In general, however, it may be said that while Christian converts and the priests were roughly handled in the South, yet there was considerable missionary activity and success in the North.  Converts were made and Christian congregations were gathered in regions remote from Ki[=o]to and Yedo, which latter place, like St. Petersburg in the West, was being made into a large city.  Even outlying islands, such as Sado, had their churches and congregations.

The Anti-Christian Policy of the Tokugawas.

The quarrels between the Franciscans and Jesuits,[16] however, were probably more harmful to Christianity than were the whispers of the Protestant Englishmen or Hollanders.  In 1610, the wrath of the government was especially aroused against the bateren, as the people called the padres, by their open and persistent violation of Japanese law.  In 1611, from Sado, to which island thousands of Christian exiles had been sent to work the mines, Iyeyas[)u] believed he had obtained documentary proof in the Japanese language, of what he had long suspected—­the existence of a plot on the part of the native converts and the foreign emissaries to reduce Japan to the position of a subject state.[17] Putting forth strenuous measures to root out utterly what he believed to be a pestilential breeder of sedition and war, the Yedo Sh[=o]gun advanced step by step to that great proclamation of January 27, 1614,[18] in which the foreign priests were branded as triple enemies—­of the country, of the Kami, and of the Buddhas.  This proclamation wound up with the charge that the Christian band had come to Japan to change the government of the country, and to usurp possession of it.  Whether or not he really had sufficient written proof of conspiracy against the nation’s sovereignty, it is certain that in this state paper, Iyeyas[)u] shrewdly touched the springs of Japanese patriotism.  Not desiring, however, to shed blood or provoke war, he tried transportation.  Three hundred persons, namely, twenty-two Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustines, one hundred and seventeen foreign Jesuits, and nearly two hundred native priests and catechists, were arrested, sent to Nagasaki, and thence shipped like bundles of combustibles to Macao.

Yet, as many of the foreign and native Christian teachers hid themselves in the country and as others who had been banished returned secretly and continued the work of propaganda, the crisis had not yet come.  Some of the Jesuit priests, even, were still hoping that Hideyori would mount to power; but in 1615, Iyeyas[)u], finding a pretext for war,[19] called out a powerful army and laid siege to the great castle of Osaka, the most imposing fortress in the country.  In the brief war which ensued, it is said by the Jesuit fathers, that one hundred thousand men perished.  On June 9, 1615, the castle was captured and the citadel burned.  After thousands of Hideyori’s followers had committed hara-kiri, and his own body had been burned into ashes, the Christian cause was irretrievably ruined.