Japan and the Japanese

98 JAPAN. A. D. 15821588.
not carry the others ; to which he responded by ordering all the
churches in Miako, Osaka and Sakai, to be destroyed. The con-
verted princes, however, in
general,
stood firm, except Joscimon,
king of Bungo; and even the unconverted ones are said to have
protested against the emperor's edict as in violation of the freedom
of religious opinion heretofore allowed. The missionaries, in dis-
guise, were distributed through the territories of their adherents.
The emperor's grand admiral, Tsucamidono, who was viceroy of
Ximo, though himself a convert, still kept
the confidence of the
emperor, as did also Condera, the chief commander of his cavalry-
The Portuguese merchants were admitted as before. After a little
while the emperor seemed disposed to wink at the conduct of the
converted princes, and the missionaries soon began to conceive
ho t )es that, by caution on their part, the work of conversion might
still go on, the stimulus of a prohibition not very strictly enforced,
more than supplying all the benefits hitherto derived from the eclat
of imperial favor.
Some difficulty about obtaining recruits for the imperial seraglio,
especially from the province of Figin,
celebrated for its handsome
women, but in which the converts were numerous, was said to have
provoked the emperor, in a fit of drunken fury, to put
forth so sud-
denly his edict of persecution. But, in fact, his policy brooked no
power but his own. He did not fancy a religion which taught his
subjects to look up with implicit reverence to a distant and foreign
potentate; nor probably was his hostility
to the Jesuits much different
in substance from that sentiment which hud caused Henry
VIII., of England, fifty years earlier, to break with the holy see
a breach also ascribed by the Catholics to amorous passion.
But the cautious and artful emperor, who, however he might
give way to sudden fits of violence and caprice, was a perfect
master of all the arts of dissimulation, knowing, as well as Bona-
parte, if not better, how to wait till the pear was ripe, was not yet
wholly prepared to break with the converted kings and nobles,
whom he found, perhaps, as well as the humbler converts, more
attached to their faith than he had supposed. There were too many
inflammable materials in his yet unconsolidated empire, for him to
run the risk of provoking a rebellion ; and, besides, there still re-
mained to be subdued eight independent provinces in the east and