Four hundred and seven
years ago today—5 February 1597—twenty-six bloodied men and boys were crucified
on a mountainside overlooking Nagasaki Bay for the crime of being
Christian. Being spat upon and ridiculed and otherwise abused, they had
been marched for twenty-eight days through towns and villages and countryside toward
their destination at the westernmost edge of Japan—for the Christian town of
Nagasaki was, in the dictator’s eyes, the perfect place to make a show of his
power.
(Toyotomi Hideyoshi)
He had proscribed the Faith a decade earlier, perhaps in the merest fit of
pique—fueled by drunkenness—and ordered all clergy, or bateren, out of Japan.
Unwilling to abandon their flocks, however, most of the clergy in the country
stayed on at the risk of their lives and went incognito as it were, abandoning
the Jesuit habit to wear the ordinary Japanese clothing of the day. They
knew the ruler well: Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Taikō, the Retired Imperial Regent.
In the Japanese scheme of things, his so-called retirement was a screen behind
which to freely wield dictatorial power, and he accepted the proscribed
clergy’s screen of seeming-obedience to his edict as a convenient compromise,
for he needed the good offices of the Jesuit clergy in Japan to smooth his
acquisition of Chinese silk and European guns through the Portuguese traders
who sailed to Nagasaki from Macao.
But then, on October 19, 1596, the San
Felipe—a Mexico-bound Spanish galleon laden with rich Chinese silks—limped
into the Japanese port of Urado after having been blown off course by a
typhoon. The local daimyō (feudal lord), feigning
helpfulness, had the ship towed into his harbor and right onto a sand-bar,
which broke the ship's back and converted her into a shipwreck. Now, by
Japanese law, her cargo was forfeit, or so the daimyō told
the Spaniards, and he quickly sent word to Hideyoshi, from whom he could expect
a rich reward.
The Spanish captain dispatched an embassy of two Franciscan friars and two of
his crewmen to Osaka to save his cargo, but such an embassy could be
embarrassing for Hideyoshi: he had already claimed the cargo for
himself. He therefore engineered an interrogation of the ship's pilot at
the hands of a clever underling: Hideyoshi’s man construed a “confession”
that the friars were the vanguards of Spanish conquest; this gave the ruler an
excuse to explode with rage and in his fury order the round-up and crucifixion
of all Franciscans in his captive realm. In the event, his zealous men
netted six Franciscans, three Jesuits and fifteen Catholic laymen. (Two
more martyrs would be added to their number later on.) Hideyoshi ordered
their ears and noses cut off; next they were to be paraded around the cities of
Kyoto, Osaka and Sakai in carts, and thereafter marched eight hundred
kilometers to Nagasaki, there to be crucified. A sympathetic official in
Kyoto intervened: only their left earlobes were cut off, but the rest of
the sentence would be carried out in full.
(To be continued tomorrow: please revisit my blog.)
Website: Kirishtan.com
