Saint Valentine's Day 400 Years Ago in Tokugawa Japan

             Below: Tokugawa Ieyasu (left) and one of the many fruits of his rule (right)

Tokugawa Ieyasu

Japanese crucifixion

         















       On 14 February 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu, “retired” Shogun and de-facto ruler of Japan, promulgated his Christian Expulsion Edict.  How ironic that he chose Saint Valentine’s Day to set in motion the juggernaut that would, like a steamroller, smash into oblivion every public, visible manifestation of Christianity—that “religion of love and union” that his predecessor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had first attacked in 1587 with his own Expulsion Edict.  

            Ieyasu’s 1614 edict declared: “the Kirishitan band have come to Japan … longing to disseminate an evil law … so that they may change the government of the country, and obtain possession of the land.”[i]  Far from aiming to ‘change the government of the country, and obtain possession of the land,’ however, the Jesuit mission to Japan strove to win souls to Christ so that the people of Japan might ‘obtain possession’ of Heaven.

            Firstly, in point of fact, Saint Francis Xavier, who introduced Christianity to Japan in 1549, relied entirely on appealing to the rational minds of Japanese of all classes to effect their conversion, and with considerable success:  he reported to the Society of Jesus that:

             The bonzes [i.e. the native Buddhist clergy] were much displeased at [the mission’s success], and when they were present at the sermons and saw that a great number became Christians daily, they began to accuse them severely for leaving their ancestral religion to follow a new faith. But the others [i.e. the converts] answered that they embraced the Christian law because they had made up their minds that it was more in accordance with nature than their own, and because they found that we [Christian missionaries] satisfied their questions while the bonzes did not.[ii]

            Furthermore, Saint Francis Xavier held the Japanese in such high regard that, after his providential arrival in Kagoshima, he was inspired to report:

            By the experience which we have had of this land of Japan, I can inform you thereof as follows,--Firstly 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.[iii]    

            He found no other race their equal because of the disposition of the Japanese to embrace the truth, once it had been clearly presented to them and all their doubts confuted.

            Thirdly, the mission’s goal was clearly not to ‘change the government of the country,’ and the missionaries’ reward was just as clearly not to ‘obtain possession of the land’ as Ieyasu had falsely claimed.  Rather, their goal was to change human hearts and lead sinners to Christ, and their reward was the joyful anticipation of hearing: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord’[iv] once they themselves passed from this life into Heaven.  Another letter of Saint Francis Xavier’s makes this clear:

     The labours which are undergone for the conversion of a people so rational, so desirous to know the truth and be saved, result in very sweet fruit to the soul. Even at Amanguchi [Yamaguchi], when the King allowed us to preach the faith and a vast concourse of people gathered round us, I had so much joy and vigour and delight of heart, as I never experienced in my life before. … These things made me so overflow with joy, that I lost all sense of suffering. Would to God that these divine consolations which God so graciously gives us in the midst of our labours might not only be related by me, but also some experience of them be sent to our European Universities, to be tasted as well as heard of! Then many of those young men given up to study would turn all their cares and desires to the conversion of infidels, if they could once taste the delight of the heavenly sweetness which comes from such labours, and if the world knew and was aware how well the souls of the Japanese are prepared to receive the Gospel, I am sure that many learned men would finish their studies, canons, priests, and prelates even, would abandon their rich livings, to change an existence full of bitterness and anxiety for so sweet and pleasant a life. And to gain this happiness they would not hesitate to set sail even to Japan.[v]

      Setting sail to Japan from Portugal in the mid-sixteenth century involved great risk:  besides the dangers of scurvy, amoebic dysentery, food poisoning, starvation, shipboard fires, and countless communicable diseases, there were typhoons, shipwreck, and pirates to be feared.  No wonder then that time and time again, when their Japanese hosts asked them why they had braved such dangers to sail to the very end of the earth, to faraway Japan, the missionaries’ answer was so astonishing:  they had come to save human souls, pure and simple.  

       Rather than ‘longing to disseminate an evil law … so that they may change the government of the country, and obtain possession of the land,’ then, the Jesuit mission that opened Japan to Christ sought a much more lasting reward, an eternal one, as described by Christ Himself:  ‘But lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven: where neither the rust nor moth doth consume, and where thieves do not break through, nor steal. For where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also.’[vi]

            Where Saint Francis Xavier’s heart and treasure were, he himself made clear in closing his letter of 29 January 1552:

       So now I will end though I know not how to end when I am writing to my dearest fathers and brothers, and about my joys in Japan too, the greatness of which I could never express, how ever much I might wish to do so. I end my letter then, begging and imploring God to vouchsafe to unite us some day in the bliss of heaven.  Amen.[vii]

                                           Website:  Kirishtan.com

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[i] C.R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan.  (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993) p. 318.

[ii] St. Francis Xavier: Letter from Japan, to the Society of Jesus at Goa, 1551

[iii] St. Francis Xavier: Letter from Kagoshima, Japan, to the Society of Jesus at Goa, November 1549.

[iv] Matthew 25:21, Douay Rheims Bible, excerpt.

[v] The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, v. 2, Henry J. Coleridge, S.J., ed. (London:  Burns and Gates, 1872.) p. 349.  

[vi] Matthew 6:20-21, Douay Rheims Bible.

[vii] The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, v. 2, Henry J. Coleridge, S.J., ed. (London:  Burns and Gates, 1872.) p. 349.

February 6th: the Dictator Hideyoshi and the 26 Martyrs, Part II

"I do not want this religion:  a religion of love and union, which is therefore harmful for this kingdom."   The Taikō Hideyoshi (pictured below)

              

            The 26 Martyrs started their death-march on the tenth of January, 1597.  They were marched from dawn till nightfall for twenty-seven days, paraded as criminals and outcasts through town after town.  The youngest of the martyrs was twelve, the oldest sixty-four.  Twelve-year-old Louis Ibaraki laughed when they clipped his ear, and thereafter marched along jauntily toward Nagasaki.  On their wintry road to Calvary Thomas Kozaki, fourteen, wrote to his mother, “You should not worry about me and my father Michael”—his father was marching with him to be crucified—“I hope to see you both very soon, there in Paradise,” he explained.¹ 

            At one point in their trek the guards grabbed Peter Sukejiro, a young believer accompanying the martyrs, robbed him of everything he had and threw him in with them, thus sentencing him to death on their own authority.  Rather than protest, Peter merely remarked, “Seeing that we all have to die anyway, it's better to die for the Faith,” ² thus proving his own fitness for martyrdom.

            Their last night on earth was miserable:  it was a bitterly frosty night and the Martyrs must have prayed and shivered all night long, since they were hunched together in open boats offshore of Togitsu, a Christian village north of Nagasaki, with musket-men guarding the shoreline.  Hideyoshi's sheriff, afraid of Christian violence, would not take the risk of putting them under a Christian roof for the night, as if he had something to fear from that “religion of love and union”.

            On the Fifth of February the martyrs were marshaled to their feet at dawn and marched double-time toward Nishizaka, the mountain slope atop which they would die; it would be a twelve-kilometer marathon.  The local Christians lined the roadside in silent reverence watching them pass, breathing not a whisper of hostility.  From time to time Jesuit Brother Paul Miki exclaimed, "Today is Easter Sunday for me!  The Lord has shown me such mercy!" as they climbed toward their Calvary.³   They arrived at half-past nine in the morning:  just about the time Our Lord was crucified.

             

            Up on their crosses the Twenty-Six awaited the coup de graçe that would end their Japanese-style crucifixions:  twin spear-thrusts from below, into their left and right sides and upward through their hearts and out their shoulders.  The false charges laid against them were painted on a placard stood in front of the row of crosses for all to see, but all of Nagasaki knew that they had been condemned merely for the crime of being Christian.  Paul Miki spent his last minutes preaching, just as he had been doing all the length of their twenty-seven day march to Calvary, proclaiming to the thousands of Nagasaki Christians blanketing the hillside below, "I greatly rejoice to die for this cause!"   

             When the soldiers unsheathed their spears, the crucified martyrs and the crowd all started shouting in one voice, "Jesus!  Mary!"  This holy cry resounded again and again until every last martyr’s heart was pierced; it resounded among the hills of Nagasaki, across the waters of the bay, through the rigging of the ships from halfway round the world that lay in Nagasaki Bay tethered to their moorings, their crewmen watching transfixed by the spectacle above, as if it were they themselves and their holy Faith whose hearts were being pierced.

            Twelve-year-old Louis Ibaraki had long been prepared for this moment.  Twenty-seven days earlier, at the start of their journey, the martyrs had been paraded in oxcarts around the capital and around nearby Sakai, the mercantile center of Japan, and in their oxcart the three youngest boys had brightly sung the Our Father and the Hail Mary as their just-clipped ears poured blood; now, raised on their crosses, the three sang a Psalm—Praise the Lord, O ye children, praise ye His Holy Name.  Louis alone among the Twenty-six was there entirely by personal choice, for he had been offered his freedom by Hanzaburō, the sheriff in charge of the execution, on condition that he give up the Faith.

Louis didn’t hesitate; his answer was swift and clear:  “I do not want to live on that condition, for it is not reasonable to exchange a life that has no end for one that soon finishes” 4:  a holy precocity reminiscent of Our Lord at age twelve in the Temple, “Sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at His understanding and His answers” (Luke 2:46b-47).

In that same spirit, on the Fifth of February in the Year of Our Lord 1597, atop that slope called Nishizaka that overlooked wholly-Catholic Nagasaki and its perfect harbor, the boy-Saint Louis Ibaraki shouted words that would carry His blessing to the ears and hearts of all the listening world, before the soldiers gouged their spears into his sides and up through his twelve-year-old heart:  “Paradise!  Paradise!” he shouted, struggling toward Heaven, “Jesus!  Mary!”

             

Website:  Kirishtan.com

Copyright 2007/2014 by Luke O’Hara

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¹ Diego Yuuki, S.J., The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki (Tokyo, Enderle, 1998), 55.

² Yuuki, 56.

³ Yuuki, 70.

4 Yuuki, 60.

February 5th: the Dictator Hideyoshi and the 26 Martyrs

    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

400 Years Ago: Tokugawa Ieyasu's Sledgehammer-blow to Christendom in Japan

        

       Four hundred years ago yesterday—27 January 1614—a writing-brush inscribed the silent death-knell of Christendom in Japan, a sledgehammer-blow mandated by the shadow Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu, pictured above.  This Expulsion Edict would order the rounding-up and expulsion of all Christian missionaries throughout Japan and forbid thenceforth the practice of that religion on Japanese soil.  The Shogunate would enforce its ban with an increasingly-brutal regimen of executions and torture, finally perfecting a method of slow torture called ana-zurushi which would effect a number of apostasies by Japanese and foreign clergy and lay believers—and produce some of human history’s most glorious examples of heroism, of Christian martyrdom, true martyrdom, as well.

    In the days and weeks to come, this blog will chronicle the dark path of the Tokugawa Shogunate’s brutal suppression of that religion of love while focusing on those beacons of superhuman heroism, of true martyrdom, that dazzled all human eyes enshrouded in that inhuman darkness—and, through the printed word, would uplift the hearts and minds of humankind at large.

Author's Website:  Kirishtan.com

December 8th: Birth, death, Eternity

(reprise)

               December 8, 1941: a day that has lived in infamy for 72 years.  Americans remember Pearl Harbor on the 7^th of December, but it was December 8^th Japan Time when the Japanese Imperial Navy’s dive bombers hit Pearl Harbor.  December 8^th 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 upturn’d wondering eyes of mortals in the form of countless apparitions warning mankind to believe in her Son’s reality and recognize 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 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 15^th of August 1549, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin:  the birth of Christendom in Japan.

               Birth, death, Eternity.

Luke O'Hara, Kirishtan.com

A Summer Storm, Part II

A Summer Storm, Part II
( website:  Kirishtan.com )

          Toku-un was not only Hideyoshi’s private quack; he was also his dedicated procurer of virgins.  With high hopes Hideyoshi had sent him into the Kirish’tan domain of Arima, where the girls were known for their beauty, but Toku-un came back empty-handed and insulted to boot:  the Kirish’tan of Arima would not give up their daughters for the ruler’s debauching.  This was one prelude to the explosion—indeed perhaps the very powder in the keg—that would rock all Christendom throughout Japan.  But certainly there must have been more to it than that.

            Historian James Murdoch, writing at the hatching of the Twentieth Century, painted Hideyoshi as a recklessly-fearless commander; Luis Frois, a contemporary of Hideyoshi’s who knew him well—and personally—painted him as something of a paranoid.  I will lean on the primary source (rather than the latter one) for my own closer look at the man who first put the sledgehammer to Christ in all Japan’s domains.

            A prelude to Hideyoshi’s explosion at Hakata:  earlier that month, at Yatsushiro on the west coast of the island, the conqueror had fêted Father Coelho and his entourage on their coming to pay their respects, and he declared on their leaving, “I am the Padre’s disciple.”  The lilt of those lighthearted words may have been a smokescreen meant merely to hide Hideyoshi’s intentions: his imminent crackdown on the Church once his conquest was done.  I wonder, though, if those words weren’t in fact intended to hide his suppressed resentment at having been asked in public by the Padre to pardon a mass of prisoners of conquest whom the ruler had peremptorily sentenced to death.  Hideyoshi acceded to the Padre’s request at once, said request having been made in front of all the ruler’s assembled commanders at his annexed headquarters—a Buddhist temple—after he had given the Padre’s delegation a welcome worthy of emissaries of, well … God.

            To top this off, after meeting furious resistance from the Satsuma samurai at the battle of Sendaigawa, the shaken Hideyoshi unveiled his fear to his Christian general Takayama Ukon:  he ordered Ukon to prepare a private escape route for his own person in case of dire extremity.  An extremity that never came about, given that Hideyoshi soon managed to panic the lord of Satsuma by launching a surprise seaborne assault on his capital:  60,000 troops appearing out of nowhere to spearhead into Satsuma’s rear guard from behind.  (Their commander, the lord of Satsuma’s brother, saved his own skin by escaping on horseback, he and fifty mounted swordsmen cutting an escape route through the invading horde at a gallop.)  This coup led to the lord of Satsuma’s surrender in short order, completing Hideyoshi’s conquest of Kyushu and putting him on top of the world.

           Now back to where our story began:  in the wake of his 1587 conquest of all Kyushu, Hideyoshi was refreshing himself in Hakata, a cornucopia of debauchery, where he was visited by the Jesuit Vice-Provincial, Father Gaspar Coelho.  The Padre had come to pay his respects, having perhaps been deluded by that tactical jest of Hideyoshi’s—I am the Padre’s disciple —and, unwisely, he had sailed into Hakata’s harbor in his prize Portuguese fusta, a nimble sailing-ship very well laid out with fine Portuguese cannon to defend herself against pirates on the high seas. 

            The Padre’s fusta soon became the most popular tourist destination in Hakata: a steady stream of well-placed locals came requesting tours of the vessel, and news of this marvel lost no time in reaching Hideyoshi’s ears.  He came and insisted on being shown every last nook and cranny of the marvelous fusta, and left in apparent good humor—at least as far as the Padre could tell—taking with him a gift of Portuguese port wine.  He had been given countless delicacies too, but, afraid of poisoning, had his underlings pass them on to the locals milling about the docks.

            Soon he would be lounging in his camp with Toku-un and his other intimates, drinking himself silly with the Padre’s gift of wine.  One can only imagine the witch’s brew of lies, fears and resentments simmering in the conqueror’s heart that would presently erupt into volcanic explosion.  Just as the twenty-four megaton eruption of Mount Saint Helen’s in 1980 flattened the forest for miles around, Hideyoshi’s 1587 blow-up would level the hopes and the peace of all Christians in Japan.

(to be continued)

A Summer Storm

Website:  Kirishtan.com

A Summer Storm

    In late July of 1587, the dictator Hideyoshi clamped a ban on Christ in Japan.  Having just finished his conquest of Kyushu, he was relaxing in Hakata with Toku-un, his private quack and trusted advisor, and overindulging in draining the cask of Portuguese port wine he had been given that very evening by Padre Coelho, the Jesuit Vice-Provincial, the senior clergyman in Japan.

       Earlier that day Hideyoshi had inspected the Padre’s sailing-ship—well gunned to protect herself against the pirates prowling Japan’s sea lanes—and had left in an apparent fit of joy; a Japanese Catholic observer had, however, warned Padre Coelho that he must offer the ship to Hideyoshi at once, for this man could see (unlike the Europeans, not so steeped in the subtleties of unspoken Japanese communication) that the dictator was jealous.  Sadly for Christendom in Japan, the Padre did not heed that prophetic warning.

        He learned its truth in the wee hours of the night: Hideyoshi’s sheriff came to the dock, demanding that the Vice-Provincial debark to hear the dictator’s charges, presumably written up by Toku-un in the depths of the ruler’s drunken revel.

(to be continued)
Website:  Kirishtan.com

Peter Kibe: Samurai, Priest, and Unflinching Martyr

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        The Fourth of July marks not only the birth of American independence, but also the 374th anniversary of one of the most heroic declarations of freedom Man has ever made.  On 4 July 1639, Japanese samurai and Jesuit priest Father Peter Kasui Kibe refused to renounce Christ under the most grueling regime of torture ever devised by man or devil.  In the wake of Father Peter’s death, the Shogun’s master torturer dubbed him “the man who would not say I give in:”  a perfect epitaph to his heroic life.

           Read the whole story at:  http://kirishtan.com/samurai-martyrs-father-peter-kibe

      

Julian Nakaura: Samurai, Ambassador, and Martyr (Part One)

website:  Kirishtan.com

          The jumbled boulders of Nakaura lie brooding on the shore, defying the sea to do its worst.  Behind them squats a hill clothed in bamboo, its giant knees of rock protruding through the trees.  A continent of charcoal cloud looms over the coast, yet the sun blazes triumphantly in the distant west, riding high above the Gotoh Islands:  it burns one’s face, even in the tail-end of winter.

        Julian Nakaura was born here.  They honor him with a memorial that overlooks the village:  a pony-tailed boy in bronze pointing out at the sea, towards the Rome the real boy visited.  But I prefer the Julian in bronze who stands, weathered and flinty, at the entrance to the Shimabara Catholic Church, way down south: a gentle old man steeled by trial and perseverance, a Missal in hand and nothing but his own two sandaled feet to carry him.  Those old feet would carry him to a death unheard of even in a Europe where the burning of heretics and the disemboweling and mutilation of Roman Catholic priests was the order of the day.

        In 1582 Catholicism was flourishing in some parts of Japan—especially on the island of Kyushu.  The Jesuits had opened a school in Arima, southeast of Nagasaki, for training Catholic samurai youth to become future teachers, catechists and priests—a Seminario.  Father Alessandro Valignano, dispatched by Rome as Visitor to Japan, had set up the school in 1580, and two years later he came up with a brainstorm:  choose some fine young samurai from the student body and send them on an embassy to Rome as showpieces of the Japanese Church.  Their mission would be to impress upon the nobility of Catholic Europe the quality of this newest and farthest-flung Catholic seedbed; and to impress upon themselves the grandeur of Catholicism in Europe and report their impressions to their native brethren on their return.  Omura Sumitada, the first Japanese daimyo (domainal lord) to be baptized, loved the plan as soon as it hit his ears; he promised his full support.  Two other daimyo also joined in; the mission was prepared immediately

 (to be continued)  

Read the whole story at:  

http://kirishtan.com/samurai-martyrs-father-julian-nakaura

Adam Arakawa: Samurai, Servant, and Martyr

author's website:  Kirishtan.com

Adam Arakawa:  Samurai, Servant, and Martyr

         “Martyr” is a word much abused in our day; here's one excellent definition:  “True Christian martyrs forgive others,” says Joseph Takami, the Archbishop of Nagasaki.  “Even while being killed by others, they forgive them.  They teach us the meaning of a death like Jesus’ death.”

           Take Adam Arakawa, for example, one of the 187 Companions of Peter Kibe, beatified en masse by Pope Benedict XVI on 24 November 2008:  “He was a man of prayer,” Jesuit historian and pastor Father Diego Yuuki told me. “When the last missionary in Amakusa was expelled, he took the responsibility of the church, and for that reason he was killed.”

          Adam was a samurai, brought up in that proud martial tradition, but a samurai who had the humility to become a servant to his fellow-Christians after having been dismissed by his feudal lord.  He served the church at Shiki, in the Amakusa Islands.

          The Shōgun had banned the Faith in 1614, expelling all Christian missionaries, and Kawamura Jirōemon, the castellan of Tomioka Castle, which overlooked Shiki from a nearby mountaintop, was ordered by his lord to exterminate Christendom in the Amakusa Islands.  Humble old Adam, in his seventies, was the obvious primary target:  if he renounced the Faith, the other local Christians would follow his example, thought Kawamura. 

           Renounce?  Not Adam, steely old Catholic samurai:  when he heard that they were looking for him, he fell to his knees, thanking God, and asked Him to grant him martyrdom.  Friends warned Adam to abandon Christ, lest he be killed.  His answer is recorded in history: “’Disobey God,’ you’re telling me?  You’re telling me to shame my God?  Kawamura-sama’s orders or the law of the Shōgun of all Japan notwithstanding, please understand:  I am a Christian.  A true Christian puts Christ’s teaching above his own life.  No matter how they torture me, I cannot disobey Christ, true God.”

           Kawamura, the castellan, had Adam brought to his castle for interrogation and bound to a pillar outside; to break the old man’s spirit he kept him out there all night.  Come morning, though, Adam’s spirit was unbroken.  When Kawamura told him it was not just his own nor just his feudal lord’s command, but the very Shōgun’s orders that he apostatize, Adam replied, “A man’s soul is more important to him than his body.  I obey the true God, Deus, savior of souls.”  In old Japan, they called God by his Latin name, Deus, to avoid confusing Him with the “gods” of superstition. 

             On March 21, 1614, the Friday before Palm Sunday, Kawamura ordered Adam stripped naked and paraded through town, and then hung by his elbows from a cross-bar (or lintel) supported by two pillars; they tied his legs to these, with his tiptoes barely touching the ground.  Adam was in constant agony, straining against gravity, besides being exposed to the elements and public ridicule.  It was March—cold and windy—and Kawamura had had the pillars set up at land’s edge to expose him to the cold sea wind, but to keep from killing him, they untied him at night and took him indoors.  This torture lasted nine days.  Unable to join his hands while praying, Adam did his best to raise them toward Heaven.  Rather than show his pain, he encouraged the local Christians in their faith, speaking only of things of the soul.  He was finally untied on Holy Saturday, his faith untouched, and put in the hands of a local Christian, under house arrest—an internment that would last for sixty days.

            Kawamura eventually sent a message to Adam:  “We’ll cut your fingers off unless you renounce your faith.  Not all at once, but slowly, one by one, prolonging your agony.”  Adam’s response:  “I’m determined to bear any sort of torture.  God will surely strengthen me and give me perseverance to the end.  Even if I die after long suffering, having undergone repeated tortures, I’ll be happy to get it, for penance’ sake and for love of God.”  On hearing that, Kawamura, the castellan, ordered his fingers cut off; but his men, afraid of Heaven’s recompense should they mutilate such a good old man, held off. 

          Finally Kawamura sent to Terazawa Hirotaka, his feudal lord up in Karatsu, in northern Kyushu, for orders, reporting Adam’s unshakable determination to hold onto his faith.  A courier came back at breakneck speed with new orders:  kill him.  Meanwhile, in his imprisonment, Adam had seen a vision of the Mother of God:  she was holding a cross in her hands, and Adam understood that he was to become a holy Martyr.    

           Kawamura had Adam brought to his castle.  Along the way a crier kept blowing a conch shell and announcing that Adam would be executed in two or three days.  This was a lie:  they just wanted to put the local Christians off the track, lest they come in droves to his execution, seeking relics.  The next morning, at first cock’s crow, they took Adam out of the castle in the pre-dawn darkness and led him up a steep mountain path with a rope around his neck.  Anxious for martyrdom, Adam “climbed like a leaping deer,”[1] pulling the soldier with the rope in his grip right off his feet.  At the chosen place, Adam knelt and prayed.  He then advised his executioners to make their children study the Christian Faith, and told them they had better become Christians too, and fast. 

           The swordsman must have been unsteady on his feet on the steep slope, for his first slash went awry, into Adam’s shoulder:  Adam didn’t flinch; he was too busy praying to Jesus.  The second slash then took off his head. 

            They put Adam’s bloody remains in a net, weighted down with two large stones, took them out in a boat and sunk them into the sea, afraid, perhaps, of that eternal truth:  The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Faith.  The local Christians, though, scooped up the earth on that hillside that had drunk Adam’s sacred blood and saved it as a relic.

            Seed of the Faith indeed:  repentant Catholics all over the Amakusa Islands publicly declared their faith, emboldened by Adam’s example after having been cowed into silence by the Shōgun’s ban on Christ.  In one village alone, more than 150 emboldened souls declared their faith in the Truth that has overcome the world.

            One almighty Truth indeed, and terror to the Enemy of all men’s souls.

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Notes: 

            Blessed Adam Arakawa, beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 24 November 2008, is one of the 187 Companions of Blessed Peter Kibe Kasui.  He was beheaded on or about Tuesday, June 5, 1614.  (The date is unclear; that his martyrdom was fulfilled on a Tuesday, before dawn, is established.)

            Father Diego Yuuki, consummate historian of Japanese Christendom, passed away on November 17, 2008 in Nagasaki, city of Martyrs.  As of today, June 10, 2013, Joseph Takami continues in the office of Archbishop of Nagasaki. 

[1] Kataoka Yakichi, Nihon Kirishitan Junkyō-shi  (Tokyo: Jiji Tsushinsha, 1979) p. 252.

-End-

Copyright 2007/2013 by Luke O’Hara

author's website:  Kirishtan.com

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The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki

by Luke O'Hara

          Above a hilltop overlooking Nagasaki Bay floats a row of men and boys in bronze, frozen eternally in attitudes of joy. 'Floats,' I say, because they seem to hang suspended in mid-air along a wall of stone. These are the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. Most of them have their hands folded in prayer, and all their mouths are open in praise. Like a halo around each martyr's head, words are inscribed behind him in bronze relief. These are the last words each was heard to say or sing before being pierced with spears from below; this is how Japanese crucifixions usually ended.

            The Twenty-six were crucified on this hill on the Fifth of February, 1597 because, according to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the man who then ruled Japan, they were "foreigners ... come from the Philippines" who had "built churches, preached their religion, and caused disorders." In point of fact, most of the martyrs—twenty of them—were Japanese. 

            The 'disorders' they had caused were as follows: they had built hospitals, orphanages and leprosaria for the poor and outcast, offered charity to the indigent, and labored tirelessly to spread the Gospel of Christ in a land whose people had been esteemed by Saint Francis Xavier as "the best who have yet been discovered." As for their having "built churches," Hideyoshi himself had given the Franciscans a plot of land on which to build.

            But a few of the Franciscans had indeed arrived recently from the Philippines.  They had come in a crippled Spanish galleon headed for Mexico that had been blown off course by a typhoon and had limped into Japan in dire need of repairs. When the battered San Felipeshowed up at the port of Urado richly laden with Chinese silks and other treasured cargo, the local ruler contrived to tow the ship into port against the ship's pilot's wishes—ostensibly for repairs—and in the process broke her back on a sand bar, spilling much of her cargo into the bay. Now the San Felipe was a shipwreck, and now, by Japanese law, her cargo was forfeit. 

            But Hideyoshi himself had promised his personal protection to Spanish ships only four years earlier. With this in mind the Spaniards sent a deputation to him to petition for return of the confiscated cargo, but by the time they arrived, the divvying-up of the spoils had already been decided. Now Hideyoshi had to save face. He contrived to 'discover' a Spanish plot to take over Japan by Catholic infiltration, and when he had produced some fishy evidence he flew into a rage and ordered the rounding-up of the Franciscans. In the end the round-up netted six Franciscans, three Jesuits and seventeen hapless Japanese laymen: the youngest twelve years old, another thirteen, and the oldest sixty-four. 

            Hideyoshi ordered that their ears and noses be cut off and they be paraded around the cities of Osaka and Kyoto in carts and then marched to Nagasaki to be crucified, a journey of perhaps eight hundred kilometers; it would take them twenty-seven days. A sympathetic official mitigated the sentence; only their left ears were cut off.

            Along the route, Jesuit Brother Paul Miki distinguished himself for his constant preaching; Bishop Dom Pedro Martins called him the best preacher in Japan. The youngest, Louis Ibaraki, traipsed along laughing, and reportedly laughed even when they cut off his ear. Four days before the end the boy was offered his life on condition that he renounce the Faith. His reply: "I do not want to live on that condition, for it is not reasonable to exchange a life that has no end for one that soon finishes."^[1] When the Twenty-six arrived at the execution-ground their crosses were there awaiting them. Twelve-year-old Louis asked "Which one is mine?" and then ran to embrace the one pointed out.

            The monument depicts in bronze how they died: Paul Miki, hands spread, was preaching to the thousands of Nagasaki Christians kneeling on the hillside below when the spears pierced his heart, and Louis's last words shout out from the wall behind him:  "Paradise! Jesus! Mary!"

            Saint Francis Xavier's praises still ring true. 

           

     (The Twenty-Six were canonized on June 8, 1862.)

                      

(First published in Our Sunday Visitor.)

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^[1] Diego Yuuki, S.J., The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, p. 60.  (Enderle Book Co., Tokyo, 1998)