While Nobunaga lived, and the Jesuits were in his favor, all was progress and victory. Hideyoshi, though at first favorable to the new religion, issued, in 1587, a decree of banishment against the foreign missionaries. The Jesuits closed their churches and chapels, ceased to preach in public, but carried on their work in private as vigorously as ever, averaging ten thousand converts a year, until 1590. The Spanish mendicant friars, pouring in from the Philippines, openly defied the Japanese laws, preaching in their usual garb in public. This aroused Hideyoshis attention, and his decree of expulsion was renewed. Some of the churches were burned. In 1596, sox Franciscan, three Jesuit, and seventeen Japanese converts were taken to Nagasaki, and there crucified. Still the Jesuits resided in the country. The Christians next looked to Hideyori for their friend and quasi-leader. The battle of Sekighara, and the defeat of Hideyoris following, blew their hopes to the winds; and the ignominious death of Ishida, Konishi, and Otani, the Christian generals, drove their adherents to the verge of despair.
The new daimios began to persecute their Christian subjects and to compel them to renounce their faith. The native converts resisted even to blood and the taking-up of arms. This was an entirely new thing under the Japanese sun. Hitherto the attitude of the peasantry to the government had been one of passive obedience and slavish submission.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
