) encouraged the formation of Santa Maria brotherhoods in all areas converted to Christianity to serve as a network for believers in the face of persecution. On 20 October 1595, the Jesuit Luís Fróis (1532-1597) wrote from Nagasaki on the great popularity of the Santa Mariabrotherhoods among upper-class Japanese Christians.62
The brotherhoods established by the mendicants provided their flock with an oppor-tunity to associate themselves more closely with these orders than the J

esuits allowed

(250) their followers to do.63 Aside from the two groups discussed in this paragraph, the mendicant orders in Nagasakiincluded the Brotherhood of Charity, jointly organized by the Augustinians, Dominicans, andFranciscans to care for the impoverished sick, to prepare the dying and their sick rooms for theadministration of the last sacraments, and to recover and educate babies abandoned by their non-Christian parents. Hartmann 1965, p. 51. Another brotherhood, the On-Mamori no Santa Mariya 御守りのサンタマリヤ established by Bishop Cerqueira in 1598, advocated celebrating the Virgin Maryas the protector of Japan and named New Year’s Day on the Japanese calendar the day of “NossaSenhora da Protecção.” About a third organization, the Brotherhood of the Revelation, we knowlittle apart from the fact that it existed.

For example, the brotherhood of the Augustinians, connectedwith the São Augustinho church in Moto Furukawa-machi 本古川町 on the lef bank of the Nakajima river, was also known as the Brotherhood of the Cincture afer thewaist cord tying the brown habit that its members were allowed to wear. Similarly,the members of the Rosario brotherhood connected with the Santo Domingo (or SãoDomingo) church in Katsuyama-machi—the group at the center of our investiga-tion—were allowed to wear a white robe. According to Ikuo Higashibaba, one reasonthat people joined the Rosario brotherhood was to receive indulgences, with whichthis order seems to have been well supplied. As a member wrote,

Human salvation in the aferlife ultimately depends on one’s strong faith and observance of the law. . . . Joining this fraternity will greatly help us correct our bad habits and observethe law; it is further a good way to receive meritorious power (kuriki [功力]) from Deus through the mediation of the divine mother and furthermore to receive indulgences.64

With Ieyasu’s edict of 1614, the brotherhoods’ function of keeping believers togethergained in importance. As we have seen, afer the departure of the missionaries, the churches of Nagasaki were torn down. Between 12 and 14 November 1614, samurai demolition crews led by Ōmura Sumiyori 大村純頼 (1592-1619) destroyed theDominican church and its adjacent monastery.65

Most of the Dominican missionaries in Japan went underground, while taking care that the Rosario brotherhoodremained intact. In fact, with the church building gone and the missionaries depen-dent on the goodwill, service, and bravery of their congregation, it was the brother-hood that represented the Dominican church and community in Japan for the nextten years. Te brotherhood leaders, or kumi no oya 組の親, functioned as teachers of the faith and received believers into their homes to worship.As might be expected under the precarious circumstances, betrayals graduallydiminished the number of missionaries at liberty to serve their flock, despite new arrivals from the Philippines. One important activity for the underground mission-aries was to prepare instructions for the brotherhoods to rely on in the absence of apriest. A key figure in this enterprise was the Spanish Dominican friar Juan de Rueda,who, as I discuss below, produced a Japanese translation of the most important teachings for the Rosario and other Dominican-led brotherhoods. Rueda was born in 1578

(251) cuenta su vida, no fue mártir.

(252) Yet another important activity of missionaries hiding in Japan was the compilation of sworn testimonies by members of their flock that they would never abandon their fraith. Tis—as in the case of the Casanatense document—was done via the broth-erhoods, involving the principal members as representatives of their communities.Within Japan, the process of compiling these statements helped to strengthen theChristian communities and to confirm their identification with a particular order.At the same time, the testaments—which were taken to Europe—served to show theoutside world that the church continued to exist in Japan despite persecution andalso to secure the blessing of the pope on these courageous Japanese believers.

A Paper War on Multiple Fronts

As is well known, the persecution of Christians in Japan, and the underlying ideological competition between the bakufu and the Church, generated two different categories of documentation—that by the persecutors and that by the persecuted. On the bakufu side, we have the different edicts issued from 1587 onward throughout the early modern period to suppress Christianity and separate foreign trade from the religion brought by the European agents of that trade. We also have a number of documents signed (and probably compiled) afer 1614 by interpreters based on the interrogation of arrested or apostate Christians.77 On the opposing side, thereare the many letters written by underground missionaries, quite a few of them from prison, in European languages and even in romanized Japanese.78 And there are also the documents compiled by missionaries in collaboration with the different brotherhoods, of which the Casanatense document is one example. As will be explainedin more detail below, these writings not only testify to Christian resistance. Somewere also intended to report on the failures, transgressions, and misconduct of otherorders; thus they were part of a paper war waged on multiple fronts—by the brother-hoods both against the bakufu and against each other.

To come to a deeper understanding of our document, it becomes necessary to tracethis paper war from the very beginning of the persecution brought on by Ieyasu’s 1614 edict. On 16 September 1614, Afonso de Lucena (1551-1623), a veteran member of the Jesuit mission in the domain of Ōmura, wrote to Rome that the mendicant competi-tion had hit upon a clever plan: the daikan Murayama ōan, together with the men-dicants and the Japanese parish priests trained by Bishop Cerqueira, had proposedthat all Nagasaki Christians sign a document promising to never apostatize, to dotheir utmost to ensure only the friars and parish priests might stay in Japan, and toobey the leaders of their new brotherhood.79

Needless to say, those leaders would not

(253) be taking orders from the Jesuits, who, a mere nine days afer Cerqueira’s death, hadraised one of their own to be the new bishop.80

Meanwhile, the authorities in the person of Hasegawa Sahyōe 長谷川左兵衛 (1568-1617), who had been Ieyasu’s representative in Nagasaki since 󰀱󰀶󰀰󰀶, were also eager tohave the citizens of the city swear loyalty oaths.81 The Spanish writer Bernardo Avila Girón (dates unknown) reports that in mid-September 1614,

[Sahyōe] called together all the otona [乙名; ward elders] of Nagasaki and asked each of them individually and then all of them as a group to swear an oath that no one living intheir ward would aid any padre or hermano, or extend any help to them whatsoever thatmight enable them to remain in Japan. If this oath was broken, they and their families would lose their heads and their property. All the otona were forced to sign this oath, andthey were ordered to require the same of all the kumi no oya in the wards.82 In the end,Sahyōe sent one of his men around the whole town to collect signatures from all the people of Nagasaki. I myself was forced to [sign].83

When, after Ieyasu’s death, his son and successor Tokugawa Hidetada 徳川秀忠 (1579-1632) passed his own anti-Christian legislation in September 1616, placardswere erected throughout Nagasaki spelling out these orders once more and warn-ing that all members of each of the city’s ten-household groups would be held jointlyresponsible if any one of them was found to have been hiding a padre.84

Persecution, then, was intensifying. Tis time, a house-to-house search was accom-panied by a new drive to collect signatures from all of the city’s householders. Some-time shortly before his arrest, the Dominican friar Jacinto Orfanel (1578-1622) wroteas follows about these oaths:

When they [the authorities] want to remedy some grave matter and prevent it altogether, itis the custom of this land to make everyone in a village or city sign [a paper with the newordinance]. o ensure that no one will do this [unwanted act] again and that [people] willtake it even more seriously, they have everyone sign in groups of ten [householders], streetby street, or in groups of five in some parts of the country. They set whatever punishmentthey want and [make clear that] all ten householders and their families will be punishedthat way [for an infraction] committed by only one of their group.

Already at the beginning [of this persecution, i.e., in October 1614], a little before they destroyed the churches and chased away the religious, Sahyōe made the whole city of Nagasaki sign this type of document [pledging that] no one would hide any missionaries. . . and afer they had destroyed the churches and the padres had lef, Gonroku (who had remained behind in place of his uncle) knew that there were still many padres lef behind,

(254) so he, too, asked for signatures from each group of ten householders, threatening themwith death if they gave shelter to any missionary.85 At that time everyone signed, thinkingthey would be better able to hide the padres in this manner and thus be of greater help insaving their souls.

And so for about three or four years, they nearly did not bother anyone, at least until the year 1618, when the emperor [shogun] ordered the missionaries to be searched out withthe rigor described above. At that time [i.e., in November and December 1618], they madepeople sign these documents once more, adding that the person in whose house a padrewas found would be burned alive with his entire family [while the others in his group of tenhouseholds would be decapitated].86

From 1616, therefore, simply hiding a missionary automatically spelled the deathpenalty for the ten households involved. Orfanel himself was arrested on 25 April 1621 and was executed in Nagasaki on 10 September 1622.87

An undated confession by an anonymous believer gives the point of view of some-one who signed these statements:

As for the restrictions that have been recently placed on Christianity, an official has cometo where I live [to require] that all Christians place their signature on a document promis-ing not to lodge or meet padres and swearing an oath to make it more binding. I have madethis promise just as all my neighbors have. I have had to do this three times. Once I had toswear by all the gods and buddhas of Japan. Tis was no problem for me, I thought, for thegods and buddhas serve no purpose, so I was not signing any real oath, but merely some-thing serving to fool the pagan official.

The next time I had to swear a real oath invoking the Lord, but that time I thought:although it is now officially forbidden to lodge the padres and serve them in any other way,to sign an oath like this is not one of the mortal sins, but simply serves to save our lives andneed not touch our deepest conscience. Te third time, I was forced by my village elder in lieu of the governor himself to put my formal seal on another useless and empty oath. As I said, I have done this three times, for I have emphatically told others that it is not a mortalsin, and I will do it again if it is required of me.88

Clearly, Japanese Christians recognized the need to placate the authorities of the Tokugawa bakufu.

Again, however, the paper war was waged not only between Christians and thepolitical authorities, but also between the different missionary orders, in particularbetween the Jesuits and mendicants. In 1617, Matheus de Couros (1567-1632), the newly appointed provincial of the Jesuits in Japan, was determined to prove wrong the rumors spread by the Franciscans in Manila that the Jesuits had abandoned the Japanese mis-

(255) sion.89 to this end, in August he requested the Jesuit brotherhoods in the country tocompile documents in evidence of their steadfastness to the faith and loyalty to theorder. Within a short period, forty-eight statements containing 755 signatures were collected from fourteen provinces.90 Despite the difficulties involved, the Jesuits in Nagasaki translated and certified these papers between September 1617 and February 1618.91 Te Jesuits involved in the effort were, apart from Couros, Bento Fernandes (1579?-1633),Christovão Ferreira (1580-1650), Jeronimo Rodriguez (1567-1628), and Sebastião Vieira (1572-1634). Te first document (APT, doc. E-2: 103-10-8) reached Nagasaki from Hirado, where it hadbeen compiled on 󰀲󰀸 August, and the last (APT, doc. E-2: 103-10-18), dated 26 November 1617,arrived from Bungo.

With this background in mind, it becomes possible to see the Casanatense docu-ment as part of an effort by the Dominican friar Diego Collado (the second of thetwo Spanish signatories) to produce a set of testimonies similar to those of his rivals,the Jesuits. Te creation of this document (and its companion from Ōmura) may alsohave been spurred to some extent by knowledge of the 7 April 1621 letter sent by thir-teen Nagasaki Jesuit followers to Pope Paul V (r. 1605-1621).92 Indeed, throughout hiscareer in Japan, Collado was largely responsible for bringing the rivalry between themendicant and Jesuit orders to new depths of ignominy.

A native of Miajadas in Extremadura, Spain, Collado...

(256) Casanatense document and other evidence he had collected from Japanese Christiancommunities back with him to Europe, to prove among other things that the Jesuits forbade their parishioners to join brotherhoods established by the mendicants.96

Te Casanatense document is dated February 1622, in the midst of these anti-Jesuitmoves by the most vociferous Dominican in Japan. It is therefore not surprising tofind in the document insistence that the Dominicans are the most virtuous of all themissionaries in the land. It asserts, for example, that in contrast to the Jesuits, the Dominicans have dedicated themselves to serving the poorer segments of the popu-lation of Nagasaki:

Because it has become more and more difficult for the missionaries to hide away in thehovels of the poor, they cannot take care of people’s souls. It is therefore a mark of trulyrare and praiseworthy compassion that the friars of this order take particular care of thesepeople’s souls with all their hearts. Accordingly, without the members of the order of Santo Domingo, the poor of Nagasaki would not have been able to make their last confession,and how many of them would have simply had to die [as heathens]!

Te authors even suggest that the greater number of Dominicans than Jesuits inprison at the moment of writing demonstrates that the Dominicans have been braverand more contemptuous of the danger of being arrested; they do not acknowledgethe possibility that the friars may merely have been less cautious than the Jesuits,who had the older organization in Nagasaki:

. . . of the fathers who are imprisoned [as a result of arrest in Nagasaki], most belong tothe order of Santo Domingo, and this is proof that they, more than any of the other orders,have been constantly active [in the city].

Yet despite the missionaries’ intent to discredit each other, it is likely that to the Jap-anese signatories, this and other similar documents served a very different purpose.Whereas every householder in Nagasaki was forced to make a public statement to theauthorities swearing on his own life, the lives of his family members, and the whole of his property that he would not lodge, feed, or otherwise support missionaries, many of them also signed secret statements such as the Casanatense document, as if to deny before God what they had promised the bakufu. As we have already seen, these testa-ments of faith may even have predated the paperwork demanded by the bakufu, open-ing up the possibility that the public documents, promising a certain hell on earth inthe case of noncompliance, had been deemed necessary in response to the privateones. Whatever the case, it is certain that both the public and secret documents influ-enced each other. In the wrong hands, the secret statements were automatic deathwarrants for those who had put their signatures to them. In the eyes of the believers

(257) themselves, on the other hand, they could—once sent to Rome and approved by thepope—serve as powerful instruments for assuring one’s place in heaven.

The Document of the Rosario Brotherhood

(258) Let us examine what is known about the Japanese signatories, including information that can be inferred from the list itself. Of the overwhelming majority of signatories we know nothing more than what they put on this document. Te inclusion of their family names by itself gives us an indication of the prominence within theRosario brotherhood of the first six men—Higuchi Jian 樋口自庵, Hirano Ryōkei 平野良慶, Ishimoto Rofusai 石本ろふ斎, anaka Hauro 田中者うろ (hereafer, Paulo, also Riemon 利右衛門), Ōno Ko-Ruisu 大ノ小るいす (“Little” Luis), and Kanasaki Shoan かなさきしょ庵 (João).103 From the fact that the addresses of the first four were omit-ted, we can surmise that all four of these men were in some way well known. The third and fourth signatories, discussed shortly below, were in prison at the time the document was composed. Te testament, then, is likely to have been the result of acooperative effort by the first, second, fifh, and sixth signatories. Te signatures from the seventh on were probably collected by Japanese helpers of the Dominicans as they

(259) We have additional information about Ishimoto Rofusai (1572-1622) and Tanaka Paulo (1576-1622), the third and fourth signatories, due to their arrest and subse-quent execution as described in another source. Te two men, who lived in the same(unknown) ward and belonged to the same group of ten householders, were arrested on 17 August 1621 for their part in hiding the Dominican friar José Salvanez de San Jacinto (1580-1622), and they were executed the following year.106

Tanaka Paulo was originally from Tosa 土佐, the domain on Shikoku facing thePacific Ocean. He came to Nagasaki around the beginning of the seventeenth cen-tury, was baptized, and married a Christian woman called Maria. The couple remained childless. Paulo had been involved in the hiding and protection of under-ground missionaries from long before his arrest. According to a report written by the Jesuit Bento Fernandes (ca 1579-1633), “when they moved away from his lodging, hewould accompany and follow them. If they were transported over water, he would volunteer to do the rowing and would not leave his guests before they were safe. Nomatter what the weather, neither rain nor snow could prevent this fervent Christian from doing his sacred duty.”107 Paulo and his wife were both executed on 10 September 1622; first, Maria was decapitated and then Paulo was burned alive.

Ishimoto Rofusai was arrested along with Paulo, as were the heads of the two otherhouseholds in their group. Rofusai was born on one of the Gotō 五島 islands lyingwest of Hirado in the East China Sea. In 1579, at the age of seven, he went with his father to Hirado, where he was baptized in the Jesuit mission. Tere he is said tohave met a Portuguese merchant who took him to Macao. He presumably arrivedin Macao in 1587, when he was around fourteen or fifeen years old. Over the “few years” Rofusai reportedly spent in the service of the unnamed Portuguese merchant

(260) in China, he probably learned to speak Portuguese and became knowledgeable aboutthe China-Japan trade. He must have returned to Japan and settled in Nagasakiaround the time of Hideyoshi’s first Korean campaign in the early 1590s. Afer thestart of persecution, he is said to have bought the freedom of a Christian womanwho had been enslaved for her religion in Ōmura. It is, however, not clear whether Rofusai married this woman or anyone else. Because his only crime was belonging toPaulo’s group of householders, his execution was a merciful decapitation.

Twenty-one of the signatories, or fully 20 percent, were female, which is intriguing in light of what it illustrates about some of the very basic differences between the worldviews of the Japanese Christians andthe bakufu, as well as what it may indicate about differences among the brotherhoodsin their views on gender. 110

he presence of their signatures indicates that in theeyes of their fellows in the brotherhood, these women were independent individuals

(261) and even principal members rather than appendages of the men in their families; this stands in sharp contrast to official bakufu documents, in which women seldomappear as independent individuals or householders. For example, the household register for Hirado-machi 平戸町 compiled in 1642 identifies all women in connection tothe male head of their household. Even households headed by widows are registerednot in their own names, but in the names of their late husbands. Moreover, thesedeceased householders are still counted, at the end of the document, among the totalpopulation “living” in Hirado-machi!111

Te independent status accorded to women within the brotherhood is seen espe-cially clearly in the names associated with Gotō-machi 五島町, which is represented by four women (nos. [82] Mariya まりや, [84] Maruta まるた, [92] Matareina またれいな [Magdalena], and [98] Rianoru 里あのる [Leonora]) versus only two men (nos. [5]Ōno Ko-Ruisu [“Little” Luis] and [61] Ōno Furanshisuko 大野ふらん志すこ [Francisco], likely members of the same family). Of these women, we note especiallyMaruta, whose signature appears before that of her fellow Gotō-machi inhabitant,no. [85] Sukawa Hashichian すかわ者志ち阿ん (Bastian). Yet another ward, Naka-machi 中町, is represented by more than one female leader of the Rosario brother-hood.112 Here again, a woman, no. [62] Rushiya るしや (Luzia) signs before her maleneighbor, [63] Ruisu るいす, something that also happens with nos. [23] Ruhiina るひいな (Rufina) and [24] Shuan 寿庵 (João/Juan) from Ogawa-machi 小川町. In allthe other wards, the men sign first. While it is probably easy to read too much into this, it is worth remembering that such inversions of the “proper” male-female orderwould be unthinkable in bakufu documents.

A related discovery revealed by the document is the distribution of these Christian women in the city of Nagasaki. Despite the heightening persecution facing the Rosa-rio brotherhood at the time of the document’s writing, we see from the list of sig-natures that the brotherhood still reached into forty-three different wards, fourteen in Uchimachi and twenty-nine in Sotomachi.113 In sheer numbers, the brotherhood

(262) leaders living in Sotomachi (sixty-six) outnumber those living in Uchimachi (thirty-eight).114 The male-female ratio is, however, much more balanced in Uchimachi (withthirteen women to twenty-five men) than in Sotomachi (eight women to fify-eightmen); in accordance with this tendency, we find Gotō-machi, the Uchimachi wardwith the largest number of signatories, to be represented by four women and twomen (as mentioned above) in contrast to the one woman and five men representingIma Shikkui-machi 今石灰町, the Sotomachi neighborhood with the most signatures.In these two instances, the differing male-female ratios can likely be attributed to cultural factors, namely, the blue-collar character of Ima Shikkui-machi (predominantly home to those in the plastering trade) versus the mercantile character of Gotō-machi, which was known for its inns.

With regard to the overall distribution of Rosario brotherhood members, we find,surprisingly, that a third of the signatories lived in Uchimachi, which, afer all, wasthe territory of the Jesuits. Tis may be an indication that, as the document itself suggests, by 1622 the Dominicans were, on the whole, better represented inside Nagasaki than the Jesuits. Conspicuously absent from the wards represented, however, are thesix original wards of Nagasaki, which suggests two possibilities: that they may stillhave been firmly under the control of the Jesuits, or that they became the first wardsto abandon Christianity. 115

(263) (264) Let us return to two of the key figures behind the Casanatense document, following their stories as they unfolded afer 1622. On 23 April 1623, Juan de Rueda set sail from Manila for Japan once more.127 A storm forced him to land on an island in theRyūkyū chain, where he continued his missionary work. Captured by the authorities,he is recorded to have been executed on Ishigakijima 石垣島 in September 1624.128

At the time of Rueda’s death, Diego Collado was in the midst of his journey backto Europe, discussed above, to present the papal authorities with the evidence he hadcollected in Nagasaki against the advisability of a Jesuit monopoly on the Asian mis-sion. He arrived in Rome in January 1625.129 Five months later, he had already man-aged to get into such trouble with the head of the Dominican order there, Serafino Secchi (d. 1628), that he was forced to take refuge in his homeland of Spain. Secchi’sdeath allowed him to return to Rome for a few months in 1632, during which time he published the three books on the Japanese language he had prepared in Spain.

In 1634, afer a decade of frenzied activity in Italy and Spain, Collado lef Europe toreturn to the Philippines, accompanied by twenty-four junior Dominicans.130 These men, who came to be called “los barbados” in the Philippines because of their longbeards, formed the vanguard of a new “Congregation of St. Paul” that Collado envi-sioned would serve in the conversion of Japan and China.131 Blair and Robinson 1973, vol. 25, ch. 15.

(265) Nonetheless, this document composed by the principal members of the Nagasaki Rosario brotherhood remains greatly valuable for its rarity as an original source and for its wealth of data in the form of the large number of participants who were willingto reveal themselves with their signatures, seals, and addresses. Like a group portrait,the document gives us a glimpse of Nagasaki in February 1622, reflecting the mood of the city during the final few months before the Great Martyrdoms, which occurredduring August and September of that year. At the time of the document’s signing,at least, Nagasaki’s Christian population could still hope that their religious identity would survive

"Document of the Rosario Brotherhood of Nagasaki with the Signatures of Its Members". En Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 70, No. 2 (2016), pp. 267-283. Disponible en internet: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43864688 [consultado el 4 de agosto de 2022].

(267) With great respect we offer up the following articles:

One. Although there are many provinces in Japan where Christianity has flourished, Nagasaki has always been like the home of [Japanese] Christendom. Tis has been particularly true since the beginning of the persecutions. While throughout Japan theanti-Christian laws [against lay believers] have been strictly observed, in Nagasaki such laws have been issued solely to suppress the missionaries. Because in Nagasaki there is no strong interference to being a Christian, those who have been exiled for their faith, those who want to come to confession in secret, and those who want tohelp apostates return to the faith all gather here from other provinces, but if they findno priests, they cannot accomplish these goals.

Two. In contrast with [the authorities’] lack of concern over what the common people of Japan believe, the laws against missionaries have nowhere in all of Japan beenas harsh as they are in Nagasaki. Although elsewhere in the country the authoritiesdo not search for missionaries at all, in Nagasaki they are constantly on the look-out for where they may be hiding. Especially recently, they have been depending onmonetary rewards to find places likely to offer shelter to the padres, and because theyhave started offering excessive amounts of money, the greedy who do not care aboutheaven or hell look for missionaries day and night.137 [Rewards for the denunciation of underground missionaries, known as the kenshō sonin 懸賞訴人 system, were announced in Nagasaki in the fall of 1618. Cieslik 1963, p. 40; Kataoka 1970,p. 37. Tirty bars of silver were to be offered to anyone whose information led to the arrest of apriest; this amount, at 43 monme 匁 per bar (ARSI, Jap.Sin., doc. 17, f. 238r), came to 1,290 monme,or roughly 2.4 million yen (20,000 U.S. dollars) in today’s currency. Later, half the value of the confis-cated property of the householder who had hidden the arrested missionary was added to this reward] They have all kinds of clever schemes, and any place arousing the least suspicion is immediately searched by force.Because this never ceases, there is no way for missionaries to hide in Nagasaki any longer.

Tree. Because in such a situation people’s hearts will, regrettably, naturally slacken [in matters of religion], the support of the missionaries is absolutely vital for Nagasaki.Te fathers of the order of Santo Domingo have been mindful of this, and throughout

(268) their peregrinations all over Japan they have never abandoned Nagasaki but alwaysremained hidden among us to support us in the faith. For this we are deeply indebtedto them. Especially since the recent changes in the laws [forbidding Christianity], wethought that we would no longer be able to depend on the support of missionarieseven for the last confession,138 but on the contrary the members of this order haveremained, in hiding, all over Nagasaki and have given us their spiritual guidance.

At a time such as this, merely the thought of hiding oneself will naturally weakenone’s will. Te faith in people’s hearts is undoubtedly also weakening in these harshtimes, and many are reverting to the ideas of the pagans. Te missionaries have dem-onstrated to us the ultimate act of love by exerting themselves ever more vigorouslywithout regard for the danger in which they find themselves. All this is clear from the fact that, even though their prison guards are very harsh, only the members of thisorder hear the last confessions of the many prisoners waiting to die a martyr’s death.Four. It is not unusual for the missionaries of any order to be not only exemplary paragons of virtue in their teachings, but also shining mirrors for us in their behavior. Te friars of the order of Santo Domingo are of similarly high caliber. [Te friars] never discriminated between the virtuous and the incompetent. Because it hasbecome more and more difficult for the missionaries to hide away in the hovels of the poor, they cannot take care of people’s souls. It is therefore a mark of truly rareand praiseworthy compassion that the friars of this order take particular care of thesepeople’s souls with all their hearts. Accordingly, without the members of the order of Santo Domingo, the poor of Nagasaki would not have been able to make their last confession, and how many of them would have simply had to die [as heathens]! Tis,undoubtedly, is what people are saying to each other.

Although there are many worthy missionary orders in Japan whose members worktirelessly to give spiritual guidance to thousands of people, of the fathers who areimprisoned [as a result of arrest in Nagasaki], most belong to the order of Santo Domingo, and this is proof that they, more than any of the other orders, have beenconstantly active [in the city].139 [All were burned aliveon 19 August and 10 September 1622. Ruiz de Medina 1999, pp. 440-59.] However, despite their extremely small number overthe last several years, the members of other sects lef in hiding [in Nagasaki], too,have accomplished nothing but amazing feats of pastorship.140 [Members of other sects lef in or around Nagasaki included five Jesuit priests (Juan Baptistade Baeça, Matheus de Couros, Bento Fernandes, Antonio Ishida, and Balthasar de orres), four Franciscans (Martín de Pineda, Antonio de San Buenaventura Casal, Diego Pardo de San Francisco, and Gabriel de Santa Magdalena), and one Augustinian (Bartolomé Gutierrez). A total of roughly sixty-four fathers and brothers still remained within Japan, of whom thirty-four wouldbe executed by the end of the year. Kataoka 1963, p. 8, relying on numbers given in Anesaki 1930].

(269) Six. Of old it has not been rare to see a foot of evil for every inch of good. Fromtime to time, damage has been done to the love for one’s neighbors among Christiansas well, but the friars of the order of Santo Domingo in particular have encouraged[the Christians of Nagasaki], teaching them to love and respect each other, to speak frankly of their faith with all the padres of the different orders, and to work togetherto provide them with places to stay and other necessities, each according to his or herindividual capacity and circumstances. 142

[Tey have also encouraged everyone] toseek the spiritual guidance of confession and to receive their teachings, and, wherethe matters of the brotherhoods are concerned, to not bicker among themselves,imploring each brotherhood to be mindful of everyone’s spiritual welfare, which ismore important than anything and is taught ceaselessly. We have not been in theleast negligent in such prudence

(270) Seven. As we have always stated, but especially since the start of the persecutions,owing to the labors of the friars of the order of Santo Domingo, a special spiritual virtue has appeared within Japanese Christianity that is hard to explain in words. Wewill therefore never cease asking for [the friars’] guidance.Although all the members of the Brotherhoods of the Rosary and of Jesus, one aferthe other, should have signed the above [to prove] that no one is of a different opin-ion in their conscience, because [the membership] runs into the tens of thousands,[the signing] has been done [in everyone’s name] by the elders of the brotherhood [ineach ward].One thousand and six hundred twenty-two years afer the appearance of Our Lord(thirteenth day of the first month of Genna 󰀱).