Anatomy of a Martyrdom: for Love of Souls

The burning of Father Antonio Ishida. From Cardim's 

Fasciculus e Iapponicis Floribus, Rome, 1646.

       While combing the narrow streets of Nagasaki in the autumn of 1629, the Shogun’s police grabbed themselves a coveted prize: a Japanese Jesuit priest, an heir of Saint Francis Xavier’s hope, born eighty years earlier, to fill all Japan with Christ. By 1629, under the Shogun Iemitsu’s persecution, that hope was all but smashed under the tyrant’s heel, and yet a rare breed of intrepid men still clave to that hope as if it were their very life and breath, despising their own mortal lives to save immortal souls for Christ. 

          Father Antonio Ishida, S.J. had been called to Nagasaki to hear the confession of an ailing believer, and having done this work of charity, he stayed on for six more days to hear a string of confessions from underground Catholics too-long starved of the Sacraments. He had been warned against making the dangerous trip to Nagasaki by a fellow-priest in Omura, but he had chosen to obey the call “for love of souls,” as he later explained in a letter from his Nagasaki prison.

            There he languished with four other men: three Augustinians, one Franciscan, and a Japanese diocesan priest. Meanwhile, the Shogun’s governor in Nagasaki, Takenaka Uneme, was busily devising stratagems designed to seduce Christ’s shepherds away from His flock—or, that failing, to rip that hated faith out of them by tortures as cruel as fallen Man could devise.

            But first the seduction. Uneme had Fr. Ishida brought out of jail to face an erudite Buddhist monk chosen to convince him to renounce the Faith, if only for show, in obedience to the Shogun. In his secret heart, he could go on believing whatever he wished, the monk explained, and save his life. The staunch priest replied that what a Christian believed in his heart he must proclaim to all the world. And the Shogun’s decrees, he went on, could in no wise prevail against the law of the Creator of the universe.

            Next they tried bribing him with riches and prestige on top of the offer of his life: the browbeating went on for twenty-four hours—to no avail. The priest went back to jail, and Uneme turned his eyes toward Mount Unzen, a volcano southeast of Nagasaki whose peak held boiling pools of acrid sulfur water, the very stench of which would choke and gag a passerby. But Uneme’s victims were not marched up there merely to choke.

            The torturers had a practiced method: strip the victim naked, make him stand on a rock at the boiling pool’s edge, and shower him with that boiling, sulfurous crud dripped from a ladle with holes in its bottom. A survivor reported that each drop felt like a knife’s point driven into the skin. Throughout December of 1631, Fr. Ishida and his fellows endured daily torture as their torturers demanded they apostatize and thus procure relief. At night they were shoved into a hut where they would wait, shivering, through the freezing hours of darkness for their next day of agonies and pray for the grace to go on. For sustenance, each victim was allowed one sardine and one small bowl of broth per day.

         Along with Fr. Ishida suffered four priests and one brother: Frs. Bartolomé Gutiérrez, Vicente Carvalho, and Francisco de Jesús, Augustinians; and Br. Gabriel de la Magdalena, a Franciscan. Two were Spaniards, one Portuguese, and one, Fr. Gutiérrez, was Mexico-born.  Along with these clergy, Uneme, the reptilian inquisitor, had thrown in two Portuguese ladies from Macao, Beatriz da Costa and her daughter Maria, perhaps out of gratuitous cruelty. Maria finally collapsed, unconscious, and they said she had apostatized: a claim she denied upon reviving.

       Thirty-three days of scalding having gained the torturers no prize, Uneme called them back to Nagasaki. The ladies he sent back to Macao; he would substitute a Japanese priest—Fr. Iyo, Franciscan—to stand in for them on the execution-ground overlooking Nagasaki Bay. The six men were led out of their cell on the morning of September 3, 1632. They would climb a steep slope called Nishi-zaka to reach the place of their martyrdom, the very flatland atop which the crosses of the Twenty-Six Martyrs had been arrayed on a February morning in 1597; many more faithful had seeded that soil with their blood in the intervening years.

      Atop that sacred ground, Uneme’s men had built a cage of sorts in which to roast those stalwarts of the Faith. Around it, on all sides, a palisade of bamboo poles enclosed the killing-ground; inside stood six columns in a line, topped by a roof of foliage and straw: this would trap the acrid smoke intended to prolong the agonies of the missionaries to be burned. Firewood was spaced at a distance from each column calculated to provide a lingering death, and all was doused with saltwater to produce as much choking smoke as possible. Spotting some Portuguese onlookers on the way to Nishi-zaka, Fr. Vicente shouted at them “Long live the Faith of Christ!” in their tongue, and when none made a sound, he asked, “Will no-one respond?” and repeated, “Viva!” At this there came a cry of “Viva! Viva!” On their way up the slope, the martyrs chanted Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes.  

       Inside their death-cage, each of the martyrs was tied by a single finger to one of the columns: this method was intended to elicit amusing dances of agony and panic from the men of that proscribed faith, and even perhaps provide an apostasy or two. The torturers, though, were disappointed. 

       Fr. Gutiérrez was the first to die: he stood like a warrior facing an inconsequential enemy, leaned into his column, and gave up his soul in silence. Fr. Vicente, holding a bronze cross, kept his eyes fixed on it until his last breath. All died without providing any hint of cowardice or doubt of their eternal reward, enduring hell on earth for love of souls.

       Friday, September 3, 1632: a day to remember when asking for prayers from above.

                                        ***

            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.

August 25th, 1624: Five Heroic Men who Withstood Hellfire for Their Faith

  

On 25 August 1624, five Catholic heroes faced hellish deaths for having brought Christ to the people of Japan. Burned at the stake in Ōmura, east of Nagasaki, were Father Miguel Carvalho, S.J., Fathers Luís Sotelo and Luís Sasada, Franciscans, Father Pedro Vázquez, Dominican, and Franciscan Brother Luís Baba.

Padre Miguel Carvalho, the Jesuit, had entered Japan in 1622 on a Portuguese trading-ship, having disguised himself as a soldier. The three Franciscans had been sent from Japan as private ambassadors to King Philip III of Spain and the Vatican, only to be arrested on their return. Fray Pedro Vázquez, dauntless Dominican, had once risked death by disguising himself as a Japanese official to gain entry to Nagasaki’s prison, where he heard the confessions of Catholic prisoners bound for execution.

A decade had passed since the fateful Anti-Christian Edict of 14 January 1614 exploded onto Japan—ironically, on Saint Valentine’s Day. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the retired-yet-reigning Shogun, on that day fettered Japan with a brutal regime of suppression worthy of Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong, a regime that his progeny would tighten with each new accession to the Shogunal throne. By 1624, every cleric in Japan was living on the scythe’s edge, daring a gruesome death; nevertheless, these men of God carried on.

In July 1623, Father Carvalho had slipped into the Ōmura domain to hear the confessions of her underground Christians. Having done his heroic work, he was betrayed by a spy, arrested, and jammed into a hellhole of a prison where the four other servants of God already languished, awaiting martyrs’ deaths.

Ōmura was the first domain in Japan where Catholicism took deep root; its ruler, Ōmura Sumitada, christened Bartolomeo, had embraced the Faith in 1563 and championed it, braving violent opposition and even a rebellion led by his anti-Catholic half-brother. Bartolomeo stood firm as a pillar of the Church unto his death in 1587.

Bartolomeo’s progeny, however, did not prove so redoubtable: his son and heir apostatized in a fit of pique, and his son, christened Bartolomeo like his grandfather, was cowed into apostasy when the second Tokugawa Shogun fumed threats of dire consequences at him should he not rid his domain of that irking religion of truth and light. The cowed apostate started executing priests in May 1617; perhaps by the time Father Carvalho showed up in Ōmura, its ruler’s conscience was numb, inured to spilling holy martyrs’ blood.

On 22 July 1623, Father Miguel Carvalho was thrown into a foul, stinking cell no bigger than a closet—“16 hand full long and 8 broad,” he wrote—with the four Christian stalwarts with whom he would die. It comforted him that his imprisonment began on the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, his patroness, and that he had managed to convert two of his captors on his way to jail.

Thirteen months the five faithful men endured an unendurable penance, awaiting the chance to prove to the downtrodden souls of Ōmura that Christ lives in His martyrs. That chance finally came on the feast day of the saintly King of France who had daily set beggars at his own table.

August 25, 1624: the Feast of Saint Louis. The five condemned men of God were led to the execution-ground in Ōmura with ropes strung tight around their necks and their arms bound. Only their hands were free—free enough for each priest to walk clutching a cross on the way to his Calvary. The Palme of Christian Fortitude (Douai, 1630) relates their ordeal:

   They arrived at the place appointed for their death, a field called Hokonohara, when giving thanks unto those who had conducted them, … the Priests lifting on high the crosses which they bare in their hands, they began to recite psalms with a loud voice; when Father Carvalho, perceiving now a great multitude to be assembled, turning unto them, You must understand, said he, that we are Christians, and that we die of our free and voluntary accord, for the faith of Christ our Lord.  The admirable serenity of their countenances put their joy so clearly in view of the beholders, that amazed thereat they said, these men seemed to go rather to some feast or banquet, than unto death.

          The five men were loosely tied to their stakes in order that, flailing about in their agonies, they might provide amusement to the crowd: the loose cords would also burn away quickly, giving each victim the chance to flee the flames and apostatize.

          But not a man gave in. The first to die was Brother Luís Baba, the native Japanese catechist.  Freed by his burnt-away cords, he ran to the stakes of his priest-companions to kneel and kiss their hands, and

then exhorting with a loud voice the standers by to embrace the faith of Christ in which alone is true safety and salvation,  he returned generously unto the stake again, and leaning himself unto it, without any further tying … he endured, without ever moving himself, the fury of those flames, until at length he rendered his invincible soul to God.

          The next to die was Father Carvalho, and then Father Luís Sasada, a native-born Japanese who tried, like his countryman Luís Baba, to leave his stake and do reverence to the surviving priests. He could not move his feet, though, for they were burnt to cinders. The longest survivors were Fathers Luís Sotelo and Pedro Vázquez, who endured the torment of a slow, smoky fire of straw “and other dry litter” to choke them and cook them slowly, torturously—to effect their apostasies. Yet they hung on

3 hours in the fire, ever immovable, consuming away in lingering slow flames; after which space of time they ended the course of a combat so much [the] more glorious, as it was produced longer, upon the twenty-fifth of August 1624, by order of the Governors of Ōmura and Nagasaki.

          Five shining examples of faith, five luminaries to strengthen us from Heaven.  

 ***

            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.

July 25, the Feast of Saint James the Greater

Saint James the Greater by Guido Reni, ca. 1636-1638

          Today, July 25, is the Feast of Saint James the Greater, the first of Christ’s Apostles to suffer martyrdom. He and his brother Saint John the Beloved were nicknamed “Sons of Thunder” by Jesus for their audacious faith and desire for glory.

          Perhaps it was audacious, thunderous preaching of the Word of God from out of the mouth of Saint James, that Son of Thunder, that drove King Herod Agrippa to order his beheading in A.D. 44—a year that also saw the death of Herod himself while he was on a visit to Caesarea. Saint Luke tells us in Acts of the Apostles:

          On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat on the platform, and delivered a public address to them [i.e. the people of Tyre and Sidon]. The people kept shouting, “The voice of a god, and not of a mortal!” And immediately, because he had not given the glory to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died.

                                                                             Acts 12:21-23 (NRSV) 

          A fitting recompense for taking the life of a chosen Apostle of Christ—yet the voice of that Son of Thunder is eternally alive in his epistle, tempered and honed to perfection.

          My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.

                                                                             James 1:2-4 (NRSV)

          I think this is the soul of martyrdom: a perfected joy, mature and complete, that steels a believer even in the very jaws of the lion.  

Antonio Ishihara Magōemon：Warrior, Merchant, Martyr

(アントニオ石原孫右衛門)

Antonio Ishihara Magōemon:

Warrior of Bizen, Merchant of Sanuki, and Faithful Samurai of Christ

July 16, 1617

 Ikoma Masatoshi

        It all started with a lust for vengeance burning in the heart of a certain man of Sanuki who had been the loser in a certain lawsuit. Digging for dirt with which to destroy the victor, he heard that his opponent was harboring a Christian uncle in his home and reported this to the Daimyō of Sanuki, Ikoma Masatoshi. The uncle slipped away discreetly, unscathed, but the unsubstantiated charge sparked a roundup of Christians in Ikoma’s domain—a roundup that turned up several faithful Catholics, none of whom was willing to deny the Faith.

       Seven or eight of these Ikoma exiled from his domain, thus ridding his hands of them—perhaps they were peasants, inconsequential men living hand-to-mouth. But then there was the man named Ishihara Magōemon: a man of means, a warrior-turned-merchant who was also a faithful Kirishitan christened Antonio.

            Antonio Ishihara Magōemon had served as a samurai of Bizen until the autumn of 1600, when the dynasty of the Tokugawa Shōguns was set in stone by Tokugawa Ieyasu’s victory over the Western forces at the battle of Sekigahara on 21 October of that year. Antonio would probably have served the Daimyō of Bizen, Ukita Hideie, on the Western side—the losing side—until that day, after which he would have found himself cut loose from both his erstwhile earthly lord and his living.

            With samurai grit he rebuilt his life, becoming a successful merchant in the province of Sanuki on the island of Shikoku, most likely in the town of Takamatsu, a short sail from Bizen across the Seto Inland Sea. That is where he met his faithful end on 16 July 1617, offering his neck to the executioner’s sword rather than mouth the words of apostasy that both friends and foes were urgently demanding of him.

            In 1616, Antonio had traveled to the province of Harima, just east of Bizen, on the trail of a certain priest, presumably traveling incognito, who had come to Sanuki to minister to its Catholic faithful but had somehow missed Antonio. Catching up with this intrepid missionary, Antonio confessed his sins and received not only Christ’s absolution, but also a cornucopia of Christian teaching from out of the mouth of this man who was living on the very sword’s edge of death to fulfill his vows to Christ. Antonio then returned to Sanuki afire with the Spirit and began to live his faith openly and boldly, indifferent to the Shōgun’s ban on Christianity. On Sundays, he opened his home to his fellow-Catholics for prayer, discussion and spiritual reading.

       Then the roundup: when the Daimyō’s men came sniffing around for Christians, one or more of Antonio’s neighbors, terrified to have an openly-practicing Kirishitan in their midst, reported his faithful love of God and neighbor to them. At that report, Ikoma, the Daimyō, exploded with rage, ordered the good man’s arrest, and confiscated all his property.

       In his imprisonment, Antonio was deluged with pleas from his friends, both pagan and Christian, that he make a merely-outward show of recantation in order to appease the Daimyō’s anger and thereby save not merely his own life, but those of his wife and children too, not to mention his confiscated property. Antonio replied that he would obey his lord the Daimyō in everything, even give his life for him—but that he could not betray Christ. He then requested that he be crucified for being Christian. On hearing this, Ikoma fumed that he would kill Antonio with his own sword and leave his corpse to be chopped to pieces by his men. News of this death-sentence filled Antonio with joy, and he called his entire household to the jail—he had that privilege, for he was samurai—to beg forgiveness for any offence he may have given any of them.

       With nightfall, Ikoma’s men came to take Antonio to his death and led him out of prison with his hands bound tight behind him. When a friend of his complained to the guards that it was unbefitting a samurai to be so handled, Antonio assured them that all was good and well. “It suits me to go thus, sirs,” he said, “since I did not merit being crucified as I requested and desired—for my Lord Jesus Christ was bound.” He then went on to thank them profusely for the good they were doing him.

       As Ikoma’s men led Antonio down the dark road to the execution-ground with torches lit, he prayed aloud, preached Christ to his captors, and urged some Christians who were following along to go home before any harm should come to them. Reaching the execution-ground, he fell to his knees and recited the Confiteor aloud. Next he prayed some final prayers, called the names of Jesus and His Mother, and bent his head to receive the executioner’s sword. The slash did not come, however: instead, one of the executioners begged the stout Christian to reconsider, promising to make peace between Ikoma, the Daimyō, and Antonio, if only he would feign apostasy—just a simple word…

       “The law of the Christians is not one that suffers such deceptions and embellishments,” Antonio proclaimed, firmly planted on his knees and awaiting his glorious end. He then declared to his reluctant executioners that he could already see his eternal crown.

       Dazzled by that vision, Antonio implored all within earshot to study the Faith. Next, he turned to one man who had apostatized out of fear and urged him to repent. Finally, before bending his head to receive the fatal slash, he asked a friend to bury him as a Christian, and only then did he signal the swordsman. Thus, there on his knees on the soil of Takamatsu, that town perched at the edge of the shimmering Seto Inland Sea in the benighted province of Sanuki, Antonio Ishihara Magōemon baptized the island of Shikoku with his sacred lifeblood.

     Behold the Daimyō’s proclamation, inscribed on a placard put on public display along with the Martyr’s severed head:

      This man was killed by order of Sanuki-dono for being Christian against the law of the Tenka [i.e. the Shōgun] on the 14th day of the 6thmonth in the 3rd year of Genna [i.e. 16 July 1617].

      The third year of Genna: an imperial-era name redolent of retrogression, of what Japan was meant to be—according, at least, to the Shogunal dynasty so cruelly committed to extirpating Christ. Yet Ikoma, the Daimyō, so intent on proving his fealty to the Shōgun by this gruesome display, had with his inscription conjured up an echo of Pontius Pilate’s own placard reading:

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

     An echo shimmering in every precious drop of that sacrificial Christian blood poured out as a testament of Christ.

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)

2. Webpage:  ここに立つ教会　at:     http://ch.febcjp.com/2017/10/10/resp171010_00/

3. Webpage:　讃岐の殉教者　アントニオ石原孫右衛門親子　at: http://www.sakuramachi.catholic.ne.jp/martyrs/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0bUVIUhlLxhsP1hhrgnNzhzbUMOZj8RFdWWzxlIPJF3hy1hwTa0CDB88w

 Copyright 2019 by Luke O’Hara

Kirishtan.com

APRIL 12, 1638 : A CHRISTIAN HOLOCAUST

Amakusa Shiro as depicted in sculpture on the grounds of the vanished Hara Castle

              Under the Fallen 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, the invaders 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.

          In the wake of the rebellion, barely a soul remained in the south of the Shimabara Peninsula: all but the rare deserter had died at the hands of the Shogun’s army. In order to have the land tilled, therefore, the Shogunate repopulated the Peninsula by forcibly removing peasants from Shikoku and Honshu and installing them willy-nilly in the ghost towns of Shimabara.

            In Japan’s Catholic heyday, at least seventy Catholic churches dotted the Shimabara Peninsula; today only three remain. 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 a fitting testament to the expunging of the Faith from what was once a Catholic land—after all, a prettied-up cartoon parody of that would-be forgotten slaughter of yesteryear fits in well with the animé unreality that so enthralls the Japan of today. But the made-up fun obscures the monstrous truth of the slaughter of those 37,000 who believed themselves ‘timely born to die for the Faith,’ and it ignores the countless martyred children: martyrs because they, unlike so many of their parents, had not chosen to rebel, but had been scooped up by their parents and rushed to Minami Arima and through the gates of Hara Castle. These the Shogun’s hordes executed for the crime of being Christian. Even the little girls.

          When will Hara Castle’s little martyrs be remembered?

Copyright © 2005, 2013, 2015 by Luke O’Hara

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

BOOKS BY LUKE O'HARA

Samurai of Light: the Real Martyrs of "Silence"

Of Love and Union: a Saga of Christ in Japan

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THE KIRISHITAN HOLOCAUST OF 12 APRIL 1638: AMAKUSA SHIRO AND THE FALL OF HARA CASTLE

Amakusa Shiro as depicted in sculpture on the grounds of the vanished Hara Castle

              Under the Fallen 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, the invaders 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.

          In the wake of the rebellion, barely a soul remained in the south of the Shimabara Peninsula: all but the rare deserter had died at the hands of the Shogun’s army. In order to have the land tilled, therefore, the Shogunate repopulated the Peninsula by forcibly removing peasants from Shikoku and Honshu and installing them willy-nilly in the ghost towns of Shimabara.

            In Japan’s Catholic heyday, at least seventy Catholic churches dotted the Shimabara Peninsula; today only three remain. 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 a fitting testament to the expunging of the Faith from what was once a Catholic land—after all, a prettied-up cartoon parody of that would-be forgotten slaughter of yesteryear fits in well with the animé unreality that so enthralls the Japan of today. But the made-up fun obscures the monstrous truth of the slaughter of those 37,000 who believed themselves ‘timely born to die for the Faith,’ and it ignores the countless martyred children: martyrs because they, unlike so many of their parents, had not chosen to rebel, but had been scooped up by their parents and rushed to Minami Arima and through the gates of Hara Castle. These the Shogun’s hordes executed for the crime of being Christian. Even the little girls.

          When will Hara Castle’s little martyrs be remembered?

Copyright © 2005, 2013, 2015 by Luke O’Hara

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

Paulo Uchibori and Sons, 
Dauntless Christian Samurai Martyrs

  

          On February 28, 1627,  atop a volcano whose boiling springs are known today as “Unzen Hell,” a fearless Catholic samurai named Paulo Uchibori shouted out his final words to the ears of all his mortal torturers and all the heavenly host: “Praised be the Most Blessed Sacrament!”

          He had endured a regime of tortures far beyond the reach of any merely-mortal power of endurance. First, imprisonment along with his three sons in a dank, pestilential dungeon of  a prison within the walls of Shimabara Castle; next, taken out to the grounds at the edge of the castle’s moat, forced to watch as the lord of Shimabara’s torturers cut off his beloved sons’ fingers—even five-year-old Ignacio didn’t flinch—before they began to cut his own; then, stripped naked and taken out in a boat along with other prisoners, forced to watch the taunting and drowning of his sons in the cold waters of Shimabara Bay. Then, with the word CHRISTIAN branded on his forehead, he was exiled into untouchability and homelessness, with all Shimabarans forbidden to give him food or shelter lest they too taste the ruler’s wrath. The effect of all this on Paulo Uchibori was, contrary to the ruler’s and his torturers’ expectations, to prove the mettle of Paulo and his Christian fellows in the crucible of hell’s most sadistic torments.

The story of Paulo Uchibori and his heroic sons, along with stories of many other Christian martyrs of Japan, is to be found within the pages of this author’s latest book,

Samurai of Light: the Real Martyrs of “Silence”

   available here  (print edition) and here  (Kindle edition)  on Amazon.com.

©2019 by Luke O’Hara, Kirishtan.com