Yet, in order to employ the vast bodies of armed men hitherto accustomed to the trade of war, and withal jealous of China and hostile to Korea, Hideyoshi planned the invasion of the little peninsular kingdom by these veterans whose swords were restless in their scabbards.  After months of preparation, he despatched an army in two great divisions, one under the Christian general Konishi, and one under the Buddhist general Kato.  After a brilliant campaign of eighteen days, the rivals, taking different routes, met in the Korean capital.  In the masterly campaign which followed, the Japanese armies penetrated almost to the extreme northern boundary of the kingdom.  Then China came to the rescue and the Japanese were driven southward.

During the six or seven years of war, while the invaders crossed swords with the natives and their Chinese allies, and devastated Korea to an extent from which she has never recovered, there were Jesuit missionaries attending the Japanese armies.  It is not possible or even probable, however, that any seeds of Christianity were at this time left in the peninsula.  Korean Christianity sprang up nearly two centuries later, wind-wafted from China.[11]

During the war there was always more or less of jealousy, mostly military and personal, between Konishi and Kato, which however was aggravated by the priests on either side.  Kato, being then and afterward a fierce champion of the Buddhists, glorified in his orthodoxy, which was that of the Nichiren sect.  He went into battle with a banneret full of texts, stuck in his back and flying behind him.  His example was copied by hundreds of his officers and soldiers.  On their flags and guidons was inscribed the famous apostrophe of the Nichiren sect, so often heard in their services and revivals to-day (Namu miy[=o] ho ren ge ki[=o]), and borrowed from the Saddharma Pundarika:  “Glory be to the salvation-bringing Lotus of the True Law.”

The Hostility of Hideyoshi.

Konishi, on the other hand, was less numerously and perhaps less influentially backed by, and made the champion of, the European brethren; and as all the negotiations between the invaders and the allied Koreans and Chinese had to be conducted in the Chinese script, the alien fathers were, as secretaries and interpreters, less useful than the native Japanese bonzes.

Yet this jealousy and hostility in the camps of the invaders proved to be only correlative to the state of things in Japan.  Even supposing the statistics in round numbers, reported at that time, to be exaggerated, and that there were not as many as the alleged two hundred thousand Christians, yet there were, besides scores of thousands of confessing believers among the common people, daimi[=o]s, military leaders, court officers and many persons of culture and influence.  Nevertheless, the predominating influence at the Ki[=o]to court was that of Buddhism; and as the cult that winks at polygamy was less opposed to Hideyoshi’s