The missionaries themselves were far from blameless. The Portuguese Jesuits had been followed by Spanish Franciscans and Dominicans, and there was considerable rivalry between the Portuguese and Spanish orders. The latter displayed all the zeal and little or none of the prudence of the former. They refused to observe, as the Jesuits had done, Hideyoshi’s decrees against public preaching, a limit which he had sternly imposed, and the Spaniards also gave offence by arrogantly asserting their claims to similar personal deference in public to that which they were entitled to receive in their own country.
Be the reasons what they may, and all that have just been quoted had no doubt their share, Hideyoshi’s favour was suddenly converted into bitter antagonism, and a persecution of Christians was begun in 1587, which continued, with a short interlude after Hideyoshi’s death, till 1638, when the open profession of Christianity in Japan was finally exterminated.*
abridged
* Hideyoshi’s successor as de facto ruler of Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu (holding power from 1600 to 1616), encouraged other European powers to break the Iberian monopoly on trade. He welcomed Englishman Will Adams in 1600 and raised him to high honour, and allowed the Dutch East India Company (whose Christians were Protestants) to establish a base at the former Portuguese trading post of Dejima, Nagasaki, in 1609. The Dutch clung on, virtually prisoners in their modest warehouse at Dejima, for some two hundred years as the only contact between Japan and the outside world. For the establishment of Orthodoxy in Japan during the 1860s, see The Bearded Foreigner; for one Scotsman’s part in the re-opening of Japan, see Japan’s First Railway.