Kirish'tan Martyrs Blog is dedicated to all the holy men, women and children who gave their lives for Christ to save Japan and the Japanese from Satan's lies.
Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens
Public Domain (PD-US)
“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 store-room 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, so much like the face of the
Infant Jesus.
When the Pharisees asked the adult 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)
Our spiritual forefathers understood the preciousness of each human
life, and thus the infinite value of healing. How appalled they
would have been to breathe the putrid ambience of our brave new world
where slithery phrases like ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘women’s
reproductive rights’ mean the wholesale murdering of babies in
their mothers’ wombs, and—horror unspeakable—the slaughtering
of babies while they are being born, and even after having emerged
alive into our world: 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 ‘women’s reproductive rights’ or, God save us, ‘women’s health.’
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.
Statue of Magdalena at the Basílica Menor de San Sebastián, Manila. Photo by Ramon F. Velasquez (Wikimedia Commons)
Thirteen days and a half
she hung in the pit, singing hymns and blessing the names of Jesus and His
mother: no other human being in all the dark history of Japan’s persecution of
Christ’s Church ever withstood the torturers’ cruelties so long. Yet, in the end,
it was not the cruelties of the Shōgun’s minions that ended her life; rather,
it was the merciful Hand of God that gently took holy Magdalena home.
A young woman of
extraordinary beauty and refinement, Magdalena so enthralled the diabolic
Governor of Nagasaki, Takenaka Uneme, that he tried to dissuade her from
seeking the arrest and martyrdom she so craved. She was worthy of marriage to a
noble of the highest order, he insisted; nay, to the very Emperor himself. But
Magdalena would have none of that. She boldly declared to Uneme’s face that her
only spouse was Christ,1
and in so doing handed herself, life and limb, over to him: to Uneme, the
infamous deviser of the cruellest torture ever known to humankind.
The life and glorious
death of Santa Magdalena, or Saint Magdalene—or Marie-Madeleine, as
French historian Léon Pagès called her—is a dazzling tale so replete with signs
of supernatural power as to make modern atheists stop their ears and crimp shut
their eyes, lest “they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears,
and understand with their heart, and be converted,” and Jesus should heal them.2
Magdalena was a prodigy
who displayed a love of learning from childhood, reading “pious books in the
two languages of Portuguese and Japanese” and consecrating her virginity to God
in front of an image of Our Lady of the Rosary.3 The orphaned daughter of Catholic
martyrs, she risked martyrdom herself by laboring as interpreter and catechist
for the Augustinian friars Francisco de Jesús and Vicente de San Antonio as she
“accompanied them in their vicissitudes in the mountains.”4Father Francisco gave her
the habit of an Augustinian Tertiary and she thereafter made her profession,
though barely fifteen years of age.5 Léon Pagès tells us that
she worked tirelessly for the conversion of pagans, and with great success.6
Such a devoted disciple
was she that, when her spiritual fathers were arrested in November of 1629,
Magdalena wanted to join them in their inevitable martyrdom (they would be
tortured to death by “slow fire”) by turning herself in to the authorities. God
let her know that He had different plans for her, though: she would find new
pastors and continue her work among her people. She served two more Augustinian
Friars, Melchor de San Agustín and Martín de San Nicolás, as their right hand
until they too were captured by the Shogunal authorities. She had been with
them barely three months; they would die by “slow fire” on 11 December 1632.
Execution by “slow fire”
consisted in tying the Christian to a stake surrounded by firewood placed far
enough away from him to produce an excruciatingly slow, agonizing death. To
aggravate the torture, the executioners covered the firewood with a layer of
leafy foliage, then a layer of straw mixed with green branches; they doused the
whole with saltwater mixed with soil; this would produce a thick cloud of acrid
smoke to sting the Christian’s eyes and nose and poison every breath he took.7
Death would finally come only after hours of choking, broiling torture. The
point of all this was to procure public apostasy: to produce such torment in
the Christian captive that he would publicly renounce his faith, thereby
opening the flood gates to mass apostasy. Slow fire, however, wasn’t doing the
job: something more gruelling was in order.
Enter Takenaka Uneme. In
August of 1629 the Shōgun had installed him as Governor of Nagasaki with orders
to expunge the Catholic Faith from that staunchly-Catholic town, the historical
wellspring of Catholicism in Japan. Since slow fire was producing only
blackened corpses and seemed even to be fanning the flames of that proscribed
Faith, the diabolical Uneme devised what would prove to be the ultimate in
torture: “the pit.” Thus:
This was their method of
persuasion: they would coil their victim tightly in rope from the feet up to
the chest, tie his hands behind his back, and then hang him upside-down from a
gallows with his head and torso lowered into a hole, six feet deep, perhaps
containing human waste or other filth and covered with a lid to trap the
stench. The lid was made of two boards closed together; crescent cutouts in the
center closed tight around the victim’s body, pinching his waist and cutting
off his circulation. It felt like his head was going to explode; his mouth,
nose and ears would soon start oozing blood. François Caron, the chief of the
Dutch trading-post in Hirado, wrote, “This extremitie hath indeed ... forced
many to renounce their religion; and some of them who had hung two or three days
assured me that the pains they endured were wholly unsufferable, no fire nor no
torture equalling their languor and violence.”8
This is how Magdalena’s
next two pastors would die. The first, Dominican Father Domingo de Erquicia,
described Uneme as “man dressed as demon, or devil incarnate.”9
He succumbed on 14 August 1633. The second, Italian Dominican Father Giordano Ansaloni, would meet his death on 17 November 1634. By
that time Magdalena had already left this wretched earth, for she had sought
out martyrdom, marching into that incarnate devil’s very lair in her black
monastic habit to declare her burning love for Christ and her contempt for any
torture that hell and all its minions could throw her way.
Upon learning of Father
Giordano’s arrest, she went straight to Nagasaki to present herself to the
authorities and demand that she too—as a Christian, a disciple of Father
Giordano’s, and a member of a religious order—be arrested. At first, taken by
her beauty and her obvious refinement, Uneme tried to dissuade her, but seeing
her unshakable faith, he ordered her put in jail. “She entered with great
happiness, shedding tears of joy,” history tells us.10 To dampen her spirits, Uneme
ordered her tortured; his torturers jammed sharpened strips of singed bamboo
under her fingernails. Seeing blood pouring from her wounds, she reveled, “With
what rubies have you adorned my hands!”11 The torturers ordered Magdalena to
scratch furrows in the earth with the bamboo strips; she obeyed, undaunted.12
They tried a water torture, pouring copious amounts down her throat and then
throwing her onto the floor and loading heavy stones onto her so that the water
gushed out violently through her mouth, ears, and nose.13 Though they repeated this torture
time and again, giving her no rest, beautiful Magdalena was unmoved. They hung
her by her arms on ropes, raised her high, and dropped her, dislocating her
shoulders,14
to no avail: still she clung to Christ.
Giving up, Uneme
condemned Magdalena to the pit along with ten other Christians. First he had
them paraded around the streets of Nagasaki with Magdalena at their head on
horseback, a rope strung tight around her throat like a garotte and tied to her
wrists, bound fast behind her. A sign on her back proclaimed her sentence:
condemned to death for refusing to abandon the Law of the Christians.15 Her eyes showed no terror, nor the slightest hint of
disquiet; indeed, they glowed with joy as she preached to onlookers all along
the lengthy way. Finally her horse was led up the steep slope called Nishi-zaka
to the execution-ground above, overlooking Nagasaki Bay. There the executioners
cocooned her in rope, slung her by her heels from a gallows, and hung her, head
downwards, into the pit of horrors—a six-foot-deep hole whose bottom, filled
with the vilest filth the torturers could gather, reeked abominably—and clamped
the lid around her waist, cutting off all light, fresh air, and even her own
circulation. Perhaps, as usually happened, blood began to drip from her ears
and mouth and nose; perhaps her agonies were ‘wholly unsufferable, no fire nor
no torture equalling their languor and violence’; but Magdalena uttered not one
groan or plaint or squeal: instead, she happily sang sweet songs in Japanese to
Jesus, her Spouse in Heaven.16
This went on for nearly
fourteen days. The guards would hear her ask, “Would you like to hear a song?”
in the cheeriest of tones, and on their answering ‘Yes,’ Magdalena would
immediately break into song, singing “a thousand canticles of praise to God our
Lord in the Japanese tongue.”17 Accounts abound of miracles
performed by—or through—Magdalena during that fortnight, but it was miracle
enough that she had remained alive without a sip of water or a bite of food
through that overlong ordeal, incredible enough to bring the torturers’
overlords up to Nishi-zaka to see for themselves just what was going on. They
had no doubt that the guards had been suborned, that some Christian misfits
were slipping her food and drink and bribing the guards to let them in. This
the guards denied, and Magdalena backed up their words when they opened the lid
to have a look at her for themselves. “Don’t be surprised if I don’t die in
this ordeal,” she told the incredulous officials. “The Lord whom I adore
preserves me and holds me up. I feel a paternal hand touching my face, and my
body is lightened so that I don’t suffer.”18
That was enough for
Uneme’s minions: they told the guards to club her unconscious, orders they must
have obeyed with bitter reluctance, having been soothed for nearly fourteen
days on end by Magdalena’s sweet, angelic songs—songs “in praise of her Husband
[sung] with singular melody and sweetness, so much so that they said it
couldn’t be a human voice.”19
Their dirty work done,
those men must have closed the lid on Magdalena’s pit with leaden stomachs and
searched their souls for some relief, something like that soothing Hand that
had caressed that lovely maiden’s face throughout her impossibly-long ordeal.
Perhaps they felt a hint of that relief when Heaven opened her floodgates that
evening, drenching them as they stood at their posts atop Nishi-zaka, looking
down on holy Nagasaki, home of so many martyrs, and trying to make sense of the
horrors they had to stand watch over. Then, come morning, there was perfect
silence: no heavenly joy, no sweet, angelic songs, for they saw Magdalena’s
hole filled to the brim with Heaven’s cleansing rain, and pulling her out, they
found that she had drowned: her Lord and Husband had finally, and ever so
gently, taken her home.
Pretty Magdalena, holy
Magdalena: the perfect bride for Heaven’s earthborn King.
17 Testimony of Úrsula Torres, Japanese and native of
Nagasaki, relating what the guards themselves had told her; recorded at the
Proceso de Macao, 1 Feb. to 2 March 1638. Peña, p. 71.
18 Pagès, 806. Another rendering of her words
can be found in Peña, 51: “No os canséis que no he de morir de este
tormento, porque el Señor, a quien adoro, me sustenta y siento una mano suave
que arrimadaal rostro me está aliviando el cuerpo.”
U.S.S. Shaw exploding at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, Hawaii time
December 8, 1941: a day that has lived in infamy for 78 years.
What? December 8th?
Americans remember Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December, but it was
December 8th in Japan when the Japanese Imperial Navy’s dive bombers hit Pearl
Harbor. December 8th 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 wondering, upturn’d eyes of mortals in the form of countless apparitions
warning mankind to believe in her Son’s reality and 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 full-fledged 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 15th of August 1549,
the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin: the birth of
Christendom in Japan.
Martyrdom
of Bl. Leonard Kimura and four other Christians in Nagasaki, November
18, 1619.
By
an anonymous Japanese artist. Source: Wikimedia Commons
In the final week of November 2019, Pope Francis was treading soil
baptized with Catholic blood in one of history’s cruelest persecutions. While
visiting Tokyo, Hiroshima, and especially Nagasaki, our first Jesuit pope
likely recalled Saint Francis Xavier, whose pioneering mission brought Christ
to Japan on the Feast of the Assumption in 1549. Hopefully, the modern Francis
also contemplated the agonies and privations that his forebears lived and breathed
in the centuries of that great darkness.
When that first Jesuit mission reached Japan, St. Francis Xavier and his
two Jesuit companions found the country in a state of civil war. It was thus
providential that they landed in Kagoshima, whose powerful lord gave them safe
haven where they could learn about the Japanese and plant the Gospel seeds that
would root in countless Japanese hearts. St. Francis Xavier reported:[1]
"The
people whom we have met so far, are the best who have as yet been discovered,
and it seems to me that we shall never find among heathens another race to
equal the Japanese. … They are a people of very good will, very sociable, and
very desirous of knowledge; they are very fond of hearing about things of God."
After trekking much of Japan, the saint departed in November 1551,
leaving his two Jesuit companions behind to carry on the superhuman task ahead.
He would fall ill on November 20, 1552 and die twelve days later on an island
south of China, carrying to Heaven his unfulfilled dream of getting into that
closed country, converting its emperor, and returning to Japan to do the
same.
Yet the seeds he had planted did thrive, so much so that the warlord
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, whose power grew to compass all Japan, became jealous of
the priests of that religion that had stolen the hearts of tens of thousands of
his people. In 1587, Hideyoshi banned the Faith; a decade later, to drive in
his point, he crucified 26 Catholic men and boys on a slope called Nishi-zaka
overlooking Nagasaki Bay. His death in 1598 gave the Church a needed respite.
And yet short-lived. In 1614 a new persecution shook Japan. The Tokugawa
shoguns who succeeded Hideyoshi made the very life and breath of every human
being in Japan contingent on his willingness to spurn the Catholic Faith and
betray all known believers to the murderous regime.
But some preferred a holy death in public view to hell and dishonor. One
such fearless believer was yet another Jesuit, a humble lay brother named
Leonardo Kimura.
In November of 1619, Brother Leonardo was confined in Nagasaki’s jail,
where he had spent three grueling years. Japanese prisons of this period were
deathly hellholes,[2]
their prisoners crammed like sardines into dark, dank, unvented wooden cages
whose dirt floors bred vermin while the air stunk beyond description. Disease
and infestation were rampant, and many died, their bodies sometimes left in
place for days on end until official permission could be gotten by the guards
to remove them.
However, neither dankness nor lice nor stench nor filth nor inhuman
cramping nor lethal illness was sufficient to deter Brother Kimura from saving
souls. Within the confines of his pestilential earthly hell, he lived a holy
life along with three fellow-prisoners in his spiritual charge. Their regimen
is documented in François Solier’s Histoire:[3]
They started every day with an hour of silent prayer; next they prayed
the Litany of the Saints aloud followed by other prayers, a second hour. They
did spiritual reading until mealtime, after which each applied himself to some
edifying activity. Evenings, another hour of prayer. All fasted at least three
days a week, during which they also scourged themselves. They prayed five hours
on Fridays in honor of the Five Wounds of Christ. Every month they did the
Forty Hours devotion to bring Heaven’s help to the persecuted Christians and
the preachers of the Gospel.
Eventually the warden, seeing that this Jesuit had turned his jail into
a house of prayer, moved him to a separate cell whose ceiling was so low that
he couldn’t raise his head while squatting on the floor; still he evangelized.
By the time they led Leonardo out of prison to meet his death, he had 86
baptisms under his belt, numbering both prisoners and guards.
Yet, in dying, he proclaimed Christ more boldly than ever. While being
marched toward a death-cage at the edge of Nagasaki Bay along with four other
faithful believers, this indomitable Jesuit proclaimed the Gospel at the top of
his lungs to the thousands lining the roadside, watching from boats offshore,
and blanketing the mountainside opposite the bay: a message of hope for all the
truth-starved ears of benighted Catholic Nagasaki.
But this was only the prologue.
The five were tied to stakes; the wood was lit; a cloud of smoke
enveloped the martyrs—and then a marvel. The smoke cleared to reveal Leonardo
wrapped in flames,his face exuding joy, waiting forhis ropes
to burn away. Then, freed of his stake, hebent to earth, took up two
burning embers in his hands, and held them aloft “as if they were heavenly jewels,”[4]singing Laudate
dominum omnes gentes.
Nagasaki’s thousands, astonished, “made the air ring with the sacred
names of Jesus and Mary”[5]
while a children’s choir began singing praises from a boat offshore.
The martyrs’ bones and ashes would be chopped to bits, bagged up and
sunk into the deep as if to wipe the dazzling truth from history, a futile stab
at the invincible. For history cannot forget.
Perhaps, back in Rome, Pope Francis will reflect, having looked out on
that water from atop Nishi-zaka, better known as Martyrs’ Hill—where so many
faithful Jesuits shed their lives.
***
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.
[1] Charles Ralph Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan 1549-1650 (Lisbon: Carcanet, 1993) 401.
Fukushima MasanoriHiroshima Castle today. Photo by Hiroaki Kikuchi In the Year of Our Lord 1616, a young samurai named Hoshino Kanzō
returned to Fukushima Masanori’s castle-town of Hiroshima after some years’
absence to care for his father, who was mortally ill. The young man’s return
must have been bittersweet, since his father, egged on by his Jezebel of a
stepmother, had thrown him out of his home years earlier over his devotion to
Christ. Perhaps his very baptismal name, Domingo, set her teeth on edge.
On his eviction, Domingo
Hoshino had made his way to Nagasaki to seek spiritual help from the
Portuguese Jesuit priest who had baptized him, Fr. Mattheus de Couros, and
afterwards traveled to the island of Shikoku, where he found work as a samurai
in the service of a prominent daimyō. When the Tokugawa persecution of 1614
extended its tentacles to Shikoku, however, Domingo was given the choice of
abandoning either his faith or his living. Of course, he chose the latter. This
made him not only a rōnin—a wandering samurai without a master, and thus
perhaps considered a dangerous tramp—but also a Kirish’tan rōnin,
perhaps treated as anathema by all and sundry.
Thus, on his return to Hiroshima, Domingo was
longing for rest, for a home, and for a chance to repair the filial ties that
his stepmother had sundered by dint of her malign influence over the old
man—who now lay on his deathbed, shorn of any strength to resist his wife’s
predations. It must have wrung his heart to see his eldest son’s face again
after those years of absence. Certainly Domingo’s heart, too, would have stung
on seeing his father near death, still neither baptized nor converted. Domingo
did the little he could to nurse his father’s body back to health, but all his
efforts to save his soul were frantically resisted by his Jezebel stepmother until the old man was dead.
One can imagine the desolation
that must have followed fast upon the spent anguish in the heart of the dead
man’s returned discarded son. His father’s apparently unrepentant death was not
the final blow, however: as if not yet having injected enough venom into her
despised stepson’s life and soul, that wanton shade of a mother snatched away
Domingo’s inheritance, grabbing legal title over the family home. She was
determined to make him a Kirish’tan outcast again.
No doubt these facts steeled
Domingo’s certainty of the justice of his cause when he marched to Fukushima
Masanori’s castle on 26 November 1616 to petition for redress of the theft of
his inheritance. He was probably thinking not only of himself, but also of his
younger brother, who would be solely under that Jezebel’s malevolent influence
in his forced absence. His younger brother’s soul was in jeopardy just as his
father’s had been.
Masanori’s castle stood on a
rise in Hiroshima armored with massive masonry on all sides, surrounded by a
moat, and planted with pretty groves of pine trees. Perhaps it reminded Domingo
of his days of samurai service in Shikoku; perhaps he felt readmitted to the
human race for a space of moments as he climbed the stone steps into the castle
keep for an audience with the daimyō himself. That changed abruptly, though,
when one of Masanori’s samurai, an ally of the stepmother’s in her rotten
scheme, stood up to denounce Domingo as an incompetent, a coward, a madman, and
above all an accursed Christian who had long before been thrown out of the
family home for having defied his father’s orders to quit that banned
religion—and would he now come storming back to Hiroshima to demand that home
for his own?
Since the accuser had publicly
denounced the petitioning Domingo as a flagrant violator of the shogun’s
prohibition against practicing the Christian Faith, Masanori was forced to act
enraged at the ‘discovery’ of the young man’s Catholicism. (This daimyō had in
fact been sympathetic to Christianity before the shogun forced him to execute a
crackdown; he may well have long known about the young man’s conversion.) He
asked if it were true that he was a Christian and that he had indeed defied his
father’s orders to renounce Christ; Domingo answered Yes. Masanori then ordered him to commit suicide
by hara-kiri.
“I will gladly die or suffer any torture you give me for the
sake of Christ,” Domingo answered, “but I cannot commit suicide, for it is
against our [Christian] law, as all know.”
This Masanori acknowledged. He then declared
that, since Christians so esteemed the Cross, there was one obvious solution:
“Crucify him!”
With his hands tied behind his back and a noose
around his neck—gross ignominy for a samurai—Domingo was led out of the castle
grounds by a cordon of soldiers. The man at the head of the procession held a
sign proclaiming Fukushima Masanori’s sentence of death:
I order this man executed for having
become a Christian against the law of the Lord of the Tenka (i.e.
the Empire) and for having refused to renounce his religion in defiance of his
parents…
It concluded with the charge that Domingo,
having gone to Nagasaki to become a Christian, had thereafter returned to
Hiroshima. Domingo had actually received baptism in Hiroshima at the hands of
Fr. de Couros some years before the 1614 ban. That final charge in the
death-sentence was obviously a ploy to absolve Masanori and his domains, far
removed from Catholic Nagasaki, of any taint of Christian sympathies.
The condemned Catholic thanked God all the way to
the execution ground, where a cross had been prepared, awaiting him. He
reverenced the cross, said a prayer, embraced it, and passively allowed his
executioners to tie his arms and legs to the wood (Japanese crucifiers did not
nail their victims to the cross) and fasten his neck to the upright with an
iron clamp. Then he was lifted up.
He began to preach of the truth of the Faith to
all within earshot, insisting that they deceive themselves who hold that there
is any salvation outside of Christ. Domingo Hoshino ended his sermon with the
names of Jesus and Mary, shouted as the spearmen standing at the foot of his
cross drove their spears into his flanks, up through his heart, and out the
shoulders. This is how Japanese crucifixions culminated.
On Masanori’s orders, Domingo’s body was left to
rot eight days on the cross as a terror to any who would dare to worship
Christ. Rather than prove a deterrent, though, the corpse of the crucified
Christian became a holy shrine, drawing a steady stream of Catholics come to do
the faithful martyr reverence—and, if possible, scoop up some of that sacred
earth baptized with his blood.
After that octave of would-be terror, the local
Catholics took away Domingo Hoshino’s body for proper burial. He was the first
Catholic martyred in Hiroshima and the first in all Japan crucified under the
Tokugawa persecution, a samurai of 23 or 24 years of age, faithful unto death
to his Lord above.
Sources:
1.
Pedro Morejón, Historia y Relacion de lo sucedido en los Reinos de
Japon y China, en la qual se continua la gran persecucion que ha
avido en aq̃lla Iglesia, desde el año de 615. hasta el de 19. Por
el Padre Pedro Morejon de la Compañia de Iesus, Procurador de la
Prouincia de Iapon, natural de Medina del Campo. (Lisboa:
Rodriguez, 1621) 76-77. 2. Webpage of the
Pauline Sisters: キリシタンゆかりの地をたずねて,
広島県広島市広島キリシタン殉教の碑.
URL: https://www.pauline.or.jp/kirishitanland/20111104_koi.php
