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First, because it witnessed the apparition of those mighty captains, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Iyeyasu, types of men that a race seems to evolve for supreme emergencies only, types requiring for their production not merely the highest aptitudes of numberless generations, but likewise an extraordinary combination of circumstances.
But harsher measures followed upon an event which took place in 1615, the very year after the issuing of the edict. Hideyori, the son of Hideyoshi, had been supplanted fortunately for Japan by Iyeyasu, to whose tutelage the young man had been confided.
Nobunaga had taught Buddhism a severe lesson about the danger of such intriguing. Iyeyasu decided that the Jesuit intrigues had a political object of the most ambitious kind; but he was more patient than Nobunaga. By 1603 he, had every district of Japan under his yoke; but he did not issue his final edict until eleven years later.
But in 1606, after having solidly established his power, Iyeyasu for the first time showed himself decidedly opposed to Christianity by issuing an edict forbidding further mission work, and proclaiming that those who had adopted the foreign religion must abandon it. Nevertheless the propaganda went on conducted no longer by Jesuits only, but also by Dominicans and Franciscans.
But so long as this foreign religion was suffered to attack and to sap the foundations of order, there never could be peace.... Convictions like these must have been well established in the mind of Iyeyasu when he issued his famous edict. The only wonder is that he should have waited so long.
This lasted until near the end of the sixteenth century, when it happened that Iyeyasu, the supreme military commander of his day, belonged to the Minamoto family, and was therefore able to assume the office of Shogun himself. He and his descendants held the office until it was abolished at the Restoration.
Later on the daimyo were even required to furnish security for their good behaviour: they were obliged to pass a certain time of the year* in the shogun's capital, leaving their families as hostages during the rest of the year. The entire administration was readjusted upon a simple and sagacious plan; and the Laws of Iyeyasu prove him to have been an excellent legislator.
Having founded the temple, the next care of Iyémitsu was to pray that Morizumi, the second son of the retired emperor, should come and reside there; and from that time until 1868, the temple was always presided over by a Miya, or member of the Mikado's family, who was specially charged with the care of the tomb of Iyéyasu at Nikkô, and whose position was that of an ecclesiastical chief or primate over the east of Japan.
Its doctrines were humane, in the best meaning of the word; and striking evidence of its humanizing effect on government policy may be found in the laws and the maxims of that wisest of Japanese rulers Iyeyasu.
Why Iyeyasu should have termed it a "false and corrupt religion," both in his Legacy and elsewhere, remains to be considered. From the Far-Eastern point of view he could scarcely have judged it otherwise, after an impartial investigation. It was essentially opposed to all the beliefs and traditions upon which Japanese society had been founded.
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