* * *
In the aftermath of the battle, the people of Arima and Nagasaki celebrated and gave thanks to God for their deliverance. Masses were held, bells pealed out the happy news. The threat of Ryūzōji, so long hanging over them all, was gone. In the villages and towns of Arima and in the city of Nagasaki, people filled the streets to dance, the brothels did a brisk trade, teahouses ran out of food, sake casks swiftly emptied, the first bounty of spring was enjoyed and the world seemed a different place. It seemed a huge victory for Catholic Japan; surely the rest of the country must soon follow the calling to Christ.
Honors and material prizes of war were given to all. The Jesuits, for their role in the victory, were bestowed a huge tract of land bordering Nagasaki to the north, including the large village of Urakami. Their foothold in Japan had grown considerably.
And Yasuke, as one of the main figures in the battle, must also have been well rewarded with a handsome bounty of treasure. He was again celebrated, valued. And, if those accolades would soon pass—as he well understood—he now had several pouches full of silver and long strings of copper coins. And with them, the power to bankroll more options and a world of future possibilities for the first time in many years. A man or woman with money was their own master.
In an age when few had options, the African samurai now had many.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Possible Paths
There is no verified record of Yasuke after the autumn of 1582.
It’s possible Yasuke was killed in the Battle of Okitanawate.
It’s also possible that the African warrior sent by the Jesuits may have been another man entirely.
Historic conjecture suggests otherwise. It’s highly likely Yasuke was the African gunner at the Battle of Okitanawate and, as likely, that he survived.
But, we must officially now concede to the spoils and muddle of time and delve into the world of historic detective work to find possible paths for the African samurai. The search begins with verifiable accounts of men who may be him: African men not simply visiting temporarily (the sailors), but residents in Japan, carrying out various roles in the years and decades following Nobunaga’s fall. Our story continues with them.
Yasuke may or may not be one of these men, but there were so few Africans in Japan at this time, that at least one of them is likely to have been him, and their lives and stories do mirror the most likely avenues he would have taken.
* * *
The Battle of Okitanawate put the island of Kyushu firmly in the hands of the Satsuma clan, but the real struggle for Japan’s second largest island was only just beginning.
As part of the spoils of the battle, the Jesuits had gotten their hands upon new lands and were able to strengthen their hold over the original territory they held around Nagasaki. The local populations within, however, weren’t so quick to accept new management. While many of the people of the new Jesuit lands were already Christian, they’d never actually been subject to Jesuit governance. Regardless of the gifting Arima may have done, there were still plenty of local power brokers, minor samurai and village headmen, who were not Catholic and bridled under alien rule.
Coelho, the Jesuit mission superior, was a soldier at heart, and headstrong, and thought he knew exactly how to deal with unruly peasants. While the Jesuits tried their best to win over their new wards’ hearts and minds by fair means, some military backing went a long way. However, teaching Japanese peasants a lesson was not always an easy job. They could be violent, and there is a rich history of overbearing samurai getting their comeuppance at the end of various sharp farming and fishing implements or rusty weapons scrounged from the dead on battlefields. (Akechi Mitsuhide hadn’t been the first samurai lord to end his life on the tip of a peasant’s bamboo spear.)
Coelho sent his increasingly powerful and well-armed military to pay insubordinates a visit, to ensure their obedience and submission. This military force would, were he still alive, likely have included Yasuke. To these new territories, the Jesuits brought along their deadly fusta warship, manned by the militia, as backing, and spent the months after the Battle of Okitanawate demonstrating who now was in charge.
Yasuke and the other militia men would have accompanied priests, brothers or acolytes ashore to various villages. While the Jesuits politely explained the new governmental arrangements, the soldiers stood nonchalantly in the background. The message was clear. And, whether the locals liked it or not, one or more of their young folk were taken to Nagasaki to live with the Jesuits and taught to be good Catholics. The Japanese villagers called them “hostages.” The children were taken from more than twenty villages.
Meanwhile, the Shimabara peninsula to Nagasaki’s south had fallen back under the full control of Arima, but in name only. All of Arima’s decisions were now subject to Satsuma approval and the Satsuma clan left a garrison of hundreds in Arima’s lands to make sure that remained the case.
And Arima’s neighbor, Lord Ōmura (who’d given Nagasaki to the Jesuits four years before), had been under Ryūzōji’s overlordship, but with Ryūzōji’s death, he also now recognized the Satsuma clan as his new liege. This had major consequences for the Jesuits. From the Japanese political perspective, the Jesuits (residents in Ōmura land), were perceived as Ōmura’s vassals and hence vassals of whomsoever he recognized as his overlord. In 1584, after the Battle of Okitanawate, the Jesuits, therefore, were also forced to submit to Satsuma power.
In evidence of this new arrangement, within a month of the decisive battle, the Satsuma had installed an overseer of Nagasaki, Uwai Kakken, and insisted the Jesuit military and diplomatic activities cease forthwith. The Satsuma were not at all happy with the Jesuits exerting any kind of military force, nor trying to build Christian coalition armies which could potentially one day threaten their new domination of northwest Kyushu. Priests, the Satsuma argued, should stick to priestly endeavors—especially foreign priests. Each week, the Satsuma troops arrived in Nagasaki in ever-increasing numbers. For the first time since its founding, the Catholic city was now under the suzerainty of non-Christians.
Meanwhile in Japan’s heartland, the Kyoto region, competition to succeed Nobunaga as national hegemon was coming to a head. Hideyoshi’s stroke of genius in taking over control of the Oda had still left Tokugawa Ieyasu as a powerful independent lord and the disgruntled anti-Hideyoshi Oda forces appealed to Tokugawa to combat Hideyoshi’s rise. The resulting series of battles in 1584 led to an eventual stalemate, but Tokugawa realized he’d come out worse in the end and—in an exchange for hostages, which included Hideyoshi’s own mother, in a gesture of goodwill—Tokugawa accepted the inevitable and agreed to become a vassal of Hideyoshi.
Nobunaga’s legacy now belonged to Hideyoshi alone and those former Oda samurai who were not dead were now Hideyoshi’s vassals, even Nobunaga’s senior surviving son, Nobukatsu.
Father Coelho hoped to travel to Kyoto and petition Hideyoshi to intervene against the Satsuma, but Uwai outright refused to let the Jesuit travel. As far as the Satsuma were concerned, the days of the Jesuits stirring the Japanese pot toward their own ends were over. And as an anti-Catholic domain, they were adamant that the Jesuits would not extend their power and influence any further. The priest seethed under this Satsuma yoke, but until specifically forbidden from doing so, he spent the rest of the summer pondering how to reach Hideyoshi to obtain his support to balance out the Satsuma yoke, and trying to assemble an alliance of Christian lords to work toward enforcing Catholic domination on Kyushu.
Although Uwai kept his interference in the running of the city to a minimum, the Satsuma were concerned the Jesuits might appeal to the then seemingly pro-Christian Hideyoshi for support. If Hideyoshi came to the island of Kyushu, the Satsuma would meet him with blood and fire, but it would be best if Hideyoshi left the island alone entirely.
Had Coelho managed to leave Nagasaki for Kyoto in 1585, he’d likely
have taken Yasuke, for the African samurai had met Hideyoshi several times at Azuchi during his residence there and would have been the perfect go-between. It was not to be, and Yasuke—grounded now with all the other Jesuit militiamen—would have remained on uneasy garrison duty in Nagasaki.
But where, before, Yasuke was trapped in the employ of the Jesuits, he now had more options. He’d been well rewarded for his role in Okitanawate by Arima and the Jesuits, and this led to the chance of a new life beyond the walls of Nagasaki. Sometime in the 1580s, suggested by the fact that no missionary source mentions him by name again, Yasuke seems to have left the service of the Jesuits.
With personal skills such as multiple foreign languages, extensive knowledge of foreign lands, peoples, cultures and of course soldiering, Yasuke would have been a very valuable man for any Japanese lord attempting to engage in the sphere of foreign trade for the first time or a ship’s captain needing extra hands and protection from pirates.
He was also a relatively rich man. He would have had reward money from Okitanawate and perhaps retained some of the fortune that Nobunaga gave him. The dead lord of the Oda was known to be a generous master. Could Yasuke have reclaimed this fortune from the ashes of Nobunaga’s death? Could it have survived the looting of Azuchi? The answer is that some of it probably did survive. In that day and age it was common to take much of your fortune with you, if it was portable. Yasuke probably carried at least the cash portion of his fortune with him at all times. After all, coins were specifically made with holes in them so that they could be hung on strings around the waist or on another part of the body. Samurai also commonly carried purses at their belts, and if the thirty-seven kilos of copper coins Yasuke received as a meeting gift had been converted into silver or gold, they would have weighed considerably less and been even more portable. Akechi’s rebel forces had thoroughly destroyed Azuchi Castle, but it’s also possible Yasuke successfully managed to bury and hide some of his money there. We also have Yasuke’s continued career to take into account. He accumulated pay, gifts and rewards in the course of service to the Jesuits and to Arima, and perhaps other Japanese lords as well. In any case, Yasuke would have been well bankrolled for the next chapter in his story.
That next chapter most likely, as with almost everyone in Japan in the 1590s, involved Lord Hideyoshi.
* * *
By 1586, Hideyoshi had become undisputably the most powerful man in the land, Nobunaga’s true successor and along with a host of honors, he was formally bestowed with the new clan name Toyotomi by the imperial court. The Oda returned to their rural roots, and the “Toyotomi” ruled the nation from their new castle in Osaka, just south of Kyoto. Hideyoshi built it to surpass Azuchi Castle in every way, with eight stories, one more than Nobunaga had, the walls twenty feet thick and constructed of huge granite stones as large as ten feet wide and forty feet long. Three moats had to be crossed before reaching the center of the fortress. The decoration of course also surpassed that of Azuchi, and it is said that many of the embellishments were of pure gold, not simply painted with gold leaf. It quickly became one of Japan’s most important political centers.
And it was Osaka Castle that Coelho finally managed to reach in 1586 where he had an audience with Hideyoshi that included a personal three-hour guided tour of the palace. Hideyoshi was buttering up the Jesuits because he wanted two Portuguese ships, and crews to sail them, and Coelho made a rash promise of compliance. The Jesuit was accompanied by the Jesuits’ old friend Ōtomo Sōrin from Bungo, now rid of his former wife, “Jezebel,” and living out his days in domestic peace. Ōtomo essentially remained the only other power on the island of Kyushu besides the Satsuma. The Japanese lord was quite rightly convinced that the Satsuma forces would turn upon him next, therefore, Ōtomo had considered the post-Nobunaga political winds and supplicated himself to Hideyoshi to ally himself with the most powerful force in Japan.
Hideyoshi was delighted; Kyushu was his last step to national domination anyway, and to be actually invited by a local lord would make things so much easier. Firstly, he sent a polite letter to the Satsuma asking them to return to their own lands and cease their thirty-year campaign to dominate Kyushu. The reply was scornful, and chose to emphasize Hideyoshi’s low birth in comparison to the ancient samurai lineage that the Satsuma lords possessed. Predictably, Hideyoshi was not amused, and as the Satsuma troops crossed the border into Ōtomo’s territory in November 1586, Hideyoshi’s vanguard landed on the island of Kyushu to support their new ally.
Lord Hideyoshi’s main force would take longer to prepare, but by the time it arrived in early 1587, it comprised the largest army ever seen on Japanese soil. The force comprised well over two hundred thousand men, provisioned by twenty thousand packhorses and supported by a vast fleet.
Hideyoshi’s attack came in two main prongs. First, around a third of the army under the command of senior vassals “liberated” Ōtomo’s lands and then headed south chasing the retreating Satsuma samurai. They met stiff resistance at several points along the way. Satsuma samurai had a well-deserved reputation for being among the fiercest fighters in all of Japan. The second prong headed down the western side of the island, past Nagasaki and Arima and into Higo, bordering on the Satsuma fiefs. This army was commanded by Hideyoshi in person, and supported by his fleet. Here too, the Satsuma had no option but to retreat, and Nagasaki came back under Jesuit control after its three years of non-Catholic occupation.
Coelho made the trip to Hideyoshi’s field headquarters accompanied by some Portuguese merchants, the first time the warlord met non-Jesuit Europeans. It is quite possible that Yasuke went with him. Hideyoshi, like Nobunaga before him was fascinated by exotic things. In fact, in the next decade he even specifically requested African dancers perform for him on at least two occasions.
Hideyoshi was fascinated by the Portuguese mode of dress and weapons and acted extremely graciously toward the foreign merchants (shortly afterward, he requested that his tailors provide him with similar Portuguese attire, starting off another craze for European-style clothing among the elite). But there was little time for civilities; Hideyoshi had a war to win, and his army pressed southward. After a huge battle on the banks of the Sendai River, where Hideyoshi’s one hundred seventy thousand men were held for a whole day by sixty thousand Satsuma samurai, the Satsuma retreated to their capital city of Kagoshima. The clan heads deliberated staging a glorious fight to the last man but, in the end, the Satsuma clan surrendered to reality and the Kyushu campaign was over. The entire island of Kyushu now belonged to Hideyoshi, who’d nearly completed the life’s work of his former master, Nobunaga—the reunification of Japan.
Hideyoshi headed for home, but first requested another visit from Coelho to get an update on the ships he’d ordered at their earlier meeting. They met on the Jesuit’s galley rather than on Hideyoshi’s ground, a deep sign of respect to the Fathers, and Hideyoshi hinted that he desired it for himself. Coelho foolishly tried to bargain with the warlord, and outwardly Hideyoshi seemed to let the matter go. He also asked that a visiting Portuguese ship be brought to him so that he could see one for the first time in person.
But there was a problem—the ship was loaded with hundreds of Japanese slaves and the captain judged, rightly, that Hideyoshi would not be impressed to see his countrymen tethered in the depths of the foreign ship. He apologized profusely and made his excuses, but Hideyoshi knew he was being lied to. That year he had seen conditions in Kyushu for himself, the power of the Church, the enforced destruction of native religious belief, places of worship. He had, for the first time, become cognizant of the vast enslavement of his countrymen as well. He was outraged, and the fact that the foreigners would lie to him or bargain with him like a merchant in the market, only made matters worse.
That same night, Hideyoshi drafted a promulgation that both banned the slave trade and ordered the missionaries to leave the country. Nagasaki, he took for himself.
The missionaries managed to avoid immediate expulsion, having disguised some Portuguese merchants in priests’ robes to make it look as if the Jesuits were following Hideyoshi’s orders to leave Japan. For the next decade, the Jesuits kept their heads down.
With the new leadership on Kyushu, a man named Katō Kiyomasa—a distant kinsman of Hideyoshi, and a young and ambitious lord with likely links to Yasuke—came to the island. Katō, twenty-five, had successfully risen, like Hideyoshi, from the lowest levels of peasant society, and just been granted by Hideyoshi part of Higo Province (modern Kumamoto) directly east of Nagasaki and directly north of Satsuma territory. Here, he was to keep a close eye on the defeated enemy and, no doubt, the wayward Christians too. He was already known across Japan as a soldier’s soldier and, uncommonly for his time, disdained all the normal artistic pursuits of a samurai such as poetry and tea, choosing instead to lead a Spartan military life, practicing only the martial arts.
After claiming Kyushu, Hideyoshi completed his conquest of all of Japan in 1590 by defeating the last holdouts to his rule, Nobunaga’s erstwhile allies the Hōjō clan in Odawara (near modern-day Tokyo). Again, he attacked with overwhelming force, two hundred and twenty thousand to the Hōjō’s remaining eighty thousand and although Hideyoshi’s final foe was no pushover, after three months of siege and sporadic fighting, the Hōjō could see the outcome was inevitable and surrendered. Throughout the siege, Hideyoshi had engaged in somewhat unorthodox tactics for his last battle in Japan. While still ensuring the fighting fitness of his forces, he had treated them to lavish entertainments right under the eyes of the besieged foe. While the defenders dozed uncomfortably in their armor on the walls, Hideyoshi’s men enjoyed their favored concubines from home, prostitutes, musicians, acrobats, fire-eaters and jugglers. All making as much noise as possible. For his part in the victorious siege, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hideyoshi’s most important vassal, was awarded control over the largely undeveloped lands around a large bay in the east of Japan (what would later become Tokyo).
Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai Page 30