“Suwo No Suke
[August Seal]”*
[*In the Latin and Portuguese translations, or rather pretended translations of this document, there is nothing about preaching the Law of Buddha; and there are many things added which do not exist in the Japanese text at all. See Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan (Vol. VIII, Part II) for Satow’s comment on this document and the false translation made of it.]
If this error [or deception?] could have occurred at Yamaguchi, it is reasonable to suppose that it also occurred in other places. Exteriorly the Roman rites resembled those of popular Buddhism: the people would have observed but little that was unfamiliar to them in the forms of the service, the vestments, the beads, the prostrations, the images, the bells, and the incense. The virgins and the saints would have been found to resemble the aureoled Boddhisattvas and Buddhas; the angels and the demons would have been at once identified with the Tennin [334] and the Oni. All that pleased popular imagination in the Buddhist ceremonial could be witnessed, under slightly different form, in those temples which had been handed over to the Jesuits, and consecrated by them as churches or chapels. The fathomless abyss really separating the two faiths could not have been perceived by the common mind; but the outward resemblances were immediately observable. There were furthermore some attractive novelties. It appears, for example, that the Jesuits used to have miracle-plays performed in their churches for the purpose of attracting popular attention…. But outward attractions of whatever sort, or outward resemblances to Buddhism, could only assist the spread of the new religion; they could not explain the rapid progress of the propaganda.
Coercion might partly explain it,—coercion exercised by converted daimyo upon their subjects. Populations of provinces are known to have followed, under strong compulsion, the religion of their converted lords; and hundreds—perhaps thousands—of persons must have done the same thing through mere habit of loyalty. In these cases it is worth while to consider what sort of persuasion was used upon the daimyo. We know that one great help to the missionary work was found in Portuguese commerce,—especially the trade in firearms and ammunition. In the disturbed state of the country [335] preceding the advent to power of Hideyoshi, this trade was a powerful bribe in religious negotiation with provincial lords. The daimyo able to use firearms would necessarily possess some advantage over a rival lord having no such weapons; and those lords able to monopolize the trade could increase their power at the expense of their neighbours. Now this trade was actually offered for the privilege of preaching; and sometimes much more than that privilege was demanded and obtained. In 1572 the Portuguese presumed to ask for the whole town of Nagasaki, as a gift to their church,—with power of jurisdiction over the same; threatening, in case of refusal, to establish themselves elsewhere. The daimyo, Omura, at first demurred, but eventually yielded; and Nagasaki then became Christian territory, directly governed by the Church. Very soon the fathers began to prove the character of their creed by furious attacks upon the local religion. They set fire to the great Buddhist temple, Jinguji, and attributed the fire to the “wrath of God,”—after which act, by the zeal of their converts, some eighty other temples, in or about Nagasaki, were burnt. Within Nagasaki territory Buddhism was totally suppressed,—its priests being persecuted and driven away. In the province of Bungo the Jesuit persecution of Buddhism was far more violent, and conducted upon an extensive scale. Otomo Sorin Munechika, the reigning daimyo, not [336] only destroyed all the Buddhist temples in his dominion (to the number, it is said, of three thousand), but had many of the Buddhist priests put to death. For the destruction of the great temple of Hikozan, whose priests were reported to have prayed for the tyrant’s death, he is said to have maliciously chosen the sixth day of the fifth month (1576),—the festival of the Birthday of the Buddha!
Coercion, exercised by their lords upon a docile people trained to implicit obedience, would explain something of the initial success of the missions; but it would leave many other matters unexplained: the later success of the secret propaganda, the fervour and courage of the converts under persecution, the long-continued indifference of the chiefs of the ancestor-cult to the progress of the hostile faith…. When Christianity first began to spread through the Roman empire, the ancestral religion had fallen into decay, the structure of society had lost its original form, and there was no religious conservatism really capable of successful resistance. But in the Japan of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the religion of the ancestors was very much alive; and society was only entering upon the second period of its yet imperfect integration. The Jesuit conversions were not made among a people already losing their ancient faith, but in one of the most intensely religious and conservative societies that ever existed. Christianity of any sort could not [337] have been introduced into such a society without effecting structural disintegrations,—disintegrations, at least, of a local character. How far these disintegrations extended and penetrated we do not know; and we have yet no adequate explanation of the long inertia of the native religious instinct in the face of danger.
But there are certain historical facts which appear to throw at least a side-light upon the subject. The early Jesuit policy in China, as established by Ricci, had been to leave converts free to practise the ancestral rites. So long as this policy was followed, the missions prospered. When, in consequence of this compromise, dissensions arose, the matter was referred to Rome. Pope Innocent X decided for intolerance by a bull issued in 1645; and the Jesuit missions were thereby practically ruined in China. Pope Innocent’s decision was indeed reversed the very next year by a bull of Pope Alexander VIII; but again and again contests were raised by the religious bodies over this question of ancestor-worship, until in 1693 Pope Clement XI definitively prohibited converts from practising the ancestral rites under any form whatsoever…. All the efforts of all the missions in the Far East have ever since then failed to advance the cause of Christianity. The sociological reason is plain.
We have seen, then, that up to the year 1645 the ancestor-cult had been tolerated by the Jesuits [338] in China, with promising results; and it is probable that an identical policy of tolerance was maintained in Japan during the second half of the sixteenth century. The Japanese missions began in 1549, and their history ends with the Shimabara slaughter in 1638,—about seven years before the first Papal decision against the tolerance of ancestor-worship. The Jesuit mission-work seems to have prospered steadily, in spite of all opposition, until it was interfered with by less cautious and more uncompromising zealots. By a bull issued in 1585 by Gregory XIII, and confirmed in 1600 by Clement III, the Jesuits alone were authorized to do missionary-work in Japan; and it was not until after their privileges had been ignored by Franciscan zeal that trouble with the government began. We have seen that in 1593 Hideyoshi had six Franciscans executed. Then the issue of a new Papal bull in 1608, by Paul V, allowing Roman Catholic missionaries of all orders to work in Japan, probably ruined the Jesuit interests. It will be remembered that Iyeyasu suppressed the Franciscans in 1612,—a proof that their experience with Hideyoshi had profited them little. On the whole, it appears more than likely that both Dominicans and Franciscans recklessly meddled with matters which the Jesuits (whom they accused of timidity) had been wise enough to leave alone, and that this interference hastened the inevitable ruin of the missions.
[339] We may reasonably doubt whether there were a million Christians in Japan at the beginning of the seventeenth century: the more probable claim of six hundred thousand can be accepted. In this era of toleration the efforts of all the foreign missionary bodies combined, and the yearly expenditure of immense sums in support of their work, have enabled them to achieve barely one-fifth f the success attributed to their Portuguese predecessors, upon a not incredible estimate. The sixteenth-century Jesuits were indeed able to exercise, through various lords, the most forcible sort of coercion upon whole populations of provinces; but the modern missions certainly enjoy advantages educational, financial, and legislative, much outweighing the doubtful value of the power to coerce; and the smallness of the results which they have achieved seems to require explanation. The explanation is not difficult. Needless attacks upon the ancestor-cult are necessarily attacks upon the constitution of society; and Japanese society instinctively resists these assaults upon its ethical basis. For it is an error to suppose that this Japanese society has yet arrived even at such a condition as Roman society presented in the second or third century of our era. Rather it remains at a stage resembling that of a Greek or Latin society many centuries before Christ. The introduction of railroads, telegraphs, modern arms of precision, modern applied science of all kinds, has not yet [340] sufficed to change the fundamental order of things, Superficial disintegrations are rapidly proceeding; new structures are forming; but the social condition still remains much like that which, in southern Europe, long preceded the introduction of Christianity.
Though every form of religion holds something of undying truth, the evolutionist must classify religions. He must regard a monotheistic faith as representing, in the progress of human thought, a very considerable advance upon any polytheistic creed; monotheism signifying the fusion and expansion of countless ghostly beliefs into one vast concept of unseen omnipotent power. And, from the standpoint of psychological evolution, he must of course consider pantheism as an advance upon monotheism, and must further regard agnosticism as an advance upon both. But the value of a creed is necessarily relative, and the question of its worth is to be decided, not by its adaptability to the intellectual developments of a single cultured class, but by its larger emotional relation to the whole society of which it embodies the moral experience. Its value to any other society must depend upon its power of self-adaptation to the ethical experience of that society. We may grant that Roman Catholicism was, by sole virtue of its monotheistic conception, a stage in advance of the primitive ancestor-worship. But it was adapted only to a form of society at [341] which neither Chinese nor Japanese civilization had arrived,—a form of society in which the ancient family had been dissolved, and the religion of filial piety forgotten. Unlike that subtler and incomparably more humane creed of India, which had learned the secret of missionary-success a thousand years before Loyola, the religion of the Jesuits could never have adapted itself to the social conditions of Japan; and by the fact of this incapacity the fate of the missions was really decided in advance. The intolerance, the intrigues, the savage persecutions carried on,—all the treacheries and cruelties of the Jesuits,—may simply be considered as the manifestations of such incapacity; while the repressive measures taken by Iyeyasu and his successors signify sociologically no more than the national perception of supreme danger. It was recognized that the triumph of the foreign religion would involve the total disintegration of society, and the subjection of the empire to foreign domination.
Neither the artist nor the sociologist, at least, can regret the failure of the missions. Their extirpation, which enabled Japanese society to evolve to its type-limit, preserved for modern eyes the marvellous world of Japanese art, and the yet more marvellous world of its traditions, beliefs, and customs. Roman Catholicism, triumphant, would have swept all this out of existence. The natural antagonism [342] of the artist to the missionary may be found in the fact that the latter is always, and must be, an unsparing destroyer. Everywhere the developments of art are associated in some sort with religion; and by so much as the art of a people reflects their beliefs, that art will be hateful to the enemies of those beliefs. Japanese art, of Buddhist origin, is especially an art of religious suggestion,—not merely as regards painting and sculpture, but likewise as regards decoration, and almost every product of aesthetic taste. There is something of religious feeling associated even with the Japanese delight in trees and flowers, the charm of gardens, the love of nature and of nature’s voices,—with all the poetry of existence, in short. Most assuredly the Jesuits and their allies would have ended all this, every detail of it, without the slightest qualm. Even could they have understood and felt the meaning of that world of strange beauty,—result of a race-experience never to be repeated or replaced,—they would not have hesitated a moment in the work of obliteration and effacement. To-day, indeed, that wonderful art-world is being surely and irretrievably destroyed by Western industrialism. But industrial influence, though pitiless, is not fanatic; and the destruction is not being carried on with such ferocious rapidity but that the fading story of beauty can be recorded for the future benefit of human civilization.