The Confusion

“The Portuguese brought Christianity and guns. My ancestors embraced both. To people living in Sakai in those days it must have seemed an intelligent choice. The harbor was crowded with European ships bristling with cannons and flying Christian banners from every spar. Also, the Jesuits liked to establish missions in poor areas, and despite the silver mines, our ancestral land was still poor. So when a mission was established there at the invitation of my great-great-grandfather, the miners and peasants embraced Christianity without hesitation. Here was a creed that preached to the poor and the meek, and they were both.

“At the same time my great-great-grandfather was learning the secrets of gunsmithing, and teaching this skill to the local artisans. Men whose fathers had hammered out hoes and shovels were now making firelocks worth a hundred times as much.

“Now the peasants who lived down below, working the paddies, began to make trouble for their Samurai, our cousins. Some of these peasants began to turn Christian, which our cousins abhorred; others were growing disrespectful of their lords, who seemed to have lost the mandate of heaven. In those days there was a thing called katana-gari which means sword-hunt, in which the Samurai would search the peasants’ homes for armaments. They began to find not only swords but firearms.

“So naturally the cousins allied themselves with powerful men who sought to unify Japan. This tale extends across three generations and as many shoguns-the first two being Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi-and has more twists and turns than a game trail over the mountains. The long and the short of it is that they threw in their lot with Tokugawa Ieyasu, who, a hundred years ago, won the Battle of Sekigahara, in part by using foot-soldiers armed with guns. In that battle my cousins won glory, and they won even more in the storming and the destruction of Osaka Castle, which took place in the Year of Our Lord 1615. My father was eighteen years old at the time, and he was one of the defenders of that castle, and of the Toyotomi family which was extinguished on that day.

“The Wheel had turned again. The Tokugawa shogunate claimed a monopoly on the minting of coins-my family lost its chief source of revenue. Firearms were banned-another source of income vanished. Foreign trade was strictly controlled-Sakai became an island cut off from the rest of Japan. But worst of all, for my family, was that Christianity had been outlawed. My father had not been the only Christian to have allied himself with the Toyotomi family, and Tokugawa Ieyasu believed that the Jesuits and the Toyotomis, allied together, were the only force that could defeat him. Both were extirpated.

“At the time of my father’s birth there were a quarter of a million Christians in Japan and at the time of his death there were none. This did not occur all at once but gradually, beginning with the execution of a few Jesuit missionaries in the Year of Our Lord 1597 and culminating forty years later in a few great battles and massacres. My father perhaps did not really grasp what was happening until it was nearly finished. His brother had gone back to our ancestral land to look after the mines and practice Christianity in secret. My father remained in Sakai for a while trying to make a living in foreign trade. But first this fell under the strict control of the shogun, and from there it was gradually choked off. The Portuguese were banned altogether because they kept bringing over priests disguised as mariners. Sakai and Kyoto were closed to foreign trade altogether. Only Nagasaki was left open, and only to the Dutch, who-being heretics-did not care about saving Japanese souls from eternal fire, and only wanted our money.

“So my father had become a masterless Samurai, or ronin-one of a large host of Christian ronin brought into being by the policies I have described. He moved round to the opposite coast of Honshu-the coast that faces towards Korea and China-and worked as a smuggler. He smuggled silk, pepper, and other goods to Japan, and smuggled fugitive Christians out to Manila.

“Now, formerly my family had had no contacts with Manila whatsoever, because we were exporters of silver. If the commerce of Asia is like a fire, then silver is like the air blown into it to make it blaze up, and Manila is the bellows. For it is to Manila that the Spanish galleon sails every year, full of silver from the mines of New Spain. My family’s mines could not compete against this, and so in generations past we had been more apt to trade with Macao, and other ports on the coast of China-a vast country that is eternally ravenous for silver.