December 8th: Birth, death, Eternity

(reprise)

               December 8, 1941: a day that has lived in infamy for 72 years.  Americans remember Pearl Harbor on the 7^th of December, but it was December 8^th Japan Time when the Japanese Imperial Navy’s dive bombers hit Pearl Harbor.  December 8^th also marks the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin in the Roman Catholic Church. 

                Mere coincidence, one might imagine, but here’s another “coincidence”:  the Emperor’s surrender proclamation was broadcast to his astonished nation on August 15, 1945.  The 15th of August marks the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, which pegs the end of the earthly life of the Lord’s mother, who was soon to return to earth time and again to dazzle the upturn’d wondering eyes of mortals in the form of countless apparitions warning mankind to believe in her Son’s reality and recognize the direness of man’s addiction to sin, lest countless souls needlessly consign themselves to eternal fire—the pool of fire that is the second death. (See Revelation 20:14-15)

               So the front and back covers of that Book of Death that mankind knows as the Pacific War coincide with the conception of the Blessed Virgin (for conception is the start of human life) and her departure from earthly life—which, for those who cling to Christ, is only the beginning of eternal bliss.  But all this must be merest coincidence.

               Just like the coincidence of Saint Francis Xavier’s arrival in Japan by dint of an irresistible wind that drove his ship straight to Kagoshima, the home town of his Japanese interpreter, an escapee from Japan who was now a convert to the Faith.  The ship’s captain had been determined to avoid Japan, but that almighty wind had had its way, and now there was nothing to do but land his passengers.

               And the date?  By the merest coincidence, the 15^th of August 1549, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin:  the birth of Christendom in Japan.

               Birth, death, Eternity.

Luke O'Hara, Kirishtan.com

A Summer Storm, Part II

A Summer Storm, Part II
( website:  Kirishtan.com )

          Toku-un was not only Hideyoshi’s private quack; he was also his dedicated procurer of virgins.  With high hopes Hideyoshi had sent him into the Kirish’tan domain of Arima, where the girls were known for their beauty, but Toku-un came back empty-handed and insulted to boot:  the Kirish’tan of Arima would not give up their daughters for the ruler’s debauching.  This was one prelude to the explosion—indeed perhaps the very powder in the keg—that would rock all Christendom throughout Japan.  But certainly there must have been more to it than that.

            Historian James Murdoch, writing at the hatching of the Twentieth Century, painted Hideyoshi as a recklessly-fearless commander; Luis Frois, a contemporary of Hideyoshi’s who knew him well—and personally—painted him as something of a paranoid.  I will lean on the primary source (rather than the latter one) for my own closer look at the man who first put the sledgehammer to Christ in all Japan’s domains.

            A prelude to Hideyoshi’s explosion at Hakata:  earlier that month, at Yatsushiro on the west coast of the island, the conqueror had fêted Father Coelho and his entourage on their coming to pay their respects, and he declared on their leaving, “I am the Padre’s disciple.”  The lilt of those lighthearted words may have been a smokescreen meant merely to hide Hideyoshi’s intentions: his imminent crackdown on the Church once his conquest was done.  I wonder, though, if those words weren’t in fact intended to hide his suppressed resentment at having been asked in public by the Padre to pardon a mass of prisoners of conquest whom the ruler had peremptorily sentenced to death.  Hideyoshi acceded to the Padre’s request at once, said request having been made in front of all the ruler’s assembled commanders at his annexed headquarters—a Buddhist temple—after he had given the Padre’s delegation a welcome worthy of emissaries of, well … God.

            To top this off, after meeting furious resistance from the Satsuma samurai at the battle of Sendaigawa, the shaken Hideyoshi unveiled his fear to his Christian general Takayama Ukon:  he ordered Ukon to prepare a private escape route for his own person in case of dire extremity.  An extremity that never came about, given that Hideyoshi soon managed to panic the lord of Satsuma by launching a surprise seaborne assault on his capital:  60,000 troops appearing out of nowhere to spearhead into Satsuma’s rear guard from behind.  (Their commander, the lord of Satsuma’s brother, saved his own skin by escaping on horseback, he and fifty mounted swordsmen cutting an escape route through the invading horde at a gallop.)  This coup led to the lord of Satsuma’s surrender in short order, completing Hideyoshi’s conquest of Kyushu and putting him on top of the world.

           Now back to where our story began:  in the wake of his 1587 conquest of all Kyushu, Hideyoshi was refreshing himself in Hakata, a cornucopia of debauchery, where he was visited by the Jesuit Vice-Provincial, Father Gaspar Coelho.  The Padre had come to pay his respects, having perhaps been deluded by that tactical jest of Hideyoshi’s—I am the Padre’s disciple —and, unwisely, he had sailed into Hakata’s harbor in his prize Portuguese fusta, a nimble sailing-ship very well laid out with fine Portuguese cannon to defend herself against pirates on the high seas. 

            The Padre’s fusta soon became the most popular tourist destination in Hakata: a steady stream of well-placed locals came requesting tours of the vessel, and news of this marvel lost no time in reaching Hideyoshi’s ears.  He came and insisted on being shown every last nook and cranny of the marvelous fusta, and left in apparent good humor—at least as far as the Padre could tell—taking with him a gift of Portuguese port wine.  He had been given countless delicacies too, but, afraid of poisoning, had his underlings pass them on to the locals milling about the docks.

            Soon he would be lounging in his camp with Toku-un and his other intimates, drinking himself silly with the Padre’s gift of wine.  One can only imagine the witch’s brew of lies, fears and resentments simmering in the conqueror’s heart that would presently erupt into volcanic explosion.  Just as the twenty-four megaton eruption of Mount Saint Helen’s in 1980 flattened the forest for miles around, Hideyoshi’s 1587 blow-up would level the hopes and the peace of all Christians in Japan.

(to be continued)

A Summer Storm

Website:  Kirishtan.com

A Summer Storm

    In late July of 1587, the dictator Hideyoshi clamped a ban on Christ in Japan.  Having just finished his conquest of Kyushu, he was relaxing in Hakata with Toku-un, his private quack and trusted advisor, and overindulging in draining the cask of Portuguese port wine he had been given that very evening by Padre Coelho, the Jesuit Vice-Provincial, the senior clergyman in Japan.

       Earlier that day Hideyoshi had inspected the Padre’s sailing-ship—well gunned to protect herself against the pirates prowling Japan’s sea lanes—and had left in an apparent fit of joy; a Japanese Catholic observer had, however, warned Padre Coelho that he must offer the ship to Hideyoshi at once, for this man could see (unlike the Europeans, not so steeped in the subtleties of unspoken Japanese communication) that the dictator was jealous.  Sadly for Christendom in Japan, the Padre did not heed that prophetic warning.

        He learned its truth in the wee hours of the night: Hideyoshi’s sheriff came to the dock, demanding that the Vice-Provincial debark to hear the dictator’s charges, presumably written up by Toku-un in the depths of the ruler’s drunken revel.

(to be continued)
Website:  Kirishtan.com

Peter Kibe: Samurai, Priest, and Unflinching Martyr

  Home page:  Kirishtan.com         

        The Fourth of July marks not only the birth of American independence, but also the 374th anniversary of one of the most heroic declarations of freedom Man has ever made.  On 4 July 1639, Japanese samurai and Jesuit priest Father Peter Kasui Kibe refused to renounce Christ under the most grueling regime of torture ever devised by man or devil.  In the wake of Father Peter’s death, the Shogun’s master torturer dubbed him “the man who would not say I give in:”  a perfect epitaph to his heroic life.

           Read the whole story at:  http://kirishtan.com/samurai-martyrs-father-peter-kibe

      

Julian Nakaura: Samurai, Ambassador, and Martyr (Part One)

website:  Kirishtan.com

          The jumbled boulders of Nakaura lie brooding on the shore, defying the sea to do its worst.  Behind them squats a hill clothed in bamboo, its giant knees of rock protruding through the trees.  A continent of charcoal cloud looms over the coast, yet the sun blazes triumphantly in the distant west, riding high above the Gotoh Islands:  it burns one’s face, even in the tail-end of winter.

        Julian Nakaura was born here.  They honor him with a memorial that overlooks the village:  a pony-tailed boy in bronze pointing out at the sea, towards the Rome the real boy visited.  But I prefer the Julian in bronze who stands, weathered and flinty, at the entrance to the Shimabara Catholic Church, way down south: a gentle old man steeled by trial and perseverance, a Missal in hand and nothing but his own two sandaled feet to carry him.  Those old feet would carry him to a death unheard of even in a Europe where the burning of heretics and the disemboweling and mutilation of Roman Catholic priests was the order of the day.

        In 1582 Catholicism was flourishing in some parts of Japan—especially on the island of Kyushu.  The Jesuits had opened a school in Arima, southeast of Nagasaki, for training Catholic samurai youth to become future teachers, catechists and priests—a Seminario.  Father Alessandro Valignano, dispatched by Rome as Visitor to Japan, had set up the school in 1580, and two years later he came up with a brainstorm:  choose some fine young samurai from the student body and send them on an embassy to Rome as showpieces of the Japanese Church.  Their mission would be to impress upon the nobility of Catholic Europe the quality of this newest and farthest-flung Catholic seedbed; and to impress upon themselves the grandeur of Catholicism in Europe and report their impressions to their native brethren on their return.  Omura Sumitada, the first Japanese daimyo (domainal lord) to be baptized, loved the plan as soon as it hit his ears; he promised his full support.  Two other daimyo also joined in; the mission was prepared immediately

 (to be continued)  

Read the whole story at:  

http://kirishtan.com/samurai-martyrs-father-julian-nakaura

Adam Arakawa: Samurai, Servant, and Martyr

author's website:  Kirishtan.com

Adam Arakawa:  Samurai, Servant, and Martyr

         “Martyr” is a word much abused in our day; here's one excellent definition:  “True Christian martyrs forgive others,” says Joseph Takami, the Archbishop of Nagasaki.  “Even while being killed by others, they forgive them.  They teach us the meaning of a death like Jesus’ death.”

           Take Adam Arakawa, for example, one of the 187 Companions of Peter Kibe, beatified en masse by Pope Benedict XVI on 24 November 2008:  “He was a man of prayer,” Jesuit historian and pastor Father Diego Yuuki told me. “When the last missionary in Amakusa was expelled, he took the responsibility of the church, and for that reason he was killed.”

          Adam was a samurai, brought up in that proud martial tradition, but a samurai who had the humility to become a servant to his fellow-Christians after having been dismissed by his feudal lord.  He served the church at Shiki, in the Amakusa Islands.

          The Shōgun had banned the Faith in 1614, expelling all Christian missionaries, and Kawamura Jirōemon, the castellan of Tomioka Castle, which overlooked Shiki from a nearby mountaintop, was ordered by his lord to exterminate Christendom in the Amakusa Islands.  Humble old Adam, in his seventies, was the obvious primary target:  if he renounced the Faith, the other local Christians would follow his example, thought Kawamura. 

           Renounce?  Not Adam, steely old Catholic samurai:  when he heard that they were looking for him, he fell to his knees, thanking God, and asked Him to grant him martyrdom.  Friends warned Adam to abandon Christ, lest he be killed.  His answer is recorded in history: “’Disobey God,’ you’re telling me?  You’re telling me to shame my God?  Kawamura-sama’s orders or the law of the Shōgun of all Japan notwithstanding, please understand:  I am a Christian.  A true Christian puts Christ’s teaching above his own life.  No matter how they torture me, I cannot disobey Christ, true God.”

           Kawamura, the castellan, had Adam brought to his castle for interrogation and bound to a pillar outside; to break the old man’s spirit he kept him out there all night.  Come morning, though, Adam’s spirit was unbroken.  When Kawamura told him it was not just his own nor just his feudal lord’s command, but the very Shōgun’s orders that he apostatize, Adam replied, “A man’s soul is more important to him than his body.  I obey the true God, Deus, savior of souls.”  In old Japan, they called God by his Latin name, Deus, to avoid confusing Him with the “gods” of superstition. 

             On March 21, 1614, the Friday before Palm Sunday, Kawamura ordered Adam stripped naked and paraded through town, and then hung by his elbows from a cross-bar (or lintel) supported by two pillars; they tied his legs to these, with his tiptoes barely touching the ground.  Adam was in constant agony, straining against gravity, besides being exposed to the elements and public ridicule.  It was March—cold and windy—and Kawamura had had the pillars set up at land’s edge to expose him to the cold sea wind, but to keep from killing him, they untied him at night and took him indoors.  This torture lasted nine days.  Unable to join his hands while praying, Adam did his best to raise them toward Heaven.  Rather than show his pain, he encouraged the local Christians in their faith, speaking only of things of the soul.  He was finally untied on Holy Saturday, his faith untouched, and put in the hands of a local Christian, under house arrest—an internment that would last for sixty days.

            Kawamura eventually sent a message to Adam:  “We’ll cut your fingers off unless you renounce your faith.  Not all at once, but slowly, one by one, prolonging your agony.”  Adam’s response:  “I’m determined to bear any sort of torture.  God will surely strengthen me and give me perseverance to the end.  Even if I die after long suffering, having undergone repeated tortures, I’ll be happy to get it, for penance’ sake and for love of God.”  On hearing that, Kawamura, the castellan, ordered his fingers cut off; but his men, afraid of Heaven’s recompense should they mutilate such a good old man, held off. 

          Finally Kawamura sent to Terazawa Hirotaka, his feudal lord up in Karatsu, in northern Kyushu, for orders, reporting Adam’s unshakable determination to hold onto his faith.  A courier came back at breakneck speed with new orders:  kill him.  Meanwhile, in his imprisonment, Adam had seen a vision of the Mother of God:  she was holding a cross in her hands, and Adam understood that he was to become a holy Martyr.    

           Kawamura had Adam brought to his castle.  Along the way a crier kept blowing a conch shell and announcing that Adam would be executed in two or three days.  This was a lie:  they just wanted to put the local Christians off the track, lest they come in droves to his execution, seeking relics.  The next morning, at first cock’s crow, they took Adam out of the castle in the pre-dawn darkness and led him up a steep mountain path with a rope around his neck.  Anxious for martyrdom, Adam “climbed like a leaping deer,”[1] pulling the soldier with the rope in his grip right off his feet.  At the chosen place, Adam knelt and prayed.  He then advised his executioners to make their children study the Christian Faith, and told them they had better become Christians too, and fast. 

           The swordsman must have been unsteady on his feet on the steep slope, for his first slash went awry, into Adam’s shoulder:  Adam didn’t flinch; he was too busy praying to Jesus.  The second slash then took off his head. 

            They put Adam’s bloody remains in a net, weighted down with two large stones, took them out in a boat and sunk them into the sea, afraid, perhaps, of that eternal truth:  The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Faith.  The local Christians, though, scooped up the earth on that hillside that had drunk Adam’s sacred blood and saved it as a relic.

            Seed of the Faith indeed:  repentant Catholics all over the Amakusa Islands publicly declared their faith, emboldened by Adam’s example after having been cowed into silence by the Shōgun’s ban on Christ.  In one village alone, more than 150 emboldened souls declared their faith in the Truth that has overcome the world.

            One almighty Truth indeed, and terror to the Enemy of all men’s souls.

**************************

Notes: 

            Blessed Adam Arakawa, beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 24 November 2008, is one of the 187 Companions of Blessed Peter Kibe Kasui.  He was beheaded on or about Tuesday, June 5, 1614.  (The date is unclear; that his martyrdom was fulfilled on a Tuesday, before dawn, is established.)

            Father Diego Yuuki, consummate historian of Japanese Christendom, passed away on November 17, 2008 in Nagasaki, city of Martyrs.  As of today, June 10, 2013, Joseph Takami continues in the office of Archbishop of Nagasaki. 

[1] Kataoka Yakichi, Nihon Kirishitan Junkyō-shi  (Tokyo: Jiji Tsushinsha, 1979) p. 252.

-End-

Copyright 2007/2013 by Luke O’Hara

author's website:  Kirishtan.com

---

The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki

by Luke O'Hara

          Above a hilltop overlooking Nagasaki Bay floats a row of men and boys in bronze, frozen eternally in attitudes of joy. 'Floats,' I say, because they seem to hang suspended in mid-air along a wall of stone. These are the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. Most of them have their hands folded in prayer, and all their mouths are open in praise. Like a halo around each martyr's head, words are inscribed behind him in bronze relief. These are the last words each was heard to say or sing before being pierced with spears from below; this is how Japanese crucifixions usually ended.

            The Twenty-six were crucified on this hill on the Fifth of February, 1597 because, according to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the man who then ruled Japan, they were "foreigners ... come from the Philippines" who had "built churches, preached their religion, and caused disorders." In point of fact, most of the martyrs—twenty of them—were Japanese. 

            The 'disorders' they had caused were as follows: they had built hospitals, orphanages and leprosaria for the poor and outcast, offered charity to the indigent, and labored tirelessly to spread the Gospel of Christ in a land whose people had been esteemed by Saint Francis Xavier as "the best who have yet been discovered." As for their having "built churches," Hideyoshi himself had given the Franciscans a plot of land on which to build.

            But a few of the Franciscans had indeed arrived recently from the Philippines.  They had come in a crippled Spanish galleon headed for Mexico that had been blown off course by a typhoon and had limped into Japan in dire need of repairs. When the battered San Felipeshowed up at the port of Urado richly laden with Chinese silks and other treasured cargo, the local ruler contrived to tow the ship into port against the ship's pilot's wishes—ostensibly for repairs—and in the process broke her back on a sand bar, spilling much of her cargo into the bay. Now the San Felipe was a shipwreck, and now, by Japanese law, her cargo was forfeit. 

            But Hideyoshi himself had promised his personal protection to Spanish ships only four years earlier. With this in mind the Spaniards sent a deputation to him to petition for return of the confiscated cargo, but by the time they arrived, the divvying-up of the spoils had already been decided. Now Hideyoshi had to save face. He contrived to 'discover' a Spanish plot to take over Japan by Catholic infiltration, and when he had produced some fishy evidence he flew into a rage and ordered the rounding-up of the Franciscans. In the end the round-up netted six Franciscans, three Jesuits and seventeen hapless Japanese laymen: the youngest twelve years old, another thirteen, and the oldest sixty-four. 

            Hideyoshi ordered that their ears and noses be cut off and they be paraded around the cities of Osaka and Kyoto in carts and then marched to Nagasaki to be crucified, a journey of perhaps eight hundred kilometers; it would take them twenty-seven days. A sympathetic official mitigated the sentence; only their left ears were cut off.

            Along the route, Jesuit Brother Paul Miki distinguished himself for his constant preaching; Bishop Dom Pedro Martins called him the best preacher in Japan. The youngest, Louis Ibaraki, traipsed along laughing, and reportedly laughed even when they cut off his ear. Four days before the end the boy was offered his life on condition that he renounce the Faith. His reply: "I do not want to live on that condition, for it is not reasonable to exchange a life that has no end for one that soon finishes."^[1] When the Twenty-six arrived at the execution-ground their crosses were there awaiting them. Twelve-year-old Louis asked "Which one is mine?" and then ran to embrace the one pointed out.

            The monument depicts in bronze how they died: Paul Miki, hands spread, was preaching to the thousands of Nagasaki Christians kneeling on the hillside below when the spears pierced his heart, and Louis's last words shout out from the wall behind him:  "Paradise! Jesus! Mary!"

            Saint Francis Xavier's praises still ring true. 

           

     (The Twenty-Six were canonized on June 8, 1862.)

                      

(First published in Our Sunday Visitor.)

---

^[1] Diego Yuuki, S.J., The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, p. 60.  (Enderle Book Co., Tokyo, 1998)

Paulo Uchibori and Sons, Japanese Martyrs of Unzen, Part IV

               Finally, at dawn on 28 February 1627, Paulo and fifteen others were taken out of Matsukura's dungeon to start their climb up Mount Unzen.  Along the way they sang hymns and recited the Creed,     and when their guards stopped to rest, they knelt, made an Act of Contrition, and prayed a Rosary; and, singing another hymn, arrived at the "hell" where they were to die; where the guards tied ropes around  their necks, as if they were not human beings but the merest meat for boiling.

(Two boiling pools (above and below) in "Unzen Hell."  What remain today are mere vestiges of the    "Hell" of 1627:  Mount Unzen was reshaped by a 1792 eruption.)
 

               The first to die jumped into the violently-boiling sulfur-water on the executioners' command; Paulo admonished the others to wait for Matsukura's men to do the killing:  faithful Catholics must not  kill themselves.  He kept on encouraging and guiding his fellow-Catholics through their martyrdoms,    guiding them Heavenward, which infuriated Matsukura's executioners; so they saved Paulo for the last, grisliest execution:  they hung him upside-down by his feet and dunked him head-first, yanking him out  to see the result.  He sang out, "Praised Be the Most Blessed Sacrament!"  




               They dunked him again, maybe expecting better results this time, and pulled him out a second  time.  Again he prayed, "Praised Be the Most Blessed Sacrament!"   No whining, no squirming, no sur- render to the Shogun:  only praise for the Conqueror of death, until they plunged him in a third time, for good.   




                This was the stuff of which Saint Francis Xavier had exulted on his first arriving in Japan:  here was the good earth that bore fruit a hundredfold.  Eleven years later, Paulo's prayer would crown    Amakusa Shiro's flag of rebellion, flying over Hara Castle, where 37,000 Catholics would shed their   blood for Christ.  It was the flag of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament.  Those words of  praise, joy and victory would soar over the Shimabara martyrs' final battleground while the Shogun's horde   stamped out his fury; words that cannot be erased or silenced, singing through Japan's buried centuries of darkness; words flying high and ringing still:  Praised be the Most Blessed Sacrament.  




               We dare not shut our eyes, nor stop our ears.

 (A reproduction of Shiro's battle-flag, flying at a memorial Mass on the sacred earth where Hara           Castle stood.)

-End-

Text and Photos Copyright 2007 by Luke O'Hara

Paulo Uchibori and Sons, Japanese Martyrs of Unzen, Part III

               Twenty others, stripped naked, were forced to watch the tortures and executions; Paulo himself was one of these witnesses.  First, the executioners lined the condemned Christians up along the bank of the moat around Matsukura's fortress, calling each one forward and cutting that victim's fingers off one by one:  some all ten, some less, at the torturer's whim.  Paulo's eighteen-year-old son Antonio they called first:  he bravely strode up and spread his hands out on the cutting-board, showing not a wince as they sliced his fingers off.  Paulo's youngest, five-year-old Ignacio, manifested a miracle when they cut his tender little index-fingers off:  after each slash, he brought that hand to his face and smiled, watching the blood jet out.  The astonished pagans drew away in fear:  like the Gerasenes, terrified by Christ's power over evil.
               After mutilating these heroes, Matsukura's men stripped them, tied ropes around their necks and ankles, and took them out in a boat for the final torture:  hanging stones around their necks, they plunged each into the icy sea, pulling him out and demanding that he renounce Christ to save his life, and dropped him in again, pulling him out to give him another "chance", and in, and out, over and over.  None of the Christians apostatized; every one they drowned. 
                Looking on from a nearby boat were the twenty other Christians forced to watch the tortures and drownings, with Paulo among them.  He heard his heroic son Antonio gasp, "Father, let us thank God for such a big blessing" before they drowned him; and he watched them suspend little Ignacio above the waves before his eyes for a small eternity before they finally sunk the mutilated five-year-old to the bottom of the sea.

               The twenty witnesses they then took back to their stripped-off clothes; warning-signs had been sewn on them, threatening with grave punishment anyone who would dare give these Christians alms or shelter them.  Next, they cut the three middle fingers off each of their hands, branding the word CHRISTIAN on their foreheads and setting them loose to fend for themselves:  stark, horrific examples to would-be believers of the Shogun's certain wrath; but rather than show their misery, these stalwart Catholics went around preaching Christ fearlessly, urging apostates to return to the Faith.  This was not the lesson Matsukura-dono had intended for the souls of Arima, so the twenty were ordered back to his castle.

(to be continued)

Paulo Uchibori and Sons, Part II

Part II

       In 1614, the Shogun's vise tightened on Arima:  Sahioye, the Magistrate of Nagasaki, invaded her with an army of ten thousand men to wage a gruesome campaign of anti-Christian terror, and he threw Paulo Uchibori into prison.  Sahioye, a spiritual precursor of Adolf Hitler, had been promised the fief of Arima if he solved the Christian problem.  He was soon recalled by the Shogun, though, leaving behind in Arima many mutilated but victoriously-faithful Catholics, and two hills of Christian flesh:  one of chopped-up bodies and the other of heads, in a field below Naozumi's abandoned hilltop castle in the south of Arima.

       Arima was next entrusted to Matsukura Shigemasa, a tough warrior and an old stalwart in the retired Shogun Ieyasu's camp.  At first, Shigemasa turned a blind eye to the Christians in Arima, and since he respected Paulo Uchibori's samurai grit, he let him out of prison; but in 1626, Shigemasa went up to the capital to do homage to the Christ-hating Shogun Iemitsu, the third of the Tokugawa Shoguns and Ieyasu's grandson.  According to historian Father Diego Yuuki, S.J., Iemitsu could think of nothing but the crackdown on Christianity, as if he were possessed (Yuuki, Unzen no Junkyo-sha, 1984, p. 52).

               Matsukura Shigemasa's castle at Shimabara; the moat has now become a garden

(Photo © 2007 by Luke O’Hara)

              
       In his year at the Shogun's palace at Edo, Shigemasa drank deep of the poison in the wretched Shogun Iyemitsu's soul:  he went back to Arima a changed man, determined to purge Christ from his domain, and from the capital he had sent down orders to arrest Paulo Uchibori and his family.   When he arrived at his castle at Shimabara, he found thirty-seven Christians in his dungeon.  On 21 February 1627, Shigemasa decreed this doom for sixteen of them:  cut their fingers off, hang stones around their necks, and drown them in the sea.  Paulo's three sons were among them.
                                                           (to be continued)

Paulo Uchibori and Sons, Part I

          A glowering, scar-faced volcano named Unzen reigns over the Shimabara Peninsula in southwestern Japan.  Atop it, bubbling, sulfurous hot springs vomit out white crud and belch acrid steam.  They call this place "Unzen Hell."  In the 1600s, the daimyo of Shimabara found the biggest of its caustic, skin-eating pools perfect for torturing Christians.
 Photo © 2007 by Luke O’Hara


            Most tourists connect Unzen's boiling fury only with the posh spas that ring her "Hell"; almost unknown is the history that lies buried within that smoking netherworld--a tale of superhuman heroism and epic tragedy.  Unzen transfigured this land and laid bare its people's souls.  The volcano has reshaped the Peninsula time and again, most recently in a series of eruptions from 1991-94; and as for Shimabara's Catholics of old, it fired them in its crucible, proving some, like Paulo Uchibori, to be made of tempered steel.  If only the whole world knew.

            Back in the days when it was ruled by Arima Harunobu, this land, known as Arima, had been the Catholic bulwark of Japan; but in 1612, the Shogun exiled Harunobu for bribery, ordering his death and giving Arima to Harunobu's spineless son Naozumi.  Naozumi renounced Christ on the Shogun's orders, joined a Buddhist cult, and vowed to his earthly lord and master to stamp out the Faith in his ancestral domain.  On 7 October 1613--the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary--he burnt three of his top samurai along with their families outside the walls of his castle because they had refused to deny Jesus; yet Arima's staunch Catholics, rather than being cowed, attended this glorious martyrdom in their thousands singing hymns and wearing rosaries around their necks while their earthly lord Naozumi cowered in his fortress on a hilltop overlooking the scene.  Soon Naozumi asked the Shogun to transfer him out of Arima to another fief; rather than join him in apostasy and accompany their despised lord to his new home, most of Arima's Christian samurai renounced their livelihoods for Christ and stayed behind in Arima.  One of the staunchest Catholics among these samurai was Paulo Uchibori, and his three sons took after their father, with souls as tough and keen as Japanese swords.

(to be continued)

Slaughtering the Healers

Item:  The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.

(excerpt from the Platform of the Democratic Party, 2012)

Slaughtering the Healers

            "It is the little ones who heal us," said Father Leonard, completely out of the blue.  I had been confessing some now-forgotten sin, and out came this treasure from the storeroom of his heart.

            It came to me some days later that the face of God must have something in it of the face of a child.  This would explain why Jesus said, "In heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven." (Matt. 18.10)  That is, the faces of the angels' appointed little ones, untainted as yet by actual sin, are so many little faces of God.

            When the Pharisees asked Jesus why He hung around with the likes of us, He answered, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick." (Lk 5:31)  In those days people understood the pricelessness of each human life, and thus the infinite value of healing.  How appalled they would have been to breathe the putrid ambiance of our brave new world where 'freedom of choice' means the wholesale murdering of babies in their mothers’ wombs, and even—horror unspeakable—the slaughtering of babies while they are being born, murdered by the very ‘physicians’ who should be delivering those newborn healers into their mothers’ loving arms.  How infuriated our forebears would have been by the hissing sound of those three slithery words—‘Freedom of Choice’—that deny both freedom and choice to the little boys and girls being butchered by so-called physicians.  And how it must wrench the guardian angels to see their own tiny, Godlike charges torn out of the womb with steel pincers piece by piece, limb by limb, tiny hands and feet and torso, and, most wrenching of all, the tiny bleeding head with its tortured face of God frozen in eternal agony.  How bitterly the guardians must weep to see us slaughter their helpless little ones, those tiny healers, as if infanticide really were the merest expression of 'reproductive rights'.

            If only we could hear the angels gasp, or feel the rain of tears they shower over every butchered child, but perhaps we are too far gone, too 'experienced', too hardened of heart:  perhaps our calluses are long since grown too thick for us to hear or feel such holy pain.  We are so desperately in need of love, of innocence, of healing.

              How very sick indeed our world will be when we have finally slaughtered all the little ones.

Under the Fallen Blossoms, Buried History: Amakusa Shiro and the Fall of Hara Castle

WEBSITE:  Kirishtan.com

Under the Fallen Cherry-Blossoms, Buried History

            In the Japanese village of Minami Arima, every spring at cherry-blossom time, two mortal foes march their little armies up the castle road.  One is a leathery old samurai in armor and the other a pony-tailed teenager in a flowery red cape, with his face painted up like a geisha's.  The man is the Shogun's general; the boy is Amakusa Shiro.  At road's end their armies will have mock combat, eliciting laughs from the crowd.

            Beyond the cherry trees, overlooking the sea, stands a very different Amakusa Shiro:  a stout young man in prayer with two swords in his belt.  This statue is truer to history, more like the young samurai who stood here awaiting the holocaust in that horrific cherry-blossom spring of 1638.  Here thirty-seven thousand souls would offer up their starving flesh, writing their testament in blood into this sacred soil.  Here was Hara Castle, the grave of the Shimabara Rebellion, the dying gasp of old Catholic Japan.

            The Shimabara Peninsula had boasted seventy Catholic churches in her prime, and the nearby Amakusa Islands had been staunchly Catholic too; but since 1612 the Shoguns had been tightening the vise and all faithful Catholics now faced death by torture.  The current Shogun, Iemitsu, demanded Christ's extinction.  Iemitsu was a sadist, a pederast, a drunkard, a tyrant and a paranoiac, and he feared Christ as a demon would.

            To top this off, the lords of Shimabara and Amakusa were practicing tax-extortion.  There had been three years of drought and starvation, but these two profligates demanded exorbitant payments from their peasants, or else.  Some defaulters were tied up in coats made of straw and set alight.  One sheriff seized a farmer's wife—nine months pregnant—stripped her and put her into a cage in an icy stream to make her husband pay up.  She and her baby died in the cage.

            Then there was the torture of another tax-defaulter's only daughter, a beautiful virgin.  The sheriff stripped her naked and burnt her artfully with torches; enraged, her father killed him.  Perhaps this sheriff’s atrocity was the spark for the Shimabara Peninsula’s explosion into rebellion.  Thousands attacked their cruel master's fortress in the town of Shimabara, brandishing a banner that proclaimed:  We were timely born to die for the Faith.

            It did seem like the end of time:  there were burning, vermilion skies, and flowers blooming out of season.  And down in Amakusa there was a prodigy.  Fifteen-year-old Shiro was the son of an old Catholic samurai named Jimbyoei.  Jimbyoei and his cronies had concocted a phony prophecy by a mythical missionary of old that “foretold” Shiro's coming to liberate the downtrodden Christians; and then they acclaimed the boy as their prophesied redeemer in a public ceremony. 

            Thus was the rebellion seeded.  After the explosion in Shimabara, closet-Christians in the nearby Amakusa Islands flocked to Shiro's flag to wage war on their own oppressors; meanwhile, entire villages throughout the Shimabara Peninsula were vowing in writing to obey Shiro to the death.  After an unsuccessful attempt to take their despotic feudal lord’s fortress at Tomioka, Shiro’s Amakusan army sailed to Shimabara with him to join their Shimabaran brethren, and all barricaded themselves and their families inside the disused fortress called Hara Castle, in the south of the Peninsula.

            On Christmas Day the Shogun learned of the rebellion and commissioned a general, Itakura Shigemasa, to go down south to Shimabara and wipe out the despised Catholics.  His army—thrown together with units from various feudal clans—didn't wait for his orders but attacked as soon as they had arrived at Hara Castle, expecting an easy victory:  the Christian marksmen atop the castle walls mauled them.  Enlightened, they withdrew to lick their wounds and prepare themselves for real warfare.

            Reinforcements came, but the rebels repulsed Itakura's second, bigger assault.  Now he had to save his honor:  he ordered an all-out attack on Japanese New Year's Day (Feb. 14, 1638).  Many contingents fought bravely, but the determined rebels exhausted them, and when Itakura tried to rally his army for a last, grand effort, all the mustered units refused to budge.  Now Itakura must save face:  grimly leading only his own little band of vassals, he charged the fortress.  A hail of bullets killed the men on his left and right, but he made it to the wall and died trying to scale it alone, shot through the chest.

            Now a new, veteran general—Matsudaira—arrived with orders from the Shogun to stand clear and starve the Christians out.  He surrounded the fortress with over 125,000 men and backed them up with cannon-fire from both the government camp and a 20-gun Dutch merchantman anchored offshore.

            That winter was severe, and inside Hara Castle the cold and hunger did its work:  what had been a triumphal juggernaut transformed into a purgatory.  By March they had run out of rice and some were eating the empty sacks; nor was there any more drinking-water or firewood, nor gunpowder.  The Shogun's vise was pinching their Christian kingdom and their very bellies, while cannonballs came screaming in to crunch flesh and bone.  One went through Shiro's sleeve and killed four or five of his companions.

            Matsudaira masterfully played his hand once he had tightened the vise.  He tempted the Christians with promises:  rice and homes and land and tax-relief, if only they would leave their fortress and abandon the Faith.  These tempting lies dropped out of the sky, delivered as letters wrapped around arrows shot over the castle walls.  Some nonbelievers, dragged into the rebellion against their will, did defect, but the Christian stalwarts shot testimonies back to the besiegers:  they wanted only to worship Christ; that denied them, they would just have to die, they declared.  Letting them live as Christians, of course, was not an option, for the Shogun, trapped in his private darkness, viewed the Faith with terror.

            By spring the rebels were desperate.  In a sudden night-sortie in early April they tried to rob food and ammo from the government camp, but were repulsed with heavy losses: the Christians had made the mistake of setting fire to enemy tents and thus illuminated themselves, perfect targets for massed musketry.  After the raiders’ retreat into the fortress, the government troops cut open the stomachs of Christian dead and found they had been eating only leaves.

            The Shogun's hour had finally arrived.  On the Eleventh of April, 1638, his horde swarmed over the outermost wall of Hara Castle, having first sent down a rain of fire-arrows.  The wasted defenders fought with anything at hand—empty guns, cooking-pots—while their Christian kingdom burned all around them.  The innermost wall, the wall of the citadel at the mountaintop, was stormed on the morning of the Twelfth, and the fighting ended at noon, when the last rebel combatant was dead.  Those taken prisoner—the elderly, the ill, mothers and their children—they beheaded, without exception.  "Even the little girls," one observer lamented.

            The Shogun's army ringed the burnt-out Hara Castle with 10,860 impaled Christian heads; they sent 3,300 more to Nagasaki as a lesson to that town's surviving Catholics.  As a warning to the Portuguese there—who had brought the Catholic Faith to Japan—they stuck four heads, including Shiro's, onto stakes at the foot of the bridge to the island where the Portuguese were now confined.  Soon the Portuguese would be banned from Japan entirely, and all Japanese required to appear before a magistrate annually and tread on a Christian sacred image to prove their loyalty to the Shogun.

            Today only three Catholic churches can be found in the Peninsula, frequented by perhaps three dozen souls; but every spring at cherry-blossom time, the villagers of Minami Arima do remember the holocaust of the 37,000 with a Buddhist memorial service in the evening, and the next day with a parade, with Amakusa Shiro made up like a dainty geisha, and the Shogun's general a proper man.

            Perhaps the Shogun really won.  

Copyright © 2005, 2013 by Luke O’Hara

(Originally published, in an earlier version, in Our Sunday Visitor)

Saint Paul Miki and Companions

website:  Kirishtan.com

            The martyrdom of Saint Paul Miki and Companions, otherwise known as the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan, is perhaps the fulcrum of Japanese Christian history.  Theirs was the martyrdom that laid bare the core of Japan’s ancient conflict with private conscience—that is, the sense that one’s own moral conviction overrides not only temporal social convention, but even the orders of an earthly superior, when that convention or those orders contravene the moral law.  Saint Paul tells us that that law is inscribed on every human heart, that it is universal.

            Here is a short rendition of the Martyrs’ story—a piece I published some years back.  Their feast is celebrated on the 6^th of February in the Roman Catholic Church, but their martyrdom actually took place on February 5, 1597—Japan time.

The Twenty-six Martyrs

by Luke O'Hara

    Above a hilltop overlooking Nagasaki Bay floats a row of men and boys in bronze, frozen eternally in attitudes of joy. 'Floats,' I say, because they seem to hang suspended in mid-air along a wall of stone. These are the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. Most of them have their hands folded in prayer, and all their mouths are open in praise. Like a halo around each martyr's head, words are inscribed behind him in bronze relief. These are the last words each was heard to say or sing before being pierced with spears from below; this is how Japanese crucifixions usually ended.

          The Twenty-six were crucified on this hill on the Fifth of February, 1597 because, according to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the man who then ruled Japan, they were "foreigners ... come from the Philippines" who had "built churches, preached their religion, and caused disorders." In point of fact, most of the martyrs—twenty of them—were Japanese. 

          The 'disorders' they had caused were as follows: they had built hospitals, orphanages and leprosaria for the poor and outcast, offered charity to the indigent, and labored tirelessly to spread the Gospel of Christ in a land whose people had been esteemed by Saint Francis Xavier as "the best who have yet been discovered." As for their having "built churches," Hideyoshi himself had given the Franciscans a plot of land on which to build.

          But a few of the Franciscans had indeed arrived recently from the Philippines.  They had come in a crippled Spanish galleon headed for Mexico that had been blown off course by a typhoon and had limped into Japan in dire need of repairs. When the battered San Felipe showed up at the port of Urado richly laden with Chinese silks and other treasured cargo, the local ruler contrived to tow the ship into port against the ship's pilot's wishes—ostensibly for repairs—and in the process broke her back on a sand bar, spilling much of her cargo into the bay. Now the San Felipe was a shipwreck, and now, by Japanese law, her cargo was forfeit. 

          But Hideyoshi himself had promised his personal protection to Spanish ships only four years earlier. With this in mind the Spaniards sent a deputation to him to petition for return of the confiscated cargo, but by the time they arrived, the divvying-up of the spoils had already been decided. Now Hideyoshi had to save face. He contrived to 'discover' a Spanish plot to take over Japan by Catholic infiltration, and when he had produced some fishy evidence he flew into a rage and ordered the rounding-up of the Franciscans. In the end the round-up netted six Franciscans, three Jesuits and seventeen hapless Japanese laymen: the youngest twelve years old, another thirteen, and the oldest sixty-four. 

          Hideyoshi ordered that their ears and noses be cut off and they be paraded around the cities of Osaka and Kyoto in carts and then marched to Nagasaki to be crucified, a journey of perhaps eight hundred kilometers; it would take them twenty-seven days. A sympathetic official mitigated the sentence; only their left ears were cut off.

          Along the route, Jesuit Brother Paul Miki distinguished himself for his constant preaching; Bishop Dom Pedro Martins called him the best preacher in Japan. The youngest, twelve-year-old Louis Ibaraki, traipsed along laughing, and reportedly laughed even when they cut off his ear. Four days before the end the boy was offered his life on condition that he renounce the Faith. His reply: "I do not want to live on that condition, for it is not reasonable to exchange a life that has no end for one that soon finishes."^[1] When the Twenty-six arrived at the execution-ground their crosses were there awaiting them. Louis asked "Which one is mine?" and then ran to embrace the one pointed out.

          The monument depicts in bronze how they died: Paul Miki, hands spread, was preaching to the thousands of Nagasaki Christians kneeling on the hillside below when the spears pierced his heart, and Louis's last words shout out from the wall behind him:  "Paradise! Jesus! Mary!"

          Saint Francis Xavier's praises still ring true. 

         

     (The Twenty-six were canonized on June 8, 1862.)

         

(First published in Our Sunday Visitor.)

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^[1] Diego Yuuki, S.J., The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, p. 60.  (Enderle Book Co., Tokyo, 1998)