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.
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:
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
