In August of 1596 a comet was visible for fifteen days in Japan, and on the 30th of the same month a frightful earthquake is recorded to have occurred. By this the greater part of the buildings recently erected at great expense at Osaka and Fusimi were completely demolished. Recurring at midnight of the 1st of September with awful violence, all the magnificent buildings raised by the Taiko were in a moment thrown down--two lofty eight-storied buildings, visited by the fathers, being destroyed. Stones, each of which had required the united efforts of 1,500 men to put in their places, were hurled out. The heavy roofs of temples and buildings, subsiding _en masse_, buried many under them, and, as usual in Japan, the fires which arose carried death to those buried under the wood. The occasion is used by one of the fathers, in his letter, to indulge in a sneer against the Buddhist priesthood. In doing so, he gives some insight into the tenets inculcated in their sermons by these Buddhist priests. “He was preaching on the evening prior to the earthquake with such a torrent of eloquence as to bear all before him, and the main drift of his discourse was the mercy and bounty of his god toward his clients, particularly at the hour of death. He enlarged upon his charity to mankind, showing that he would have all men to be saved, without distinction or exception of persons, exhorting them to cast themselves on his mercy. So soon as he had made an end of speaking, the people cried out with a general voice, ‘Our god, be merciful to us!’ But Amida was probably asleep, for that very night the temple fell to the ground, the idol was broken, and the preacher narrowly escaped with his life.” By this convulsion the immense copper figure of Buddha at Miako was broken. The Jesuit accounts state that seventy women about the palace at Fusimi were killed, the Taiko himself narrowly escaping to a mountain top, where he dwelt in a reed hut, for fear of being swallowed up in the chasms of the earth. Saccay, the richest and most voluptuous city of Japan, suffered, at the same time, greatly from one of those fearful incursions of the sea consequent upon a temporary depression or bending downward of the crust of the earth.