5
The years between 1467 and 1568 are known as Sengoku jidai (the age of warring provinces), a time of civil war, with battles fought at many levels of society. Around 1500, Japan was at the extreme of political decentralization; neither the imperial court nor the bakufu commanded national political authority or respect. Instead, more than 250 military strongmen, known as daimyo, ruled their own territories. Many of these daimyo had served as shugo constables in the provinces and converted these into domains under their control. During the latter third of the sixteenth century, after a century of warfare, an ambitious young daimyo, Oda Nobunaga (1534–82), began the process of reunifying the realm, a task carried on by his successors Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), the founder of the third and final bakufu. Each of these unifiers built on the accomplishments of their predecessors. This chapter describes the Sengoku era; policies undertaken by the three unifiers; and arts and material culture of the era, such as castle décor, tea ceremony, and flower arranging, that these military leaders cultivated to give their rule an air of legitimacy and civility. Many of these cultural pursuits retained connections to Buddhist philosophy and practice. The concluding portion of the chapter describes the arrival of the Europeans—first Portuguese and Spaniards who brought trade and Catholicism, then the Dutch and British. The intervention of Europeans deeply influenced the balance of power during Japan’s age of civil war.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS
The Ōnin War (1467–77), a decade-long conflict over shogunal accession that devastated the city of Kyoto and gutted the power of the Ashikaga bakufu, ushered in the century of warfare. The war was fought between eastern and western leagues of daimyo that descended upon Kyoto with tens of thousands of soldiers who ravaged the city, looting and setting temples and palaces ablaze. Courtiers and townspeople fled the chaotic capital, moving to provincial estates or to the strongholds of prominent daimyo, where they might be employed as artisans or instructors of courtly arts and culture. Remaining residents banded together to build fortifications around their neighborhoods. The conflict ended inconclusively and the Ashikaga bakufu remained nominally in power, although they were seriously weakened. Battles between daimyo and provincial warriors continued to rage in the countryside, and by 1500 the Ashikaga were shoguns in name alone, unable to control the capital city, let alone the provinces.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi described the Sengoku era as a time when “the country was divided, the polity disturbed, civility abandoned and the realm unresponsive to imperial rule.”1 During this era of insurrection, aristocratic or military lineage mattered less than martial and strategic skills; men of low birth overthrew their masters, peasants their landlords, and sons their fathers, to gain control over land in a phenomenon known as gekokujō, or “the lower-ranking overthrow the upper-ranking.” The strongmen who ruled their local territories came from a variety of backgrounds and were called daimyo (big name), a title that continued into the third Tokugawa shogunate, designating the rulers of semiautonomous domains, or han (see chapter 6). Some daimyo had originally held court or shogunal appointments as local deputy governors, governors, or constables. They recruited bands of vassals from among the local warrior-landholder classes (jizamurai) who agreed to fight in return for protection of their own land rights, new rewards of land, or other compensation. Their forces pillaged, burned, and raped their way through enemy lands, but once the enemy was conquered, the daimyo sought to assert law and order and foster economic growth. They built military fortresses, often on bluffs and surrounded by moats, to secure and protect their territories.
Warfare was rampant, as daimyo fought over provincial domains and as petty local barons contended with each other and with the daimyo for territory. In Yamashiro, near Kyoto, the jizamurai ousted their daimyo, elicited peasant support through lower taxes, and held control of the province for a decade. Autonomous communes were built behind fortifications in other areas; residents refused to pay taxes and engaged in uprisings (ikki) and guerrilla warfare to protect their interests. Religious institutions maintained their militaries of monk soldiers (sōhei) and attacked daimyo or one another. Lay followers of the Ikkō (One Mind) sect of True Pure Land Buddhism engaged in large uprisings known as Ikkō ikki. Ikkō followers believed that all people were equal in the eyes of Amida, rejecting court and warrior hierarchies. They lived in a network of self-governing enclaves overseen by True Pure Land headquarters in Kyoto’s Honganji Temple. In 1488, a league of Ikkō followers, composed of peasants allied with jizamurai and low-ranking clergy, seized control of Kaga province and ousted its governor—the first time in Japanese history that a province was controlled by commoners. Leaders promised non-follower peasants that they would lower rents and taxes in creating a new “estate of Buddha” (Buppōryō), and the uprisings soon spread to neighboring areas. The urban version of the Ikkō ikki was found in Kyoto with the Lotus Leagues, militant groups of the Hokke sect of Nichiren Buddhism who provided security and support for commoners in the capital and demanded the abolition of taxes. Their more than twenty temple-fortresses, built in major cities, featured moats and embankments. They hoped to bring all of Kyoto under their control as the “Estate of the Lotus” but were defeated by a coalition between Enryakuji Temple on Mount Hiei and powerful daimyo from adjacent provinces. The campaign against the Lotus Leagues further ravaged large swaths of Kyoto and slaughtered many of its innocent residents.
The variety and complexity of Sengoku-era conflicts are illustrated by the Daishō Ikki (Big League–Little League War) of 1531, a civil war between two different factions within True Pure Land Buddhism, fighting for control of Kaga province. Neighboring daimyo, jizamurai, and believers from other provinces all participated in the conflict. The following year, the head temple, Honganji, was destroyed in Kyoto by an alliance of daimyo and the Lotus Leagues. The temple was reconstructed in Osaka as a powerful citadel from which the leader continued to issue calls for believers to rise against enemies of their faith.
Sengoku battles waged from 1490 to 1530 resulted in many large, self-governing domains headed by a daimyo clan. Over the next three decades these clans schemed, battled, and formed alliances to expand the territories under their control. The most common strategy for expansion had a dual character. Armies first engaged in scorched-earth tactics—burning, pillaging, murdering, and conscripting peasants in order to gain control over territory. Once this was achieved, however, lands were quickly pacified to return the populace to economically productive activity.
Villages began to develop their own defensive tactics against the rampant violence and robbery, building up barriers, increasing weaponry, and skillfully hiding crops and valuables. They played opposing daimyo sides against one another. One of director Kurosawa Akira’s best-regarded films, Seven Samurai (1954), provides a fictionalized account of a sixteenth-century farming village that hires a motley crew of masterless warriors (rōnin) to protect them.
MAP 5. Sengoku daimyo domains in the mid-sixteenth century. From James Murdoch and Isoh Yamagata, A History of Japan during the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse (1542–1651) (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1926).
By the 1550s, some of the most powerful clans—such as the Takeda, Go-Hōjō, and Mōri—could amass armies of fifty thousand or more and hoped to use regional victories in a drive for greater power over all of Japan. They watched for chances to take control of Kyoto, the imperial base from which they could assert control over central Japan. Tactical skill and strategic vision, not to mention military might, were required to gain the upper hand. The daimyo who first achieved such dominance over central Japan, however, was Oda Nobunaga, the young leader of the small province of Owari on the Pacific coast. Nobunaga proved himself a military genius in 1566 at the age of twenty-seven, defeating the much larger army of daimyo Imagawa Yoshimoto in battle. He created strategic alliances with powerful daimyos, such as Matsudaira Motoyasu (an earlier name for Tokugawa Ieyasu) and Takeda Shingen, marrying his daughter to Shingen’s son. Nobunaga dreamed of establishing a unified state, which he referred to as tenka, a word meaning “everything under heaven,” referring to the entirety of Japan. His correspondence carried a vermilion seal with characters reading “tenka fubu,” or “the realm subjected to the military,” and he viewed himself as the tenkajin, or person who ruled the realm. Nobunaga first gained national prominence by helping the fugitive shogun, Ashikaga Yoshiaki, back to power in Kyoto in 1568. There, Nobunaga generously restored the imperial palace for the near-destitute Emperor Ōgimachi, who had to rely on contributions from wealthy daimyo to hold coronation ceremonies; the emperor was reportedly reduced to selling examples of his calligraphy to raise funds. Yoshiaki, however, plotted with Nobunaga’s secular and religious enemies to destroy the rising young warlord. In 1573, Nobunaga responded by surrounding Kyoto with a huge army and chasing the shogun into exile, putting a definitive end to the Ashikaga bakufu.
Nobunaga’s road to mastering the realm was not easy; ambitious rival daimyo schemed to crush him. He disposed of them through tactical genius and technology, forging strategic military partnerships through marriage alliances and using weaponry recently introduced from Europe. Nobunaga seized two important arquebus factories to guarantee access to firepower and organized three-thousand-man gun brigades that rotated in three groups, allowing a volley to fire every ten seconds. His rivals, some still relying on mounted swordsmen and archers, were powerless in the face of such new methods of warfare.
Another obstacle Nobunaga encountered in his drive for national reunification was fierce resistance from religious institutions, including Buddhist monastic armies and Ikkō and Lotus Leagues of militant lay believers. In 1571, Nobunaga infamously burned the Tendai headquarters on Mount Hiei, Enryakuji, an important symbol of the power of institutional Buddhism. He slaughtered three thousand monks and laypeople in the vicinity and completely destroyed the massive complex of temple buildings. Court nobles, clergy, and even some warriors were appalled by this sacrilegious act, but Nobunaga was ruthless with his enemies and the assault on Enryakuji represented military retaliation for the temple’s support of rival daimyo forces. An account of the assault by his vassal Ōta Gyūichi makes clear that Nobunaga acted to punish the monks for offering help to his enemies:
Nobunaga then summoned the monk soldiers from the Enryakuji and promised, striking steel on steel, that if the monks were to give him loyal service on this occasion, he would restore all of the Enryakuji’s domains in the provinces under his rule with their original privileges intact. Moreover, he sent the monks a vermilion-seal document to that effect. But if their religious principles prevented them from supporting one side exclusively, he reasoned, they should not interfere at all. Nobunaga also made it clear to the monks that if they violated these conditions he would burn down the whole mountain.2
The monks, however, ignored this warning, continuing to take the side of other daimyo. The account goes on to describe the resulting carnage:
Surging round in swarms, Nobunaga’s troops in a flash set fire to a multitude of holy Buddhas, shrines, monks’ quarters, and sūtra scrolls; they spared nothing. . . . How miserable it was to see it all reduced to ashes! At the foot of the mountain, men and women, young and old ran about panic stricken. . . . Soldiers shouting battle cries advanced up the mountain from all sides. One by one they cut off the heads of monks and laymen, children, wise men and holy men alike. They presented the heads to Lord Nobunaga, saying: “Here is an exalted prelate, a princely abbot, a learned doctor, all the men of renown at the top of Mt. Hiei”. . . . Thousands of corpses lay scattered about like so many little sticks, a pitiful end.3
Although this act is persistently invoked as an example of Nobunaga’s brutality, his ten-year campaign against the Ikkō ikki in Echizen and Kaga provinces, in which he butchered the combative members of True Pure Land’s Honganji Temple by the tens of thousands, was much bloodier and more atrocious. Nobunaga’s reign of terror ended through the betrayal of one of his generals, Akechi Mitsuhide. In June 1582, Mitsuhide defied orders to lead an army to the west, instead turning his forces to attack Nobunaga, who was resting at Honnōji Temple in Kyoto. Nobunaga and his heir and eldest son Nobutada were forced to commit suicide at Honnōji, a karmically fitting end for a warlord who had himself destroyed so many temples. There are many theories, but no certainty, about why Mitsuhide turned traitor: some claim he had been humiliated and kicked by Nobunaga, others that he sought revenge for his mother’s execution or was manipulated by Hideyoshi or Ieyasu.
History has often depicted Nobunaga as a cruel despot, but he was also a great administrator and leader who stimulated economic development through reducing the power of monopoly guilds, issuing stable currency, building ships and roads, and supporting foreign trade. At the time of his death, he controlled thirty of the roughly sixty provinces in central Japan, including the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Sakai. The task of unifying the realm would be taken up by his vassal Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
Hideyoshi’s origins are obscure, but he was probably the son of a peasant foot soldier from Owari province. He served as a menial attendant under Nobunaga, a sandal-bearer, but made a reputation for himself as a strategist and was quickly promoted to the position of general, conducting important military campaigns. By leading a rout against Mitsuhide’s forces to avenge Nobunaga’s death and then ordering a lavish funeral for his deceased lord, Hideyoshi confirmed his role as heir to the realm. He destroyed other Nobunaga vassals who resisted his assumption of power and made conquest after conquest, gaining control of the island of Shikoku by 1585 and subduing Kyushu by 1587. The provinces held by the Go-Hōjō of Odawara, the last great independent power of the eastern Kanto region, were captured in 1590. Hideyoshi gave control of these eastern hinterlands to his formidable ally and rival Tokugawa Ieyasu, who turned the small fishing village of Edo (present-day Tokyo) into his stronghold.
The last lands to unify lay in the far north, where vicious warfare persisted. Hideyoshi built a new road to the north, which he traveled with his great army of daimyo vassals. Local daimyo who agreed to submit were confirmed in their landholdings, and those who resisted had their lands confiscated. Daimyo had to agree to three conditions: to send their wives and children to live as hostages in Kyoto; to destroy all fortresses but one, which would become a castle for their residence; and to perform land surveys of their holdings. By forcing the northern daimyo to submit to him, Hideyoshi also made their respective vassals recognize that their daimyo’s local authority was granted through his central power. Daimyo lost their character as independent, regional rulers and were integrated into a national realm.
Hideyoshi enforced several important policies to consolidate his power, including the Sword Edict of 1588 and the enforcement of new land and tax systems. These and other policies, such as the transfers of daimyo from one domain to another and the demolition of provincial forts, had been initiated on a limited scale by Nobunaga, but Hideyoshi implemented them across the realm. The second great unifier realized that his position would remain precarious if the jizamurai remained armed in their local areas. Some might rise and overthrow the daimyo who had sworn fealty to Hideyoshi. To prevent such occurrences, he removed warriors from the villages, forcing them to live in castle towns (jōkamachi) under the direct control of their daimyo. By decree, these samurai were prevented from leaving their status group as warriors or from changing their daimyo affiliation, keeping the forces for each of Hideyoshi’s vassal daimyo intact. Although he himself had peasant origins, Hideyoshi froze membership within the elite warrior class, to be determined thereafter by birth into established samurai families. He also prohibited private quarrels that resorted to arms, to demonstrate that only the master of the realm had the authority to settle disputes throughout the land.
Those jizamurai who wished to remain in their village would be treated as farmers and confined to their village and fields. They were disarmed through a massive weapons roundup ordered in 1588; swords, daggers, bows, spears, firearms, and other kinds of weaponry were confiscated. Hideyoshi thus deprived the rural warrior-landowner class of the means for armed resistance and guaranteed that the bearing of arms became the exclusive privilege of the samurai class. In exchange, he promised the people peace, security, and happiness even in the life to come, as the scrap metal from their weapons would be fashioned into an enormous statue of the Buddha.
The separation of farmers from warriors was part of a larger classification of social status. Hideyoshi determined four social classes: samurai, peasants, artisans, and merchants, the latter two collectively known as chōnin (townspeople)—providing the blueprint for the even more rigid class system of the Tokugawa period. Like the farmers in their villages and samurai in their castle towns, the chōnin were confined to their cities and townships. In short, the possibilities for social mobility available in the free-for-all Sengoku environment were being fundamentally eliminated. The subsequent Tokugawa regime passed many more laws and codes restricting possibilities for each of these classes.
Hideyoshi’s new tax system emerged as a result of extensive land surveys. Nobunaga had begun surveying fields with the aim of assessing the productive capacity within his realm, but Hideyoshi was more systematic, ordering land registers containing the annual rice yield (kokudaka) of all land and the registered cultivator of each field. Each village was required to pay a percentage of its total yield as an annual tax. All ranks within the samurai class, from daimyo to the lowest foot soldier, were provided a fixed salary paid in rice from their domain’s rice tax yield. Based on all of this data, Hideyoshi clearly understood both the amount of taxable land he could rely on for economic support and the extent of military and labor power that he could mobilize. This rice-based taxation and remuneration method greatly simplified the complex patterns of landholding and income distribution under earlier estate and provincial systems and continued to be used for the next three hundred years. In order to generate more income for his regime, Hideyoshi also encouraged maritime trade with Southeast Asia, initiating a “red seal” system in 1592 that provided official permits to daimyo and merchants who wished to engage in foreign trade. To deter piracy, he promised to pursue any who brought harm to the red-seal ships.
A letter written by a Jesuit priest in 1594, excerpted here, astutely analyzed Hideyoshi’s accomplishments:
If he give his word of security to any after he has conquered a [province], they shall have no harm, which was not observed by Nobunaga, who never conquered any town or [province] but that he put all the governors thereof to the sword. . . .
He has taken away all their private quarrels and questions, which gave always occasions of their farther risings and tumults. Whosoever is now found in any of these risings and tumults is sure to die therefore. . . .
He will not suffer any of his soldiers or gentlemen to live in idleness, setting them [to] work with buildings and repairing of his forts . . . so as they have no time, nor leisure to procure or practice any treasons or rebellions.
He uses [his power] to change the potentates of one [province] and place them in another far off.4
After achieving unification of the realm, however, Hideyoshi engaged in increasingly megalomaniacal behavior. Responding to a letter of congratulations on his feats from a Korean embassy, Hideyoshi ignored his humble origins and claimed a miraculous birth, that “the wheel of the sun” had entered his mother’s womb, foretelling that his rule would extend “as far as the sun shines.” He boasted of future conquests: “I shall in one fell swoop invade Great Ming” [i.e., China] in order “to introduce Japanese customs and values to the four hundred and more provinces of that country.”5 In 1592 he conscripted over 150,000 troops and launched his invasion, with Korea as the initial stage. His armies quickly defeated the Korean army, captured Seoul, and devastated the country all the way to Pyongyang but were stopped by Ming forces. After years of unsuccessful negotiations with the Ming, Hideyoshi relaunched the invasion in 1597, but he died the following year without attaining a decisive victory. His advisory board of five powerful daimyo allies, including Tokugawa Ieyasu, brought the Japanese troops home.
While many writers of the time glorified the invasion and war, Keinen, a True Pure Land priest serving as chaplain and doctor, recounted the horrors committed in the campaign. Keinen’s diary, recording each day during seven months of the invasion, combines prose and poetry to provide a compassionate eyewitness account of the hellish events. The following entries begin in mid-September 1597 and cover the first days after he landed in Korea:
Eighth Month, 4th Day (September 15, 1597). Everyone is trying to be the first off the ship; no one wants to lag behind. They fall over each other in trying to get at the plunder, to kill people. It is a sight I cannot bear to see.
A hubbub rises
As from roiling clouds and mist
Where they swarm about
In their rage for the plunder
Of innocent people’s goods. . . .
VIII.6. The very fields and hillsides have been put to the fire, not to speak of the forts. People are put to the sword, or they are shackled with chains and bamboo tubes choking the neck. Parents sobbing for their children, children searching for their parents—never before have I seen such a pitiable sight.
The hills are ablaze
With the cries of soldiers
Intoxicated
With their pyrolatry—
The battleground of demons. . . .
VIII.8. They are carrying off Korean children and killing their parents. Never shall they see each other again. Their mutual cries—surely this is like the torture meted out by the fiends of hell. . . .6
A grisly reminder of the bloody campaign can still be found in Kyoto, where a shrine marks the Mimizuka, or ear mound, which contains nearly forty thousand ears and noses sliced off of Koreans and Chinese. Invading Japanese generals were rewarded according to the verifiable number of enemies killed, but entire heads were too heavy to ship home, so ears and noses were packed into barrels filled with brine. Only a small fraction of the total shipped are buried at Mimizuka.
Hideyoshi died begging his advisors, including Ieyasu, to ensure the succession of his five-year-old son, Hideyori. But Ieyasu gained the allegiance of many of the most powerful daimyo and generals. The great Battle of Sekigahara in October 1600 settled the question of who would rule Japan. With over 160,000 combatants, it was the largest gathering of samurai in history, pitting Hideyori supporters from the west against Ieyasu’s eastern forces. After one powerful general on the western side switched allegiances, the Tokugawa eastern army achieved victory.
AZUCHI-MOMOYAMA CULTURE
Castles
Castles were a primary cultural symbol of the Sengoku era, reflecting the conquests and power of their masters with deep moats, huge walls, intricate courtyards, and soaring turrets. They were so important that the final phase of Sengoku, from the 1570s to 1600, is named after two such citadels, Nobunaga’s Azuchi and Hideyoshi’s Momoyama castles. Through these magnificent structures, the unifiers sought cultural expression of their new power.
Early castles were small, defensive, semipermanent fortifications built at the tip of steep mountain ridges, meant for war and not as enduring structures. To prevent enemy approach, two or three lines of such fortifications were built. With the constant warfare of the Sengoku era, daimyo wanted to build more permanent strongholds. They added watchtowers and moats to their own residences and located these on plains or low plateaus to command valleys and protect nearby rice fields. Around these castles there was space for towns to grow, and artisans and merchants, along with warriors, flocked to these new spaces for the opportunity to serve the daimyo. Jōkamachi evolved into large urban communities that served as the daimyo’s administrative headquarters and became the domainal centers for commerce, trade, and craft production. They became the basis for further urbanization in later centuries and provided regional economic opportunities for an emerging merchant class.
While castles were designed to impress the populace with immense size and beauty, their primary function in the Sengoku period was military. They were built like labyrinths, designed to confront an attacking force with an intricate array of deceptive defenses. The moats, outer walls, and watchtowers were the first layer of protection. Once beyond these, attackers plunged into forking, maze-like passageways designed to confine and confuse them while castle defenders peppered them with musket fire and arrows. At the end of the maze stood the four linked towers of the castle keep (donjon), with windows and chutes to drop boulders and boiling water or oil on the enemy. In case of siege, donjons had access to wells and to storage for weapons, rice, salt, and other provisions.
Himeiji, known as the “white heron castle,” is one of the most beautiful examples of this form in Japan. It was designated one of the first UNESCO World Heritage sites in Japan in 1993 and is Japan’s most visited castle. It was also the largest castle complex, with eighty-three buildings and covering 576 acres—fifty times the area of Tokyo Dome stadium. The structure dates originally to the fourteenth century but was significantly reconstructed by Hideyoshi. According to legend, when Hideyoshi was building the castle keep, he ran out of boulders. An old woman who earned her living as a grain miller donated her only millstone, inspiring others to also offer stones to Hideyoshi, which allowed him to complete construction.
FIGURE 21. Himeiji Castle. Photo by Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons.
Architects employed the latest technology and design features to make Himeiji nearly impenetrable. Attackers would first have to cross a series of three large moats in Himeiji’s outer precincts, preventing the enemy from rapid approach because of the time needed to unload and transport necessary supplies across the water. By the time the enemy had crossed the third moat, their strength and reserves would already be diminished. The white plaster façade that gives Himeiji its beautiful appearance was fire resistant, but if attackers employed arson on other structures, moat water could also be used to fight the fire. Himeiji’s high, steeply sloping stone walls made it impossible for the approaching enemy to view the castle directly from the base of the walls. If they managed to scale the walls, they had to pass through eighty-four heavily fortified gates so narrow that only a few could pass through at one time, slowing their advance. Himeiji’s defenses were never tested, however, as it never suffered a major attack.
Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle did not survive the Sengoku era. In 1575, he turned family affairs over to his eldest son and ordered the construction of a great castle fortress in Azuchi in Omi province, which would act as visible evidence of his new role as lord of the realm. Azuchi was strategically located on a hill, on the shores of Lake Biwa between the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean, permitting rapid deployment of troops throughout central Japan. It was close, but not too close, to the imperial capital, some thirty miles away, because while Nobunaga wanted to dominate the court, he wished to avoid entanglements in all of its rituals and ceremonial affairs.
The great castles were not simply fortresses; they were living quarters for the daimyo and the centers of their administration. They gave the warlords who aspired to national leadership the opportunity to add to their legitimacy by wielding the kind of cultural capital that ruling classes had always possessed. In keeping with the interests of the court and Ashikaga shoguns, Azuchi Castle contained a Nō theater. Rather than being simply black or white, its exterior was colorfully painted with tigers and dragons. Its interiors were gorgeously decorated with wall paintings and screens replete with gold leaf and vivid color. Extensive use of gold and silver leaf, pounded paper-thin by skilled craftsmen, helped illuminate the dark interiors of castles. The unifiers lavishly patronized the painters and artisans who decorated their castles. Nobunaga employed Kanō Eitoku (1543–90), the most influential painter of the era, as master artist for Azuchi Castle. It was an immense project requiring Eitoku to organize large teams of painters for every level of the castle, each decorated with a different theme. On the top floor, sliding screen doors were covered with gold-leaf paintings of ancient Chinese rulers, symbolizing Nobunaga’s aspirations to rule all of Japan. Lower floors were decorated with Buddhist themes, horses, falcons, birds and flowers, and landscapes.
Eitoku, the fourth-generation head of the Kanō school of painters, was also the master designer of Hideyoshi’s palaces. He helped establish the Momoyama style, which retained some of the characteristics of Zen ink painting, but with more vibrancy through greater use of color and gold. The Kanō school was established in the fifteenth century when founder Kanō Masanobu was appointed court artist to the Ashikaga bakufu. He specialized in Chinese-style monochrome ink washes, but his son, Motonobu, blended that style with the more colorful yamato-e style of the Tosa school of painters. The hybrid style proved popular for the decorative folding screens (byōbu) and sliding doors (fusuma), described below, that had long been used to partition the large open spaces of palaces and mansions. After Eitoku, the Kanō school continued to produce fine painters and to receive the patronage of powerful rulers, gradually developing an even more decorative, elegant style, transforming Chinese styles and themes to Japanese taste. Eitoku’s adopted son, Sanraku, produced decorative bird and flower paintings that became the hallmark of the Kanō style.
The tower of Azuchi Castle was completed in 1579, when it became Nobunaga’s official residence. Jesuit missionary Luis Frois left a detailed description of the castle’s exterior and interiors, marveling that its “opulence, order and architectural design can compete with the noblest and most sumptuous in Europe . . . as immaculate and elegant as human industry alone could ever accomplish.”7 Following Nobunaga’s death in 1582, the splendid castle was burned to the ground by unknown arsonists, leaving only ruins today.
Interior Architectural Décor
Japanese domestic architecture is renowned for its simple yet elegant designs and use of natural materials. Many of the most renowned European and American architects of the twentieth century, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruno Taut, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, visited Japan and sought to inject the feelings of spaciousness and simplicity in Japanese architecture into their own designs, hoping to move away from the excessive decoration of the Victorian era and toward more minimal, modernist designs. Many innovations in interior design occurred during the Muromachi and Azuchi-Momoyama eras, displayed in the castles and mansions of elites and in Buddhist temples, resulting in an architectural style known as shoin-zukuri. Ashikaga Yoshimasa’s Silver Pavilion is considered the oldest extant example of this style. Shoin-zukuri allowed the ruling warrior elite to gather large numbers of allies and vassals in vast, impressive reception areas.
The interiors of castles and mansions were spacious and open in order to allow cooling breezes to circulate and to accommodate large gatherings. They contained few fixed walls; large wooden pillars supported the roof and the ceiling, which were often decorated with colorful, lavish paintings. In order to use these large spaces flexibly, the Japanese created two key interior features that allowed them to divide space and create smaller private areas—byōbu and fusuma. Both are still widely used in Japanese domestic architecture and décor today.
Byōbu, literally “wind wall,” are a highly portable form of screening, first introduced around the seventh century from Korea, but coming into maturity during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Indoors, they provided protection from drafts, a lightweight means to provide a degree of privacy, or an elegant backdrop for formal occasions. Outdoors, they could be taken on picnics to block wind or discourage voyeurs. They came in a wide variety of heights and lengths, depending on the use for which they were intended, from two to eight panels in width and from a few feet to over ten feet high. The most popular format was a six-panel screen, approximately twelve feet long and five feet high. Panels are constructed by pasting handmade paper (washi) over a latticed bamboo frame and connected to each other using paper hinges, which allowed them to be folded in either direction. In earlier centuries, byōbu panels featured individual paintings framed with silk brocade. Artists soon realized that they might extend a single composition across all of the screens, enhancing the overall impact of their work. The styles and subjects of painting varied widely according to room function. Simple ink paintings were often employed in private quarters, while colorfully painted screens covered in gold leaf might adorn public areas. Byōbu were frequently produced in pairs, allowing the artist to represent two related images or concepts, such as a tiger and a dragon; different episodes from famous literature such as The Tale of Genji; or Raijin and Fujin, the kami of thunder and lightning and the kami of wind.
FIGURE 22. Ogata Kōrin, Fujin and Raijin byōbu, seventeenth century, Tokyo National Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Fusuma are sliding doors installed between interior pillars and set into wooden tracks in the floor and in carved overhead transoms. They provided another effective method for partitioning large, open interiors; fusuma could be closed to create smaller spaces, pushed back to connect rooms, or removed altogether. Like byōbu, they were constructed by pasting layers of washi paper over a lightweight wooden or bamboo framework. While byōbu allowed artists to extend their design across several planes, fusuma enabled them to continue a single design around an entire room.
FIGURE 23. Kanō Sansetsu, The Old Plum Tree, fusuma, seventeenth century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
A third interior architectural feature that appeared in the late Muromachi period is the tokonoma, an alcove space that remains an essential element of interior décor. The tokonoma is the focal point of the room, differentiated by a raised and polished wooden base set above the tatami mat flooring. The tokonoma customarily contained a hanging scroll (kakemono) of ink painting or calligraphy, an incense burner, an arrangement of flowers (ikebana), and sometimes a candleholder. It allowed elites to exhibit their cultural treasures, changing them regularly to match the seasons. The inclusion of tokonoma in interior architecture spread widely among commoners in subsequent centuries, allowing nonelites to also display their aesthetic tastes. Considered the hearth of a room, there are forms of ritual etiquette attached to the tokonoma. Stepping within it is forbidden, except when changing displays, when one must follow a prescribed set of instructions. The most important guest at a gathering should be seated with his back facing the tokonoma because it would be considered untoward if the host pointed his guest directly toward the alcove to show off his treasures.
The flooring material used for rooms, tatami, consists of thin, fragrant mats woven from rush, mounted on a base of straw bound with hemp threads and finished with cloth edgings that varied by the owner’s rank, from plain cotton to elaborate brocades. The term tatami comes from the verb tatamu, to fold or pile. During the Heian era, the flooring of residences was constructed of wood; thin, foldable rush mats were piled up in layers on the floor for seating. During the Muromachi period, temples, castles, and mansions began to install fixed tatami matting across entire rooms, known as zashiki (sitting rooms).
Mats are of a standard size, approximately three feet by six feet (though this size varies slightly between regions), and the area of a given room is described in terms of the number of tatami mats it contains. This practice continues today, even though most rooms are no longer floored with tatami. Many typical rooms today are six to twelve mats in size, roughly one hundred to two hundred square feet. Rooms in castles and mansions, however, could be vast. The first floor of the main keep of Himeiji Castle is sometimes referred to as a “thousand-mat room,” although it only contained around 350, measuring around six thousand square feet.
By the late seventeenth century, tatami flooring was widely used in the homes of wealthy commoners; lower classes might cover earthen floors with a thin layer of foldable tatami mats. Today, most housing has few if any tatami-floored rooms, although it is not uncommon to have one “Japanese-style room,” or washitsu, with tatami flooring, a tokonoma, and other elements of traditional architecture.
An alternative style of domestic architecture, sukiya-zukuri, also emerged during this period. “Suki” indicates refined, elegant taste, and the style was rooted in the aesthetics of a humble mountain hut, highlighting natural materials, rather than in the ostentatious grandeur of castle zashiki. Sukiya rooms were small and simple in ornamentation. In place of massive squared columns, pillars were constructed of slender, polished trunks, sometimes with bark still attached. Walls and ceilings were unadorned; walls were finished with a natural-colored earthen plaster. Sliding shōji screen doors were unpainted, consisting of wooden grids filled with translucent paper. The Katsura Detached Palace, an imperial villa in the outskirts of Kyoto constructed in the early seventeenth century, is considered one of the finest examples of sukiya-zukuri style and was especially admired by later European and American architects. The villa combines rhythmic repetition of rectangular elements, such as tatami mats, shōji screens, and paving stones, with the irregularity of natural shapes in wooden elements and the garden, which was seamlessly integrated with the interior spaces.
Arts of Power—Tea Ceremony and Beyond
Hideyoshi, lacking any traceable lineage, felt the need to claim legitimacy for his position even more acutely than Nobunaga, whose father was a daimyo from a priestly family. Thus, whereas Nobunaga refused to be entangled in the webs of the imperial court and Ashikaga shogunate, Hideyoshi eagerly sought access to the court and emperor, even though they had been shorn of any real authority. He insinuated himself into the position of regent (kampaku), an office reserved for high-ranking court families, through forced adoptions, and compelled the emperor to grant court ranks to his top military supporters, transforming military leaders into an imperial aristocracy. This unsavory process, however, also had the effect of reviving the imperial order of governance. By giving daimyo court offices, Hideyoshi, like Taira no Kiyomori in the twelfth century, infused the court with actual power. The title of Regent, long meaningless, became synonymous with national authority again under Hideyoshi’s domination of the court.
One forum through which Hideyoshi acquired cultural capital was chanoyu, or tea ceremony. Tea was introduced to Japan in the Heian period by Buddhist monks, who drank it for its medicinal and stimulative effects, but from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, rules and an art form developed around the practices of preparing, serving, and drinking tea, resulting in the tea ceremony, which remains a strong symbol of Japanese cultural ideals and traditional aesthetics today. Chanoyu is a composite art that brings together painting, calligraphy, pottery, landscape gardening, architecture, and other traditional arts into a single experience. It is not simply accumulating and displaying the necessary components. The host must carefully select each required item—including a hanging scroll and flower arrangement for the alcove, tea bowls, tea caddy, and incense burners—according to the season, place, and guests involved. Thus, the tea ceremony became the ultimate forum for demonstrating one’s connoisseurship and cultural mastery, an area the new warrior elite desperately wished to cultivate.
Over two centuries, the tea ceremony evolved from a Chinese-oriented form, in which guests sat in upright chairs and the host displayed exquisite, costly Chinese wares in a party setting, to a more solemn and spiritual form, conducted in a small, hut-like room and adding Japanese and Korean pottery and implements that appeared irregular and unrefined to elegant Chinese pieces. The new enthusiasm for local pottery represented both a form of nativist reaction against widespread reverence for Chinese art and an opportunity for merchant-class tea practitioners to assert their own aesthetic values, but it was not embraced by all tea enthusiasts. Throughout the tea ceremony’s subsequent history, there have been two different styles: one, favored by the very wealthy, ornate and relatively free of rules; and another, more rigidly defined, based on aesthetic preferences for rusticity, austerity, and quietude. This latter aesthetic, known as wabi or sabi, had a philosophical component; it was thought to embody Buddhist concepts like transience and imperfection. Tea master Takeno Jōō (1502–55) tried to convey the essence of wabi tea through the following poem by Fujiwara no Teika, which expresses a sense of muted colors and humble, sincere settings:
As far as the eye can see
No cherry-blossom
No crimson leaf:
A thatched hut by a lagoon,
This autumn evening.8
FIGURE 24. Seto-ware tea jar, Muromachi period. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Japanese pottery from ancient kilns in Bizen, unglazed and wood-fired; from Seto, with brown iron glazes; and from Shigaraki, with natural hues and a pebbly finish, are among the ceramic varieties thought to exemplify the wabi aesthetic.
Wabi tea is ideally conducted in a very small room in a teahouse that resembled a modest mountain hut. The doors are low, so that all guests must crouch and enter on hands and knees. In this way, all seated in the tearoom are symbolically of the same status, a feature very meaningful to the merchants who adopted this art form alongside their social betters. This style of tea is most often associated with the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyū (1522–91), who purportedly described the religious philosophies that inform wabi tea as follows:
The tea ceremony of the small room is above all a matter of performing practice and attaining realization in accord with the Buddhist path. To delight in the refined splendor of a dwelling or the taste of delicacies belongs to worldly life. There is shelter enough when the roof does not leak, food enough when it staves off hunger. This is the Buddhist teaching and the fundamental meaning of the tea ceremony. We draw water, gather firewood, boil the water, and make tea. We then offer it to the Buddha, serve it to others and drink ourselves. We arrange flowers and burn incense. In all of this, we model ourselves after acts of the Buddha and past masters. Beyond this, you must come to your own understanding.9
Rikyū was born to a family of merchants in the port city of Sakai, which was governed by a council of wealthy merchants and was a peaceful and prosperous city where the arts flourished. He studied tea under Takeno Jōō, a merchant who earned his fortune producing military saddles and who was an early proponent of wabi-style tea. Jōō sought to conduct tea ceremonies that captured the rustic tranquility of a mountain hut, like the ten-foot-square hut of Kamo no Chōmei, in the midst of the city. His pupil Rikyū further developed the wabi tea aesthetic, as seen in the Tai-an tearoom he designed for Kyoto’s Myōkian Temple, featuring rough earthen walls and exposed cedar beams. His wabi taste is further demonstrated in the assymetrical, matte-black tea bowls that he is said to have commissioned from a tile maker named Chōjirō for use by Hideyoshi. The pleased magnate presented the tile maker’s family with a seal reading raku (enjoyment), and the family adopted this as a name, passing down its techniques through generations of what became a ceramic dynasty. True raku ware is still highly prized, but the term raku has been adopted more generally to denote low-fired pottery.
Rikyū eventually developed such renown in the tea world that he was employed as tea master by Oda Nobunaga, who used tea as a political tool to win influence among merchants trading in military goods. Nobunaga used his power to command prized tea utensils (meibutsu) from allies and enemies alike, sometimes awarding these to influential supporters or loyal vassals. Tea ceremony offered a source of refinement for the samurai class; for merchants, it became a vehicle for mingling with the ruling samurai class and provided an arena for demonstrating their wealth and taste. By Nobunaga’s time, it was thought that men with sufficient wealth who did not practice tea were boorish, completely lacking in intellectual and aesthetic sophistication. Tea played several important political roles: tea masters acted as envoys between daimyo, tea gatherings provided a civilized meeting place for diplomatic negotiations, and valuable utensils acted as gifts to strengthen alliances.
After Nobunaga’s death, Rikyū served as tea master for Hideyoshi, who inherited his predecessor’s precious collection and demonstrated even more passion for the tea ceremony. The new ruler’s enthusiasm for tea became the source of fortune and misfortune alike for Rikyū. Initially they got along very well; Rikyū became a close confidante of the ruler, whose sponsorship of chanoyu further propelled its popularity among both warriors and wealthy commoners. Hideyoshi once stated, “People must be moderate in their desires, but I willfully pay too much attention to chanoyu, as I do to hunting.”10 He sometimes favored a grand, ostentatious approach to tea that contrasted with Rikyū’s more austere teachings, for example, by constructing a portable tearoom with walls, shelves, and utensils completely covered in gold—either gold leaf or gold-sprinkled lacquerwork. In 1587, Hideyoshi ordered that an enormous, unprecedented ten-day tea party be held on the grounds of the Kitano-tenmangu Shrine in Kyoto; he commanded tea masters and practitioners from around the realm to attend. The party was attended by as many as eight hundred masters, alongside tens of thousands of Kyoto-ites, including courtiers, samurai, and townspeople. Eventually, however, Hideyoshi and Rikyū had some sort of falling-out that led the short-tempered ruler to order that his tea master commit ritual suicide through disembowelment (seppuku). Legend has it that Hideyoshi was insulted because he had to walk under a wooden statue of Rikyū installed above the gate of Daitokuji Temple in Kyoto. Another popular explanation is that Hideyoshi was jealous of a treasured tea bowl in Rikyū’s possession. The tea master’s fate may also have been due to the politics of the day. Because of Hideyoshi’s planned invasions of Korea, the city of Sakai had been eclipsed by Hakata, a port city in Kyushu where the campaign would be launched. Hakata merchants and tea masters had risen in importance around Hideyoshi and may have exercised their new influence by denouncing Rikyū.
Following the invasion of Korea, many daimyo brought back Korean ceramics and even captive potters, seeking to circulate or produce new types of ceramic wares that might become popular in the lucrative tea-ceremony trade. Korean artisans introduced new technologies, like kilns capable of firing fine white porcelain. One result was the development of Imari ware, prized by European and American collectors, featuring a cobalt blue underglaze, overglazes of red and gold, and intricate designs of flowers, plants, or scenery.
Not long after the deaths of Rikyū and Hideyoshi, the stricter class boundaries enacted by the Tokugawa Shogunate resulted in further separations in the world of tea. The leading tea masters, including Furuta Oribe, Kobori Enshū, and Katagiri Sekishū, were themselves daimyo, whose followers were limited to the elite members of the ruling warrior class. Commoners flocked to the schools established by the descendants of Sen no Rikyū: Urasenke, Omotesenke, and Mushanokojisenke. Tea remained an essential element for demonstrating refinement among elite warriors and spread more widely among the townspeople as a discipline for learning proper etiquette and comportment.
Another quintessentially Japanese art, ikebana, was also formalized during the sixteenth century and served as a means to demonstrate one’s taste and cultural capital. Like the tea ceremony in modern Japan, ikebana is often considered a feminine art, when in fact both were elite, masculine arts rarely open to women until the nineteenth century. Appreciation of flowers is well recorded in both literature and the visual arts since at least the Heian era, with writers celebrating the beauty of wisteria, irises, chrysanthemums, peonies, and other seasonal blossoms. Paintings of interiors often featured large arrangements of flowers in elegant containers. Flower-comparison (hana-awase) games among courtiers challenged competitors to match peerless blossoms with containers that would best highlight their beauty.
Some claim that ikebana’s earliest roots lie in seventh-century floral offerings to Buddhist deities. According to one account, when court noble Ono no Imoko returned from his journey as envoy to the Sui court in China, he brought back instructions that floral offerings should not be haphazard but should represent a Buddhist trinity, with a long central stem flanked by two shorter stems. Imako became the abbot of Kyoto’s Rokkakudo Temple, which eventually became the headquarters of Ikenobo, Japan’s oldest and largest school of ikebana. A text compiled by Ikenobo monks, Sendensho, describes fifty-three types of arrangements befitting different ceremonial occasions, such as departure for battle, a boy’s coming of age, and weddings. The shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436–90), a well-known patron of the arts, gathered leading ikebana designers at his Silver Pavilion estate and gave the Ikenobo school the title “master of the way of flowers.” In the seventeenth century, Emperor Go-Mizunoo was also an avid patron of ikebana.
Like Rikyū’s spiritualization of tea, Ikenobo attached Buddhist significance to the number and placement of stems, claiming that ikebana’s main aim was religious and not merely decorative—to “search for and obtain the seed of enlightenment in the face of the wind that scatters flower petals and leaves, never seeking mere entertainment for a day.”11 As with Zen rock gardens, nature was the model for ikebana arrangements: they should create symbolic Buddhist landscapes, with a large evergreen stem symbolizing a sacred mountain, willow stems or vines acting as shade forest, white flowers serving as waterfalls, and stems from flowering shrubs as foothills. Ikenobo specialized in complex, towering arrangements of seven to eleven large branches, known as rikka, suitable for the mansions of the wealthy.
As we have seen with tea, Hideyoshi’s tastes tended toward the grand and extravagant. One observer remarked, “The very privies are decorated with gold and silver, with paintings in fine colors. All of these precious things are used as if they were dirt.”12 The rooms of the ruler’s palace were filled with gigantic rikka arrangements. His tea master, Rikyū, disdained such ostentatious compositions. Chanoyu also required ikebana in the tokonoma of the teahouse, but Rikyū believed that the best floral arrangements should be natural and unforced, made by simply tossing a few scant stems into a well-chosen container—a style of ikebana that became known as nage-ire (thrown in), which contrasts with the highly regulated composition of rikka. A legendary story about the two men portrays the tea master’s attempt to demonstrate his simpler aesthetic sense to Hideyoshi. The ruler had heard that Rikyū’s garden was filled with a spectacular blossoming of a rare variety of morning glory and asked to visit. When he arrived, he was surprised to see that all of the vines and flowers had been removed and the grounds of the garden covered with sand and pebbles. Angrily allowing himself to be led to the teahouse, he was greeted by Rikyū, who had placed a single, perfect morning-glory blossom on an ancient Chinese bronze vessel in the tokonoma.
As ikebana developed over the following centuries, it retained both highly formal, structured styles and more quick and casual styles. Degrees of formality in Japan’s spatial arts—including architecture, garden design, ikebana, and calligraphy—are often expressed by three terms introduced in chapter 3: shin, gyō, and sō, just as the speed and rhythms of Nō drama and other temporal arts are expressed with jo, ha, and kyū (see chapter 4). Shin represents the most formal, associated with the slow, the symmetrical, and the imposing, and with human control or shaping. Sō is the most informal, associated with speed, assymetry, and a relaxed attitude—with things in their natural state. The gyō middle way represents a blending of shin and sō styles. These three styles are readily apparent in calligraphy, with shin characters evenly spaced and perfectly formed while sō features loose, flowing brushstrokes and letters of different sizes that run into one another.
THE ARRIVAL OF EUROPEANS—JAPAN’S CHRISTIAN CENTURY
Many historians have contemplated the possible connections between tea and Christianity, both of which thrived in Japan during the Sengoku era. The Jesuits, the first Catholic order to arrive in 1549, encountered chanoyu in their audiences with daimyo and recorded the ritual in detail. Some have theorized that Rikyū’s wabi tea, emphasizing humility, modesty, and equality, was influenced by Christian teachings, or that cross-like designs on some tea wares symbolized Christian faith. While the evidence is far from conclusive, there is no doubt that several influential daimyo who were followers of Rikyū were also Catholic converts and that the arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish in the sixteenth century deeply affected political and cultural developments.
In 1506, a treaty sanctioned by a papal bull divided the newly discovered non-Christian world between then leading European powers, giving Spain dominion over lands to the south and west and Portugal rights to the east. The Portuguese established outposts in Goa in the south of India, Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, the Molucca Islands in Indonesia, and Macao in China. At that time Europeans knew of Japan as “Zipangu,” a remote country revealed in the thirteenth-century travel accounts of Venetian explorer Marco Polo. Those stories had inspired Christopher Columbus to set sail for Asia in search of Zipangu, but he found the New World instead. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in Japan, by accident, in 1542 when a Chinese junk carrying three Portuguese merchants was shipwrecked on the island of Tanegashima, off Kyushu. The matchlock muskets the Japanese acquired from the merchants became known as tanegashima. Soon afterward, Portuguese ships traveling through Asia began to include stops in Japan.
The Portuguese arrived first as merchants carrying knowledge of Western civilization alongside their trading goods to the Japanese, who proved curious about the outside world and eager to experiment with new ideas, technologies, and fashions. They found the Europeans themselves rather barbaric—unable to use chopsticks and eating with their fingers instead, and incapable of understanding written characters. The Japanese called these new visitors nanbanjin (southern barbarians), because they arrived from the south, where Portuguese holdings were located. Many forms of material culture brought by the Portuguese were captured in paintings on large folding screens, known as nanban byōbu, that depicted long-nosed merchants in hats and billowing pantaloons accompanied by dark-skinned servants, priests and monks of different Catholic orders, large Portuguese carrack ships with gleaming white sails, and churches constructed in southern Japan.
FIGURE 25. Kanō Sanraku, nanban byōbu, seventeenth century, Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Portuguese merchants traded silk, medicines, and weapons for Japanese silver, which they carried to Ming China. Sengoku-era daimyo eagerly welcomed the ships to their ports for opportunities to trade. The firearms supplied by the Portuguese directly influenced the political balance of power during the age of civil war. The Japanese carefully studied the arquebus to learn how to manufacture their own and quickly established weapons factories. Cannons were acquired later and were used in Sengoku warfare for the first time in the 1580s. The Europeans also shared navigational and shipbuilding technology, enabling the Japanese to establish trading outposts throughout Southeast Asia. The introduction of glass lenses allowed the Japanese to explore both the heavens above and the microscopic world of the earth below. Other cultural imports, like playing cards, clothing, tobacco, and food, were also widely adopted by the Japanese populace. New foods, including spices like pepper, New World crops like sweet potatoes and pumpkins, sugar, deep-fried foods (tempura), and other delicacies like bread (pan), sponge cakes (kasutera), and candies (konpeitō), transformed the Japanese diet and remain popular today. Many Japanese admired the foreigners’ fashions; Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and other daimyo would sometimes amuse themselves by dressing in velvet pantaloons, adorning themselves with rosaries and jewelry bearing images of Christ or the Virgin Mary.
Indeed, Christianity was such a powerful agent of change that the era is sometimes known as Japan’s “Christian century.” Missionaries arrived soon after the merchants. In 1544 a man named Yajirō, wanted for manslaughter, escaped from Japan on a Portuguese ship headed for Goa in India. There, he was baptized as a Christian and studied at the Jesuit College with Francis Xavier (1506–52). Yajirō told Xavier that Japan was ripe for Christianity, and they soon set sail with two Spanish Jesuits, arriving at Satsuma in Kyushu in 1549. The Roman Catholic Church was seeking new converts to offset its losses to the Protestant Reformation in Europe. When the missionaries arrived during the Sengoku era, the domains were governed by autonomous daimyo, whom the missionaries referred to as “kings.” The Japanese initially believed that the Jesuit missionaries were bringing new Buddhist teachings, since they had arrived from India. This mistake was due in part to Yajirō, who translated Deus as Dainichi, the cosmic Buddha of Shingon.
Missionary activity spread as the daimyo came to see the advantages of throwing in their lot with the Europeans. Along with religion came the possibility for lucrative trade with China and Southeast Asia via the impressive Portuguese ships. The Jesuits urged ship captains to dock only at ports where the daimyo was Christian or allowed churches to be built in his domain. Nagasaki became the main Portuguese trading depot, quickly transforming from a small fishing village into an international trading center. By the 1560s, a Christian community was also established in Kyoto, but Kyushu remained the center of Catholicism and the site of most Jesuit colleges and churches—especially after 1580, when daimyo Ōmura Sumitada, christened Dom Bartolomeu, gave Jesuits full control of the city of Nagasaki. The rate of Jesuit success in southern Japan was largely due to the conversion of Ōmura and two other powerful daimyo, whose subjects were subsequently ordered to also accept Christ en masse. These daimyo agreed to destroy the “idols” and shrines of the native faiths in their lands, and in return they received access to the weaponry, wealth via trade, and material assistance that helped them achieve victories in the wars of Sengoku. Mass conversions account for how a small band of missionaries could report such impressive numbers of converts. In 1553, five foreign missionaries reported four thousand converts; by 1579, fifty-five missionaries achieved one hundred thousand. By the end of the sixteenth century, nearly 2 percent of the Japanese population were considered Christian, more than double the percentage in Japan today.
The Jesuit strategy in Japan, as in China, was to target the elites with the hope that they might order such mass conversions in their territories. To help make converts, the missionaries composed dictionaries, printing these and other European works like Aesop’s Fables with movable-type presses they introduced in 1590. Alexandro Valignano (1539–1606), supervisor of the Jesuit mission in Japan, believed that in order to win over the Japanese daimyo, Jesuits must not only learn the language but also abandon European dress and habits, learning to eat, drink, and behave like the Japanese themselves. He championed the training of native Japanese priests, over the doubts of his colleagues, who were not convinced of the sincerity of their Japanese acolytes. Their suspicions were confirmed by the case of Fabian Fucan, a Kyoto native raised in a Zen temple who entered the Jesuit seminary in 1586 and taught Japanese literary classics to other Jesuits at a missionary college in Amakusa in Kyushu. Resentful over the Jesuits’ refusal to grant him a promotion to full priesthood, Fucan abandoned Catholicism. In 1620, as religious persecution grew under the subsequent Tokugawa regime, he published Deus Destroyed, a harsh critique of both Christianity and the Europeans who propagated it, which became the foundation of much anti-Christian polemic. Fucan charged that the “adherents of Deus” sought to “destroy the Law of the Buddhas and Way of the Gods.” He wrote: “They have sent troops and taken over such countries as Luzon and Nova Hispania, lands of barbarians close to animals in nature. But our empire surpasses other lands by far in its fierce bravery. For that reason the ambition to usurp this country by diffusing their doctrine, even if it takes a thousand years, has penetrated the very marrow of their bones.”13
The Christian mission had flourished under the favor of Oda Nobunaga, whose use of the arquebus gave him an advantage in the unification of war-torn provinces. Nobunaga’s alliance with the Christians was partially due to the leverage it gave him against the powerful Buddhist sects. Hideyoshi also initially showed favor toward the Christians, but on a visit to Kyushu he was shocked to see the extent to which the religion had taken hold, since it remained small and unthreatening in the capital. He further turned against the Portuguese after learning of the extent of the slave trade, primarily Japanese girls sold into sexual slavery for service on ships or in Portugal and Macao. Hideyoshi wrote Gaspar Coelho, vice-provincial of the Jesuit mission in Japan, in July 1587 to demand an end to the purchase and enslavement of Japanese men and women and the return of Japanese slaves. Later that year he issued an edict banning Christian proselytization and ordering the expulsion of the foreign missionaries from Japan within twenty days. The ban was not strictly enforced, however, and the missionaries continued their activities, although a bit more discreetly.
Pope Gregory XIII had guaranteed the Jesuits an exclusive mission in Japan in 1585, but Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians began to arrive in the 1590s nonetheless. Competition between sects resulted in aggressive rivalries and territorialism. In 1596, relations between Hideyoshi and the Jesuits and Franciscans were aggravated when a Spanish galleon en route from Manila to Acapulco was blown off course and its rich cargo was confiscated by local daimyo. This action sparked bitter protests by both the Franciscans and the Jesuits. In the controversy that resulted, Hideyoshi’s suspicions about imperialist intentions on the part of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns were further intensified. He ordered the crucifixion of all Christians in Kyoto. While the original list contained hundreds of names, sympathetic officials reduced it to twenty-six, including a mixture of native Japanese Christians and priests, four Spaniards, one Mexican, and one Indian. They were marched south from Kyoto to Nagasaki for their crucifixion so that their execution might serve as a warning to the large Christian population there. The martyrs became known as the Twenty-Six Saints of Japan.
After being appointed shogun in 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu initially opened all ports to foreign trade without restrictions, hoping to expand revenues through international commerce. He ignored Hideyoshi’s anti-Christian edicts, tolerating the Catholic missionaries and priests. The Protestant rivals of the Spanish and Portuguese, the Dutch and British, soon began to arrive. The first Dutch ship landed in 1600, the only surviving vessel of a five-ship expedition dispatched in 1598. The second Dutch ship arrived in 1609, followed by the British in 1613, but the latter abandoned pursuit of trade with Japan in 1635, unhappy with the paltry profits. Trading companies, not national governments, operated the ships of both countries. Dutch and British traders warned Ieyasu about the tendency of their Catholic enemies to instigate social and political unrest and then take control of countries, as the Spanish had done in Central and South America and the Philippines, and as the Portuguese, on a smaller scale, had done in Macao and Goa. They assured the shogun that, as traders, they were more interested in profit than either conversion or conquest.
One of these European advisers, Will Adams (1564–1620), has been immortalized in James Clavell’s best-selling novel Shogun (1975), later adapted into a popular TV miniseries with a relatively high degree of historical accuracy. Adams was an English navigator who reached Japan on the Dutch ship Liefde in 1600. He settled there and became a trusted advisor to Ieyasu on issues of diplomacy and maritime trade. Forbidden to leave Japan by the shogun, Adams was granted samurai status—a rare occurrence for non-Japanese throughout history—and given a high-ranking position among Ieyasu’s vassals. He was rechristened Miura Anjin, “the pilot of Miura,” and given an estate in Uraga, next to the entrace of Edo Bay. Unable to return to his wife and children in England, he married the daughter of a local official and immersed himself in a Japanese lifestyle. He died in 1620, at age fifty-five. Adams’s gravesite is adjacent to a memorial to Francis Xavier in Nagasaki.
When Adams and his nine surviving crewmates arrived on Japanese shores, they were met by local officials and Jesuit priests. Recognizing that the arrivals represented their national enemies, the Jesuits claimed that the Liefde was a pirate vessel and that its crew should be executed. Under Ieyasu’s orders, the crew were imprisoned at Osaka Castle, where Adams was interrogated by the future shogun himself. In a letter to his British wife, he described the interview and Ieyasu’s decision to spare the lives of his crew:
Coming before the king, he viewed me well, and seemed to be wonderfully favourable. He made many signs unto me, some of which I understood, and some I did not. In the end, there came one that could speak Portuguese. By him, the king demanded of me of what land I was, and what moved us to come to his land, being so far off. I showed unto him the name of our country, and that our land had long sought out the East Indies, and desired friendship with all kings and potentates in way of merchandise, having in our land diverse commodities, which these lands had not. . . . Then he asked whether our country had wars? I answered him yea, with the Spaniards and Portugals, being in peace with all other nations. Further, he asked me, in what I did believe? I said, in God, that made heaven and earth. He asked me diverse other questions of things of religions, and many other things: As what way we came to the country. Having a chart of the whole world, I showed him, through the Strait of Magellan. At which he wondered, and thought me to lie. Thus, from one thing to another, I abode with him till mid-night.14
Ieyasu denied the Jesuits’ request to execute the navigator and his crew. Adams’s ability to gain the shogun’s confidence was worrisome for the Jesuits, who first attempted to convert him, and, after failing, offered to sneak him out of Japan on a Portuguese ship in defiance of Ieyasu’s will. Adams’s astute counsel and the many disturbances among the Catholic sects were undoubtedly factors influencing Ieyasu’s 1614 edict ordering expulsion of all Catholic priests and missionaries and ordering all Japanese to renounce Christianity and register their families’ Buddhist affiliations at state-approved temples. Ieyasu died in 1616 and was replaced as shogun by his son Hidetada, who exerted stronger efforts to destroy Christianity and control the Europeans, restricting their merchants to ports at Nagasaki and nearby Hirado.
The third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, who began his reign in 1623, further accelerated the process of stamping out Christianity. Since Ieyasu’s days, various forms of torture were used to force believers to renounce their faith; common methods included mutilation, fire, waterboarding, and being hung headfirst over sewage pits. Christian daimyo recanted quickly rather than lose their domains under the new Tokugawa regime; samurai tended to disavow Catholicism more readily than ordinary commoners, who often held steadfast and were subsequently executed. From 1614 to 1640, five to six thousand believers were killed in this way. In the 1630s, Iemitsu forbade all Japanese ships from leaving the home islands, prohibited Japanese from going abroad, and prevented those who had been abroad from returning.
The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38 led to the final steps taken by the Tokugawa to remove the scourge of Catholic Christianity from Japan. Shimabara Peninsula and the nearby island of Amakusa, near Nagasaki, were Christian strongholds. When the new daimyo assigned by the Tokugawa to rule the area imposed onerous taxes, the peasants of Shimabara and Amakusa, along with many masterless samurai (rōnin), rose in protest. Their rebellion had Christian overtones, invoking Jesus and Maria (Mary). Nearly forty thousand rebels converged at the site of Hara Castle and survived a three-month siege by an army of one hundred thousand, composed of forces from the Tokugawa bakufu and neighboring domains. Cannons acquired from the Dutch finally helped defeat the rebels. Following the rebellion, Iemitsu issued the strictest edicts, which abolished all foreign commerce except for trade conducted with Koreans, Chinese, and the Dutch. The European traders, however, were restricted to living on a small manmade island known as Deshima in Nagasaki Bay. As the only non-Asians allowed in Japan, the Dutch became the chief source of Japanese knowledge of European civilization for the next two centuries.
The orders issued by the first three shoguns to limit and control foreign interaction are often referred to as “closed country” (sakoku) edicts, but this is a misnomer that ignores the fact that trade with China, Korea, and the Ryūkyū kingdom (now Okinawa) continued under less restrictive conditions.
In summary, endemic warfare consumed the capital and countryside from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century as local warriors sought to gain control over the lands they occupied, religious sects fought among themselves, and daimyo competed to expand their autonomous territories. Daimyo military and economic aims were furthered through trade and weaponry acquired through Portuguese and Spanish merchants, who arrived in Japan accompanied by Catholic missionaries. Daimyo also forged alliances and built networks of merchant and temple supporters by cultivating cultural pursuits such as the tea ceremony, which served as an important forum for political maneuvering. The duality of their military and cultural lives is symbolized in the castles of the era, imposing martial facilities that, nonetheless, contained finely wrought paintings, Nō theaters, and tearooms.
In the 1560s, the young daimyo Oda Nobunaga began the process of national reunification, which would be completed under his deputy Hideyoshi, followed by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who established Japan’s third and final shogunate in 1603.
FURTHER READING
Berry, Mary Elizabeth. The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
———. Hideyoshi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Clulow, Adam. The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Elison, George, and Bardwell Smith, eds. Warlords, Artists, and Commoners: Japan in the Sixteenth Century. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981.
Hall, John W., Nagahara Keiji, and Kozo Yamamura, eds. Japan Before Tokugawa: Political Consolidation and Economic Growth, 1500–1650. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Mitchelhill, Jennifer, and David Green. Castles of the Samurai: Power and Beauty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Pitelka, Morgan. Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons and Tea Practitioners in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005.
———, ed. Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Tsang, Carol R. War and Faith: Ikkō Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2007.
Watsky, Andrew M. Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004.
RECOMMENDED FILMS
Heaven and Earth. 1990. Feature film directed by Kadokawa Haruki. Relates the historical rivalry between two Sengoku daimyo, Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin.
Rikyu. 1991. Feature film directed by Teshigahara Hiroshi. Fictionalized biography of the late stages of the tea master’s life, depicting his relationship with Hideyoshi.
Seven Samurai. 1958. Feature film directed by Kurosawa Akira. Historical drama about a Sengoku-era village that hires seven masterless samurai to combat bandits who plan to steal their crops. Considered one of the best films of all time.
Silence. 2016. Feature film directed by Martin Scorsese. This adaptation of Endō Shusaku’s novel of the same name follows two Jesuit priests who travel to Japan after the Shimabara rebellion.
Throne of Blood. 1957. Feature film directed by Kurosawa Akira. Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in Japan during the Sengoku era.