It seems that at this time Hideyoshi was ambitious [pg 198] to attain official appointment which would legitimately descend to his children and make him the founder of a new line of shōguns. He applied to the ex-shōgun Yoshiaki, whom Nobunaga had deposed[162] and who was now living in retirement, intimating that it would be to his interest to adopt him as his son so that he could be appointed by the emperor as shōgun. But Yoshiaki declined to comply with this suggestion on account of Hideyoshi's humble origin. In place of this appointment, however, he was installed a.d. 1585 by the Emperor Ōgimachi as Kuambaku, which is higher in rank than any other office in the gift of the imperial court. Hitherto this title had been borne exclusively by members of the Fujiwara family, and it must have been a severe blow to their aristocratic pride to have a humble plebeian who had risen solely by his own talents thus elevated by imperial appointment to this dignified position. He also received at this time the name of Toyotomi[163] by which he was afterward called, and in recognition of his successful conquest of much territory he received a.d. 1575 the honorary title of Chikuzen-no-kami.
There were a few years from about a.d. 1583—with an important exception which will be given [pg 199] below—when peace reigned in all the territories of Japan, and when Hideyoshi devoted himself wisely and patiently to the settlement of the feudal condition of the country. It was at this time he began building his great castle at Ōsaka which occupied about two years. Workmen were drawn from almost all parts of Japan, and a portion of it is said to have been finer and more massive than had ever been seen in Japan. This magnificent work[164] survived its capture by Ieyasu in 1614 and remained undisturbed down to the wars of the restoration in 1868, when it was burned by the Tokugawa troops at the time they were about to evacuate it.
The exception to which reference is made above was the important campaign which Hideyoshi was called upon to conduct in the island of Kyūshū against the Satsuma clan.[165] The distance at which Kyūshū lay from the centre of imperial operations, the mountainous and inaccessible character of a great part of the territory, made it no easy matter to deal with the refractory inhabitants of this island. The Satsuma clan even at that early day had a reputation for bravery and dash which made them feared by all their neighbors. The prince of Satsuma at this time was Shimazu Yoshihisa, a member of the same family who held the daimiate until the abolition of the feudal system. It is a tradition that the first of this family was a son of Yoritomo, who in [pg 200] the year a.d. 1193 was appointed governor of Satsuma. Like all the feudal princes of the period, the prince of Satsuma was ambitious to extend his dominion as far as possible. Hyūga, Bungo, Higo, and Hizen were either wholly or in part subject to his authority, so that by the year a.d. 1585 it was the boast of the prince that eight provinces acknowledged him as lord.[166]
It was in this critical period that Hideyoshi was appealed to for help by the threatened provinces. He first sent a special envoy to Kagoshima, who was directed to summon the prince to Kyōto to submit himself to the emperor and seek investiture from him for the territories which he held. Shimazu received this message with scorn, tore up the letter and trampled it under his feet, and declared that to a man of mean extraction like Hideyoshi he would never yield allegiance. Both parties recognized the necessity of deciding this question by the arbitrament of war.
Hideyoshi called upon thirty-seven provinces to furnish troops for this expedition. It is said that 150,000 men were assembled at Ōsaka ready to be transported into Kyūshū. The vanguard, consisting of 60,000 men under Hidenaga, the brother of Hideyoshi, set sail January 7, a.d. 1587. Troops from the western provinces joined these, so that this advanced army numbered not less than 90,000 men.
In due time, January 22d, Hideyoshi himself, with his main army, consisting of 130,000 men, left Ōsaka, marching by land to Shimonoseki, and from this point crossing over to Kyūshū. The Satsuma armies were in all cases far outnumbered, and step by step were compelled to retreat upon Kagoshima. Hideyoshi had by means of spies[167] acquired a complete knowledge of the difficult country through which his armies must march before reaching Kagoshima. After much fighting the Satsuma troops were at last driven into the castle of Kagoshima, and it only remained for Hideyoshi to capture this stronghold in order to end in the most brilliant manner his undertaking.
It was at this juncture that Hideyoshi made one of these surprising and clever movements which stamp him as a man of consummate genius. Instead of capturing the fortress and dividing up the territory among his deserving generals, as was expected, he restored to the Shimazu family its original buildings, viz., the provinces of Satsuma and Ōsumi and half the province of Hyūga, only imposing as a condition that the present reigning prince should retire in favor of his son, and that he should hold his fief as a grant from the emperor. Thus ended one of the most memorable of the [pg 202] campaigns which Hideyoshi had up to this time undertaken, and with this also closed a series of events which exerted a permanent influence on the history of Japan.
It will be desirable at this point to trace the incidents which had transpired in connection with the Jesuit fathers. It will be remembered that the work of the fathers[168] was much interfered with by the political troubles which preceded the advent of Nobunaga. Owing to their taking sides with his enemies he was very much incensed against the Buddhist priests and visited his indignation upon them in a drastic measure.[169] His desire to humiliate the Buddhist priests probably led him to assume a favorable attitude towards the Christian fathers. As long therefore as Nobunaga lived, churches were protected and the work of proselyting went on. Even after the death of Nobunaga in a.d. 1582 nothing occurred for some time to interfere with the spread of Christianity. Hideyoshi was too much occupied with political and military affairs to give much attention to the circumstances concerning religion. Indeed the opinion of Mr. Dening[170] in his Life of Hideyoshi is no doubt true, that he was in no respect of a religious temperament. Even the superstitions of his own country were treated with scant courtesy by this great master of men.
Gregory XIII. seeing what progress the Jesuits were making, and realizing how fatal to success any conflict between rival brotherhoods would be, issued [pg 203] a brief in a.d. 1585, that no religious teachers except Jesuits should be allowed in Japan. This regulation was exceedingly distasteful to both the Dominicans and the Franciscans, especially after the visit of the Japanese embassy to Lisbon, Madrid, and Rome had directed the attention of the whole religious world to the triumphs which the Jesuits were making in Japan. Envy against the Portuguese merchants for their monopoly of the Japanese trade had also its place in stirring up the Spaniards at Manila to seek an entrance to the island empire. The opposition with which Christianity had met was represented as due to the character and behavior of the missioners. In view of these circumstances the Spanish governor of Manila sent a letter to Hideyoshi, asking for permission to open trade with some of the ports of Japan. Four Franciscans attached themselves to the bearer of this letter and in this way were introduced into the interior of Japan. Among the valuable presents sent to Hideyoshi by the governor of Manila was a fine Spanish horse[171] with all its equipments. These Franciscans who came in this indirect way were permitted to establish themselves in Kyōto and Nagasaki. They were at once met by the protest of the Jesuits who urged that the brief of the pope excluded them. But these wily Franciscans replied that they had entered Japan as ambassadors and not as religious fathers, [pg 204] and that now when they were in Japan the brief of the pope did not require them to leave.
A very bitter state of feeling from the first therefore manifested itself between the Jesuits and Franciscans. The latter claimed that the opposition they met with was due to the plots and intrigues of the Jesuits, and they openly avowed that the Jesuit fathers through cowardice failed to exert themselves in the fulfilment of their religious duties, and in a craven spirit submitted to restrictions on their liberty to preach. Hideyoshi's suspicion was aroused against the foreigners about this time, a.d. 1587, by the gossip of a Portuguese sea-captain which had been reported to him. This report represented the captain as saying: “The king, my master, begins by sending priests who win over the people; and when this is done he despatches his troops to join the native Christians, and the conquest is easy and complete.”[172] This plan seemed so exactly to agree with experiences in China, India, and the East Indies, that Hideyoshi resolved to make it impossible in Japan. He therefore issued an edict in the year a.d. 1587 commanding all foreign religious teachers on pain of death to depart from Japan in twenty days. This edict, however, gave leave to Portuguese merchants “to traffic and reside in our ports till further order; but withal we do hereby strictly forbid them, on pain of [pg 205] having both their ships and merchandises confiscated, to bring over with them any foreign religious.”[173]