Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada
(Wikimedia Commons)
Behold a heart-wrenching martyrdom
in which whole families were immolated together—including mothers with infants
in their arms—just to satisfy the mighty Shogun Hidetada’s ire.
In October of 1619, Hidetada was on a visit to Kyōto, the Imperial capital,
when he heard that there were a great many Christians being held in Kyōto’s
jail. The volatile Shogun exploded into rage and ordered them all executed
immediately, regardless of age, gender, or station. They were to be crucified
and burned on their crosses as a mise-shime: a lesson to
recalcitrant believers.
Hidetada’s father, Tokugawa
Ieyasu—the first of the Tokugawa Shoguns—had slapped a nationwide ban on the
practice of Christianity in 1614, fearful perhaps of its grant of sovereignty
to every human conscience. The son was now doubling down on his father’s ban,
doing his utmost to scare that proscribed faith out of the hearts of all
Japan’s believers lest the whole nation’s heart should change, turn to the
truth, and see that all men are equal in the sight of God.
Ieyasu’s forebear, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had nailed his
own lesson of fear and intolerance to twenty-six crosses raised atop a mountain
slope overlooking Nagasaki Bay on February 5, 1597. He had crucified Br. Paul
Miki, S.J. and his twenty-five brothers in faith on the charge that they had
brought to Japan’s shores a subversive foreign religion, a “religion of love
and union” prejudicial to a martial culture whose ethos was grounded on
self-abnegation and blind obedience to rigid rule from above. In that world
inherited by the present Shogun, an overlord presumed the right to cut down his
servants at his whim or command them to take their own lives; what horror to
the tyrant, then, if every man should see himself as a temple housing Almighty
God.
Thus was Hidetada’s boiling rage most likely fueled by
fear.
Itakura Katsushige, Kyōto’s Shogunal
Governor, was a decent man—“the most moderate man on earth,” French historian
Pierre de Charlevoix tells us—but he dare not contravene the Shogun’s orders,
not even to “defer the execution of a lady of the first quality who was about
to give birth.” Before the appalling orders
arrived, Itakura had released the faithful Catholics languishing in Kyōto’s
prison, sending them home to house arrest, but now they were rounded up to be
loaded onto eleven wagons and paraded through the streets of the capital—the
men, the boys, and the girls in the foremost and hindmost wagons, and the
women, many with babies at their breast or in their arms, in the others.
Historian Léon Pagès records that
A crier led the cortege and proclaimed the death
sentence: “The Shogun … wills and commands that all these people be burned
alive as Christians.” And the martyrs confirmed the crier’s words, saying, “That's right, we're dying for Jesus. Hurrah
for Jesus!”
Twenty-seven crosses had been erected along the river called Kamo-gawa, on the
outskirts of Kyōto, awaiting these sacrificial victims. Among the martyrs were
Johane Hashimoto Tahioye and his wife, christened Tecla, along with their
six beautiful children. On the Shogun Hidetada’s orders, all the children would
of course be burned along with their mothers.
The martyrs were clamped to the
crosses—the mothers with babies in their arms in the center, and the others
back to back, in pairs. Léon Pagès lists more names: “Magdalena … had her
two-year-old daughter Regina in her arms; Maria had Monica, her daughter, four
years old; and Marta, her son Benito, two years old,” and on and on, including
“little Marta, eight years old and blind.” And Tecla, mother of five and another in her womb, with
four-year-old Lucia in her arms and her other children on crosses to her right
and left.
The firewood was lit; as the Shogun’s willed inferno erupted around the
martyrs, their voices rose above the roar of the flames, calling the name of
Jesus. Mothers with little ones in their arms caressed their babies’ faces to
soothe their pain, or perhaps to ward off the horror of the flames.
Tecla’s daughter Catherine cried, “Mother, I can’t see.”
“Call to Jesus and Mary,” her mother answered.
Richard Cocks, an English Protestant who witnessed this holocaust, wrote:
I saw fifty-five [sic] martyred at
Miyako, at one time when I was there, because they wold not forsake their
Christian Faith, & amongst them were little Children of five or sixe yeeres
old burned in their mothers armes, Crying out, Jesus recive their soules.
Léon
Pagès wrote that a comet “and supernatural fires” marked this martyrdom. A
sign, no doubt, that Christ Himself was there among the martyrs, comforting His
precious sheep in the fiery maelstrom: the Conqueror of Death claiming victory
amidst those hellish flames.
***
Luke O’Hara
became a Roman Catholic in Japan. His articles and books about Japan’s martyrs
can be found at his website, kirishtan.com.
