Japan and the Japanese

190 JAPAN. A. D. 16211640.
Finding that the means as yet employed had little effect upon
the missionaries and their native assistants, a new and more effect-
ual, because more protracted, torture was resorted to, known in
the relations of the missionaries as the Torment of the Fosse. A
hole was dug in the ground, over which a gallows was erected.
From this gallows the sufferer, swathed in bandages, was suspended
by his feet, being lowered for half his length, head downward, into
the hole, which was then closed by two boards which fitted together
around the victim so as to exclude the light, and air. One hand
was bound behind the back, the other was left loose, with which
to make the prescribed signal of recantation and renunciation of
the foreign
released.
creed ; in which case,
the sufferer was at once
This was a most terrible trial indeed. The victim suffered under
a continual sense of suffocation, the blood burst from the mouth,
nose and ears, with a twitching of the nerves and muscles, attended
by the most intolerable pains. Yet the sufferer, it was said, lived
sometimes for nine Or ten days. The year 1633, in which this
punishment was first introduced, the second year of a new emperor,
son of Xogun-Sama,* and himself known as Toxogun-Sama, proved
more fatal than any previous one to the new religion. In the
month of August of that year forty -two persons were burnt alive in
various parts of Japan, eleven decapitated, and sixteen suspended
in the fosse. The Dutchman Hagenaar, who was at Firando in
1634, states, in his printed voyages, that during
the time of his
visit thirty-seven persons lost their lives at that place on the charge
of being Catholics. Five of these perished by the torment of
the fosse, others were beheaded, others cut to pieces, and others
burnt.
The charges made in the name of Sotelo against the Jesuits are of more
interest from the fact that, at the time of the Jansenist quarrel, they were
revived and reiirged with a bitterness of hatred little short of that which had
prompted their original concoction.
A Spanish history of the Franciscan mission, full of bitter hatred against
the Jesuits, was published at Madrid m 16o2, written down to 1620, by
Father Fray Jacinto Orfanel, who was arrested that year, and burnt two
years after, and continued by Collado, who was also the author of a Japanese
grammar and dictionary mentioned in the Appendix, A.
* Xogun-Sama seems to be only Scgun-Sama, a title, not a name.