Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 425, The City on the Edge of Forever, Part 4.

One imagines that when, in 1598, Toyotomi Hideyoshi breathed his last, he was not mourned

too deeply in the city of Nagasaki. After all, just the previous year, Japan's greatest warlord had ordered the brutal

execution of 26 Christians at Nagasaki's Nishizaka execution ground, and despite variable

levels of enforcement over the years, Hideoshi's anti-Christian edicts had never gone off the

books since they were first put down in 1587.

Father Francisco Perez captured the mood pretty well when he wrote,

upon hearing the news of Hideoshi's death, that, quote,

The Taiko Sama is dead, and we are free.

It had been clear to the Jesuits, particularly the superior of the Jesuit mission in Asia,

Alessandro Valignano, who returned to Japan just a few days before Hideyoshi's death,

that the careful balance of power Hideyoshi left behind was never going to work.

Hideyoshi's idea to trust the country to five regents, who would counterbalance each other until his

heir Hideyori was old enough to rule, made sense on paper, but only if literally everything

possible went right.

Balignano was sure it would not, and by early 1599, he was convinced that Tokugawa Ieyasu,

one of Hideoshi's five regents, was the real power in Japan,

and the one most likely to win out in the end.

And that was pretty good news for the Jesuits and for Nagasaki.

As Valignano wrote to the Jesuit mission in Malacca, quote,

Iayasu authorized that everyone can choose the faith they thought best, and gave the

Christians of Nagasaki permission to live freely and in peace as Christians. And with this, we consider

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