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Updated: June 3, 2025
Cool, cautious, secretive, distrustful, yet generous, stern, yet humane, by the range and the versatility of his genius he might be not unfavourably contrasted with Julius Caesar. All that Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had wished to do, and failed to do, Iyeyasu speedily accomplished.
In the end I was commaunded to prisson agein, but my lodging was bettered." Adams did not see Iyeyasu again for nearly six weeks: then he was sent for, and cross-questioned a third time. The result was liberty and favour.
Besides, we may be sure that by the time at which the edict was issued, Iyeyasu must have heard of many matters likely to give him a most evil opinion of Roman Catholicism: the story of the Spanish conquests in America, and the extermination of the West Indian races; the story of the persecutions in the Netherlands, and of the work of the Inquisition elsewhere; the story of the attempt of Philip II to conquer England, and of the loss of the two great Armadas.
Into the vacant place of power then stepped the most remarkable man that Japan ever produced, Tokugawa Iyeyasu. Iyeyasu was of Minamoto descent, and an aristocrat to the marrow of his bones. As a soldier he was scarcely inferior to Hideyoshi, whom he once defeated, but he was much more than a soldier, a far-sighted statesman, an incomparable diplomat, and something of a scholar.
To shun shame or win a name, samurai boys would submit to any privations and undergo severest ordeals of bodily or mental suffering. They knew that honor won in youth grows with age. In the memorable siege of Osaka, a young son of Iyéyasu, in spite of his earnest entreaties to be put in the vanguard, was placed at the rear of the army.
The hamlet of Rakuzan, known only for its bright yellow pottery and its little Shinto temple, drowses at the foot of a wooded hill about one ri from Matsue, beyond a wilderness of rice-fields. And the deity of Rakuzan-jinja is Naomasa, grandson of Iyeyasu, and father of the Daimyo of Matsue.
They were eighty thousand in number. When Iyéyasu left the Province of Mikawa and became Shogun, the retainers whom he ennobled, and who received from him grants of land yielding revenue to the amount of ten thousand kokus of rice a year, and from that down to one hundred kokus, were called Hatamoto.
In 1611, Iyeyasu was roused to more active measures by the discovery of a plot between the foreigners and the native converts for the overthrow of the government. Sado, whose mines were worked by thousands of Christian exiles, was to be the centre of the outbreak, its governor, Okubo, being chosen as the leader and the proposed new ruler of the land.
A literary wit put a characteristic epigram into the mouths of three well-known personages in our history: to Nobunaga he attributed, "I will kill her, if the nightingale sings not in time;" to Hidéyoshi, "I will force her to sing for me;" and to Iyéyasu, "I will wait till she opens her lips." Patience and long suffering were also highly commended by Mencius.
The number of Christians then in the empire is said, with gross exaggeration, to have been nearly two millions. But Iyeyasu neither took, nor caused to be taken, any severe measures of repression until 1614, from which date the great persecution may be said to have begun. Previously there had been local persecutions only, conducted by independent daimyo, not by the central government.
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