Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/335

Rh The seed thus sown grew apace. Thirty years later, in 1582, the "Annual Letter" sent from Japan to the Jesuit headquarters at Rome puts the number of converts in the empire at 150,000, more or less. This certainly was a wonderful harvest, especially when the paucity of the reapers is taken into consideration. In this year of 1582 there were, indeed, as many as 75 members of the Company of Jesus in the country, some 30 of whom were Japanese. But down to 1577 there had never been more than eighteen, and down to 1563 no more than nine. Of the 150,000 converts, about 25,000 were in Central Japan, 10,000 in the province of Bungo (North-Eastern Kyūshū), and the remainder in certain small maritime fiefs in Kyūshū, Ōmura, Arima, Amakusa, and the Gotō Islands. The method of conversion adopted in these fiefs was simple. The local princelets were eager for the Portuguese trade, and the merchants loyally co-operated with the Jesuit missionaries. The plan pursued by these last was to convert the rulers, and then get them to proscribe all non-Christian cults within their domains. In some cases, only a single day's notice was granted for those who would not adopt the foreign religion to quit their ancestral homes, the images of Buddha were hacked to pieces, and the native temples given over to the flames. In Central Japan, where there was no foreign trade, the conversions seem often to have been the result of honest conviction; but the modus operandi was the same. Hence the fact, inexplicable at first sight, that of 24,000 converts in the neighbourhood of Kyōto, no less than 18,000 were upon one small fief. Kyōto itself never contained more than 300 believers.

The celebrated ruler Nobunaga (see p. 234) treated the Christians with marked favour. On his death in 1582, Hideyoshi, a greater ruler still, assumed the direction of affairs. He, too, befriended the missionaries during the first five years of his sway; consequently, his sudden suppression of Christianity in 1587 came like a bolt from the blue. The account given of this circumstance by Froez, a leading Jesuit, is as follows:—One of Hideyoshi's Court physicians, a bigoted Buddhist, "had noticed