Taikō’s edicts expelling Christian missionaries

The Taikō’s edicts expelling Christian missionaries are presented through Rodrigues’s recollection to Blackthorne: a policy that threatened priests with expulsion and death, yet was enforced inconsistently. The contrast between the order’s severity and the Taikō’s subsequent restraint makes the edicts, in Rodrigues’s account, a source of both Christian vulnerability and uncertainty about the ruler’s intentions.

Background and Scope

Rodrigues says that Christian missionaries had been able to move freely since their arrival in Japan in 1542, until the Taikō acquired power and introduced prohibitions. He dates the expulsion measures loosely to about ten years earlier, while also describing the banishment of non-traders as occurring ten or twelve years before. His chronology is approximate: he says he had been in these waters, on and off, for seven years, and recounts the history while suffering pain and struggling to keep his place in the conversation.

In Rodrigues’s telling, the Taikō ordered the priests to leave Japan, while traders were excepted from a broader banishment of foreigners. The edicts thus distinguished religious presence from commercial activity. Rodrigues attributes the Taikō’s hostility to Buddhist priests who, he claims, turned the ruler against Christianity; this explanation belongs to the speaker’s polemical account, not to an independently confirmed explanation of the policy.

The Order and Its Retreat

Rodrigues recalls the priests being gathered at Nagasaki, ready to be sent to Macao with written orders forbidding them to return on pain of death. The order’s explicit threat gave the expulsion more than symbolic force: it made return itself a capital offense. Yet, he says, the Taikō then left the assembled priests alone and took no further action against them at that moment.

Rodrigues describes a return to something like the earlier situation, with most of the priests remaining in Kyushu, where they were welcome. He says the Taikō remained friendly despite never converting, closed hardly any churches, banished only two or three Christian daimyos, and did not enforce the expulsion edicts. Rodrigues interprets those daimyos’ banishments as a pretext for taking their lands. In his account, the measures therefore operated unevenly: their threat remained, but broad and sustained enforcement did not follow the original order.

Renewed Persecution and Significance

Rodrigues says the Taikō’s policy changed again three years before the conversation, when he had twenty-six priests crucified at Nagasaki. He describes this as martyrdom without reason and treats the killings as evidence of the Taikō’s hostility to Christianity. He also says the Taikō died soon afterward and interprets that death, and the fate of his descendants, through a Christian idea of divine punishment. These are Rodrigues’s judgments, shaped by his religious convictions and anger.

The account holds the edicts’ fluctuating force in view: a lethal written command, a retreat into relative tolerance, and a later massacre at the same city where the priests had first been assembled. Because Blackthorne hears this history from an injured, intermittently coherent Rodrigues, its details arrive as testimony rather than a detached legal record. The distinction matters: Rodrigues conveys the danger and instability Christians faced, while his sweeping accusations and providential conclusions reveal how he interprets that danger.