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Updated: June 20, 2025


But all these inferences rest on little more than hypothesis. Ki no Hirozumi, Ki no Kosami, Otomo Yakamochi, Fujiwara Umakai, and Fujiwara Tsugunawa having all failed, the Court was compelled to have recourse to the representatives of a Chinese immigrant family, the Saka-no-ye.

The Kume were descended from Amatsu Kume no Mikoto, and their duties were to act as chamberlains and as guards of the Court. Finally, there was the Oga-uji, descended from Okuninushi, which makes the eighth of the great uji. Thus, the military uji of Mononobe and Otomo gave to the State twenty-two ministers out of forty during a space of some twelve centuries.

When the Yamato sovereign undertook his eastward expedition, Umashimade with his monobe subdued the central districts, and Michi no Omi with his otomo and Okume-be consolidated these conquests. Not military matters alone, but also criminal jurisdiction, belonged to the functions of these two.

To be able to adapt the Chinese ideographs skilfully to the purposes of written Japanese was a feat achieved by comparatively few. Much richer, however, is the realm of poetry. The compiler's name is not known certainly; he is believed to have been either Tachibana no Moroe or Otomo no Yakamochi. Old manuscripts and popular memory were the sources, and the verselets total 4496, in twenty volumes.

This procedure seems to have weighed cogently with Otomo, who was keenly desirous of attracting foreign traders and obtaining from them not only wealth but also novel and effective weapons of war. Xavier remained four months in Bungo and then set sail for Goa in February, 1552. He died in December of the same year, and thus his intention of returning to Japan was defeated.

This appreciation looks somewhat exaggerated when placed side by side with the incidents that occurred in Sumitada's fief, as related above. Nevertheless, Otomo certainly did render powerful aid, not within his own fief alone but also through his influence elsewhere.

The Island of the Nine Provinces was then under the rule of three great clans; the Shimazu, in the south; the Otomo, in Bungo, and the Ryuzoji, in Hizen.

This most disheartening record underwent a complete change in 1576, when the son of the Bungo feudatory, a youth of some sixteen years, and, two years later, the feudatory himself, Otomo, embraced the Christian faith. In the first Annual Letter sent to Rome after these events a striking admission is made: "It is Otomo, next to God, whom the Jesuits have to thank for their success in Japan."

And during this reign of Yuryaku, when Lord Otomo was killed in a fatal engagement with the Sinra troops, his henchman, Tsumaro, crying, "My master has fallen; what avails that I alone should remain unhurt?" threw himself into the ranks of the enemy and perished. Loyalty to the death characterized the Japanese in every age.

The Otomo family was a branch of the Fujiwara. One of its members, Nakahara Chikayoshi, received from Minamoto Yoritomo the office of high constable of the Dazai-fu, and to his son, Yoshinao, was given the uji of Otomo, which, as the reader knows, belonged originally to Michi no Omi, a general of the Emperor Jimmu.

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