27 December 1613: Orders Arrive to Register all Christians

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Two days after Christmas of 1613, Tokugawa Ieyasu’s orders arrived in Kyoto, Fushimi, Osaka and Sakai, the major population centers at the core of Honshu Island: lists were to be made of all Christians (i.e. Catholics), both foreign and Japanese, residing in those cities. This was the prelude to roundup and deportation, the order for which would arrive on 27 January.  

            The news of December 27, 1613 was but the merest subterranean rumble portending the eruption soon to come: an explosion of cold-blooded cruelty that would flood all Japan, leaving no Catholic at peace for the next two and three-quarters centuries.

            Ieyasu had already banned the Faith in all shogunal domains, and his minion Hasegawa Sahioye had by this time piled up hills of Catholic corpses in Arima, long known as a Catholic refuge. This was only the beginning of Arima’s scourging, a trial by fire that would culminate 25 years later in the mass extermination of 37,000 Catholics at Hara-jō, a disused mountaintop fortress on the southeastern coast of the Shimabara Peninsula.   

            Nevertheless, displays of dauntless faith would abound amid the horrors to come: time and again, Japan’s Catholic faithful would prove the verity of Saint Francis Xavier’s words, written in Kagoshima in 1549, when he assessed the nation thus:

    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.[1]

            Perhaps the saint, through some supernatural grace, foresaw the persecutions that so many of Japan’s faithful would endure to the end with superhuman courage. Perhaps, after his untimely death in 1552, he was praying to strengthen each tortured soul as he watched their ordeals from Heaven, doing his utmost to fill the Celestial Court with thousands of unequaled companions—who, having conquered death, can strengthen us who remain here below with their own powerful intercessory prayers.  

Luke O’Hara, Kirishtan.com

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