remains to be considered. In our present comparative ignorance of
Japanese social history, it is not easy to understand the whole of
the Christian episode. There are plenty of Jesuit-missionary [331]
records; but the Japanese contemporary chronicles yield us scanty
information about the missions--probably for the reason that an edict
was issued in the seventeenth century interdicting, not only all
books on the subject of Christianity, but any book containing the
words Christian or Foreign. What the Jesuit books do not explain, and
what we should rather have expected Japanese historians to explain,
had they been allowed, is how a society founded on ancestor-worship,
and apparently possessing immense capacity for resistance to outward
assault, could have been so quickly penetrated and partly dissolved
by Jesuit energy. The question of all questions that I should like to
see answered, by Japanese evidence, is this: To what extent did the
missionaries interfere with the ancestor-cult? It is an important
question. In China, the Jesuits were quick to perceive that the power
of resistance to proselytism lay in ancestor-worship; and they
shrewdly endeavoured to tolerate it, somewhat as Buddhism before them
had been obliged to do. Had the Papacy supported their policy, the
Jesuits might have changed the history of China; but other religious
orders fiercely opposed the compromise, and the chance was lost. How
far the ancestor-cult was tolerated by the Portuguese missionaries in
Japan is a matter of much sociological interest for investigation.
The supreme cult was, of course, left alone, for obvious reasons. It
is difficult to suppose that the [332] domestic cult was attacked
then as implacably as it is attacked now by Protestant and Roman
Catholic missionaries alike;--is difficult to suppose, for example,
that Converts were compelled to cast away or to destroy their
ancestral tablets. On the other hand, we are yet in doubt as to
whether many of the poorer converts--servants and other common
folk--possessed a domestic ancestor-cult. The outcast classes, among
whom many converts were made, need not be considered, of course, in
this relation. Before the matter can be fairly judged, much remains
to be learned about the religious condition of the heimin during the
sixteenth century. Anyhow, whatever methods were followed, the early
success of the missions was astonishing. Their work, owing to the
particular character of the social organization, necessarily began
from the top: the subject could change his creed only by permission
of his lord. From the outset this permission was freely granted. In
some cases the people were officially notified that they were at
liberty to adopt the new religion; in other cases, converted lords
ordered them to do so. It would seem that the foreign faith was at
first mistaken for a new kind of Buddhism; and in the extant official
grant of land at Yamaguchi to the Portuguese mission, in 1552, the
Japanese text plainly states that the grant (which appears to have
included a temple called Daidoji) was made to the strangers that they
might preach [333] the Law of Buddha "--Buppo shoryo no tame. The
original document is thus translated by Sir Ernest Satow, who
reproduced it in facsimile:--
"With respect to Daidoji in Yamaguchi Agata, Yoshiki department,
province of Suwo. This deed witnesses that I have given permission to
the priests who have come to this country from the Western regions,
in accordance with their request and desire, that they may found and
erect a monastery and house in order to develope the Law of Buddha.
"The 28th day of the 8th month of the 21st year of Tembun.
"SUWO NO SUKE.
[August Seal]"*
[*In the Latin and Portuguese translations, or rather pretended
translations of this document, there is nothing about preaching the
Law of Buddha; and there are many things added which do not exist in
the Japanese text at all. See Transactions of the Asiatic Society of
Japan (Vol. VIII, Part II) for Satow's comment on this document and
the false translation made of it.]
If this error [or deception?] could have occurred at Yamaguchi, it is
reasonable to suppose that it also occurred in other places.
Exteriorly the Roman rites resembled those of popular Buddhism: the
people would have observed but little that was unfamiliar to them in
the forms of the service, the vestments, the beads, the prostrations,
the images, the bells, and the incense. The virgins and the saints
would have been found to resemble the aureoled Boddhisattvas and
Buddhas; the angels and the demons would have been at once identified
with the Tennin [334] and the Oni. All that pleased popular
imagination in the Buddhist ceremonial could be witnessed, under
slightly different form, in those temples which had been handed over
to the Jesuits, and consecrated by them as churches or chapels. The
fathomless abyss really separating the two faiths could not have been
perceived by the common mind; but the outward resemblances were
immediately observable. There were furthermore some attractive
novelties. It appears, for example, that the Jesuits used to have
miracle-plays performed in their churches for the purpose of
attracting popular attention.... But outward attractions of whatever
sort, or outward resemblances to Buddhism, could only assist the
spread of the new religion; they could not explain the rapid progress
of the propaganda.
Coercion might partly explain it,--coercion exercised by converted
daimyo upon their subjects. Populations of provinces are known to
have followed, under strong compulsion, the religion of their
converted lords; and hundreds--perhaps thousands--of persons must
have done the same thing through mere habit of loyalty. In these
cases it is worth while to consider what sort of persuasion was used
upon the daimyo. We know that one great help to the missionary work
was found in Portuguese commerce,--especially the trade in firearms
and ammunition. In the disturbed state of the country [335] preceding
the advent to power of Hideyoshi, this trade was a powerful bribe in
religious negotiation with provincial lords. The daimyo able to use
firearms would necessarily possess some advantage over a rival lord
having no such weapons; and those lords able to monopolize the trade
could increase their power at the expense of their neighbours. Now
this trade was actually offered for the privilege of preaching; and
sometimes much more than that privilege was demanded and obtained. In
1572 the Portuguese presumed to ask for the whole town of Nagasaki,
as a gift to their church,--with power of jurisdiction over the same;
threatening, in case of refusal, to establish themselves elsewhere.
The daimyo, Omura, at first demurred, but eventually yielded; and
Nagasaki then became Christian territory, directly governed by the
Church. Very soon the fathers began to prove the character of their
creed by furious attacks upon the local religion. They set fire to
the great Buddhist temple, Jinguji, and attributed the fire to the
"wrath of God,"--after which act, by the zeal of their converts, some
eighty other temples, in or about Nagasaki, were burnt. Within
Nagasaki territory Buddhism was totally suppressed,--its priests
being persecuted and driven away. In the province of Bungo the Jesuit
persecution of Buddhism was far more violent, and conducted upon an
extensive scale. Otomo Sorin Munechika, the reigning daimyo, not
[336] only destroyed all the Buddhist temples in his dominion (to the
number, it is said, of three thousand), but had many of the Buddhist
priests put to death. For the destruction of the great temple of
Hikozan, whose priests were reported to have prayed for the tyrant's
death, he is said to have maliciously chosen the sixth day of the
fifth month (1576),--the festival of the Birthday of the Buddha!
Coercion, exercised by their lords upon a docile people trained to
implicit obedience, would explain something of the initial success of
the missions; but it would leave many other matters unexplained: the
later success of the secret propaganda, the fervour and courage of
the converts under persecution, the long-continued indifference of
the chiefs of the ancestor-cult to the progress of the hostile
faith.... When Christianity first began to spread through the Roman
empire, the ancestral religion had fallen into decay, the structure
of society had lost its original form, and there was no religious
conservatism really capable of successful resistance. But in the
Japan of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the religion of the
ancestors was very much alive; and society was only entering upon the
second period of its yet imperfect integration. The Jesuit
conversions were not made among a people already losing their ancient
faith, but in one of the most intensely religious and conservative
societies that ever existed. Christianity of any sort could not [337]
have been introduced into such a society without effecting structural
disintegrations,--disintegrations, at least, of a local character.
How far these disintegrations extended and penetrated we do not know;
and we have yet no adequate explanation of the long inertia of the
native religious instinct in the face of danger.
But there are certain historical facts which appear to throw at least
a side-light upon the subject. The early Jesuit policy in China, as
established by Ricci, had been to leave converts free to practise the
ancestral rites. So long as this policy was followed, the missions
prospered. When, in consequence of this compromise, dissensions
arose, the matter was referred to Rome. Pope Innocent X decided for
intolerance by a bull issued in 1645; and the Jesuit missions were
thereby practically ruined in China. Pope Innocent's decision was
indeed reversed the very next year by a bull of Pope Alexander VIII;
but again and again contests were raised by the religious bodies over
this question of ancestor-worship, until in 1693 Pope Clement XI
definitively prohibited converts from practising the ancestral rites
under any form whatsoever.... All the efforts of all the missions in
the Far East have ever since then failed to advance the cause of
Christianity. The sociological reason is plain.
We have seen, then, that up to the year 1645 the ancestor-cult had
been tolerated by the Jesuits [338] in China, with promising results;
and it is probable that an identical policy of tolerance was
maintained in Japan during the second half of the sixteenth century.
The Japanese missions began in 1549, and their history ends with the
Shimabara slaughter in 1638,--about seven years before the first
Papal decision against the tolerance of ancestor-worship. The Jesuit
mission-work seems to have prospered steadily, in spite of all
opposition, until it was interfered with by less cautious and more
uncompromising zealots. By a bull issued in 1585 by Gregory XIII, and
confirmed in 1600 by Clement III, the Jesuits alone were authorized
to do missionary-work in Japan; and it was not until after their
privileges had been ignored by Franciscan zeal that trouble with the
government began. We have seen that in 1593 Hideyoshi had six
Franciscans executed. Then the issue of a new Papal bull in 1608, by
Paul V, allowing Roman Catholic missionaries of all orders to work in
Japan, probably ruined the Jesuit interests. It will be remembered
that Iyeyasu suppressed the Franciscans in 1612,--a proof that their
experience with Hideyoshi had profited them little. On the whole, it
appears more than likely that both Dominicans and Franciscans
recklessly meddled with matters which the Jesuits (whom they accused
of timidity) had been wise enough to leave alone, and that this
interference hastened the inevitable ruin of the missions.
[339] We may reasonably doubt whether there were a million Christians
in Japan at the beginning of the seventeenth century: the more
probable claim of six hundred thousand can be accepted. In this era
of toleration the efforts of all the foreign missionary bodies
combined, and the yearly expenditure of immense sums in support of
their work, have enabled them to achieve barely one-fifth f the
success attributed to their Portuguese predecessors, upon a not
incredible estimate. The sixteenth-century Jesuits were indeed able
to exercise, through various lords, the most forcible sort of
coercion upon whole populations of provinces; but the modern missions
certainly enjoy advantages educational, financial, and legislative,
much outweighing the doubtful value of the power to coerce; and the
smallness of the results which they have achieved seems to require
explanation. The explanation is not difficult. Needless attacks upon
the ancestor-cult are necessarily attacks upon the constitution of
society; and Japanese society instinctively resists these assaults
upon its ethical basis. For it is an error to suppose that this
Japanese society has yet arrived even at such a condition as Roman
society presented in the second or third century of our era. Rather
it remains at a stage resembling that of a Greek or Latin society
many centuries before Christ. The introduction of railroads,
telegraphs, modern arms of precision, modern applied science of all
kinds, has not yet [340] sufficed to change the fundamental order of
things, Superficial disintegrations are rapidly proceeding; new
structures are forming; but the social condition still remains much
like that which, in southern Europe, long preceded the introduction
of Christianity.
Though every form of religion holds something of undying truth, the
evolutionist must classify religions. He must regard a monotheistic
faith as representing, in the progress of human thought, a very
considerable advance upon any polytheistic creed; monotheism
signifying the fusion and expansion of countless ghostly beliefs into
one vast concept of unseen omnipotent power. And, from the standpoint
of psychological evolution, he must of course consider pantheism as
an advance upon monotheism, and must further regard agnosticism as an
advance upon both. But the value of a creed is necessarily relative,
and the question of its worth is to be decided, not by its
adaptability to the intellectual developments of a single cultured
class, but by its larger emotional relation to the whole society of
which it embodies the moral experience. Its value to any other
society must depend upon its power of self-adaptation to the ethical
experience of that society. We may grant that Roman Catholicism was,
by sole virtue of its monotheistic conception, a stage in advance of
the primitive ancestor-worship. But it was adapted only to a form of
society at [341] which neither Chinese nor Japanese civilization had
arrived,--a form of society in which the ancient family had been
dissolved, and the religion of filial piety forgotten. Unlike that
subtler and incomparably more humane creed of India, which had
learned the secret of missionary-success a thousand years before
Loyola, the religion of the Jesuits could never have adapted itself
to the social conditions of Japan; and by the fact of this incapacity
the fate of the missions was really decided in advance. The
intolerance, the intrigues, the savage persecutions carried on,--all
the treacheries and cruelties of the Jesuits,--may simply be
considered as the manifestations of such incapacity; while the
repressive measures taken by Iyeyasu and his successors signify
sociologically no more than the national perception of supreme
danger. It was recognized that the triumph of the foreign religion
would involve the total disintegration of society, and the subjection
of the empire to foreign domination.
Neither the artist nor the sociologist, at least, can regret the
failure of the missions. Their extirpation, which enabled Japanese
society to evolve to its type-limit, preserved for modern eyes the
marvellous world of Japanese art, and the yet more marvellous world
of its traditions, beliefs, and customs. Roman Catholicism,
triumphant, would have swept all this out of existence. The natural
antagonism [342] of the artist to the missionary may be found in the
fact that the latter is always, and must be, an unsparing destroyer.
Everywhere the developments of art are associated in some sort with
religion; and by so much as the art of a people reflects their
beliefs, that art will be hateful to the enemies of those beliefs.
Japanese art, of Buddhist origin, is especially an art of religious
suggestion,--not merely as regards painting and sculpture, but
likewise as regards decoration, and almost every product of aesthetic
taste. There is something of religious feeling associated even with
the Japanese delight in trees and flowers, the charm of gardens, the
love of nature and of nature's voices,--with all the poetry of
existence, in short. Most assuredly the Jesuits and their allies
would have ended all this, every detail of it, without the slightest
qualm. Even could they have understood and felt the meaning of that
world of strange beauty,--result of a race-experience never to be
repeated or replaced,--they would not have hesitated a moment in the
work of obliteration and effacement. To-day, indeed, that wonderful
art-world is being surely and irretrievably destroyed by Western
industrialism. But industrial influence, though pitiless, is not
fanatic; and the destruction is not being carried on with such
ferocious rapidity but that the fading story of beauty can be
recorded for the future benefit of human civilization.
[343]
FEUDAL INTEGRATION
It was under the later Tokugawa Shogun--during the period immediately
preceding the modern regime--that Japanese civilization reached the
limit of its development. No further evolution was possible, except
through social reconstruction. The conditions of this integration
chiefly represented the reinforcement and definition of conditions
preexisting,--scarcely anything in the way of fundamental change.
More than ever before the old compulsory systems of cooperation were
strengthened; more than ever before all details of ceremonial
convention were insisted upon with merciless exactitude. In preceding
ages there had been more harshness; but at no previous period had
there been less liberty. Nevertheless, the results of this increased
restriction were not without ethical value: the time was yet far off
at which personal liberty could prove a personal advantage; and the
paternal coercion of the Tokugawa rule helped to develop and to
accentuate much of what is most attractive in the national character.
Centuries of warfare had previously allowed small opportunity for the
cultivation of the more delicate qualities of that character: the
refinements, the [344] ingenuous kindliness, the joy in life that
afterward lent so rare a charm to Japanese existence. But during two
hundred years of peace, prosperity, and national isolation, the
graceful and winning side of this human nature found chance to bloom;
and the multiform restraints of law and custom then quickened and
curiously shaped the blossoming,--as the gardener's untiring art
evolves the flowers of the chrysanthemum into a hundred forms of
fantastic beauty.... Though the general social tendency under
pressure was toward rigidity, constraint left room, in special
directions, for moral and aesthetic cultivation.