Background
Harunobu Arima was born in the castle of Arima in Hizen in Kyushu in 1567. The second son of the lord of the domain, Arima Yoshinao. He became the adopted son of his elder brother Yoshizumi.
有馬 晴信
Harunobu Arima was born in the castle of Arima in Hizen in Kyushu in 1567. The second son of the lord of the domain, Arima Yoshinao. He became the adopted son of his elder brother Yoshizumi.
In 1572, at the age of four, succeeded to the domain. At the time of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaign against Kyuohu, he was guaranteed the safety of his domains by Hideyoshi and took up residence in the castle of Hinoe. He also took part in Hideyoshi’s two campaigns against Korea and distinguished himself in battle. At the time of the crucial battle of Sekigahara in 1600, he at first sided with the forces loyal to Hideyoshi’s heir but immediately went over to the opposite side, that headed by Tokugawa Ieyasu, attacking the domain of Konishi Yukinaga. In 1608, an officially licensed trading ship that he had dispatched to the kingdom of Champa in Vietnam was attacked by the Portuguese while stopping en route in Macao. The following year, when the Portuguese vessel Madre de Deus came to Nagasaki from Macao, Arima attacked it by way of retaliation.
In 1612, he was unjustly accused of trying to enlarge his domain. He was deprived of his lands and exiled to the province of Kai. In the sixth month of the same year, he committed suicide there. This incident led to the order issued in 1612 outlawing Christianity in territory under direct control of the shogunate.
Arima was a Christian, having been baptized in 1579 by the Jesuit Visitor Alessandro Valignano. At first he took the name Joao, but later changed it to Protasio.
He presided over the founding of a seminary and a training center for novices in the domain of Arima and in 1582 joined the Kyushu Christian daimyos Omura Sumitada and Otomo Yoshishige in dispatching a mission to the Pope in Rome. When Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1587 ordered all Catholic Fathers to leave Japan and outlawed the teaching of Christianity, many missionaries and believers took refuge in the domain of Arima, where they were given protection. The Christian seminaries, in addition to giving ordinary instruction, also taught Western style music, painting and sculpture, and the manufacture of organs and other musical instruments as well as watches, thus playing an important part in the introduction of Western style art and technology to Japan.
father: Arima Yoshinao