The Great Martyrdom, 10 September 1622

Depiction of the Great Martyrdom by an anonymous Japanese artist. Credit: By Japanese artist, unknown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

            Below I have transcribed an account of the Great Martyrdom of 1622 from an English translation (1705) of Jean Crasset’s Histoire de l’Eglise du Japon (History of the Church of Japan), published in Paris in 1689. I have changed only the archaic capitalizations (in the original, all nouns were capitalized) and the inaccurate or non-standard renderings of Japanese names. Otherwise, the translator’s spellings and punctuation remain.

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             We begin this book [The Sixteenth Book of Crasset’s History] with one of the most glorious sights that hath yet appear’d in Japan. One and fifty, partly religious, and partly seculars, burnt alive, and beheaded for the Holy Faith, and the celebrated Father Spinola of the Society of Jesus, at the head of the troop, whose precious death falls next under our consideration.

Gonroku, Governour of Nagasaki, pursuant to his last instructions from Court, order’d Hikoemon Lieutenant to the Prince of Omura, to bring all the prisoners in those parts, under a strong guard to Nagasaki. In the mean while, he pick’d up at home of men and women, to the number of thirty, and condemn’d them to be beheaded, for professing the holy Faith.

These good Religious had now laid four years languishing in the prisons of Omura. Nine of them were of the Society of Jesus, the rest partly of St. Dominick, and partly of St. Francis’s Order, together with ten pious Christians. They lay winter and summer, expos’d to the weather. Brother Fernandez was perfectly starv’d to death. Father Charles Spinola never once chang’d his cloaths in three years time, so that he was in a manner cover’d over with odure and filth. But the greatest torment of all was the intollerable stench, and noisomness of the prison, and it was so streight withall, that they had not room to lie in. Moreover, they wou’d not so much as let them move out of the spot, for the common ease and benefit of nature, which bread such swarms of vermin about them, that they were little better than eaten alive. In a word, the place was in it self a perfect resemblance of Hell, and their life (abstracting from the interiour quiet of their souls) a continual martyrdom. Their common allowance was a spoonful of black rice boil’d in water, with porridge made of roots, and sometimes a herring half rotten ; but this dainty was soon retrench’d.

The Governour of Omura having orders to conduct the Prisoners to Nagasaki, chose out of the respective Orders to the number of twenty four, viz. nine of the Society [of Jesus], namely Father Charles Spinola, and Father Sebastian Kimura, with seven other novices, who made their vows afterwards to the foresaid Father Spinola, as the Provincial had directed. The rest were all Dominicans and Fryars. But as it happen’d heretofore, in the case of the Forty Martyrs at Sebaste, so it fair’d now with these Saints, all did not gain the crown, for two sunk under torments, as Father Spinola had more than once foretold.

All the prisoners were ship’d off for Nangoya [Nagayo], besides two Priests of the Order of St. Dominick and St. Francis, and the guards strictly charg’d to let none speak with them on the way. This notwithstanding, one Leo Sukezayemon, a noble Japonian, made up to Father Kimura, and recommending himself to his prayers, cut off a piece of his garment by way of relick.

From this village began the glorious cavalcade of the Martyrs. First of all went an officer, and numbers of guards after him, both foot and horse, arm’d with lances, pikes, and musquets. Next after them follow’d Father Spinola, and then the rest of the Martyrs, but without any order or distinction. Each of them had a cord about his neck, and an executioner at his side, to drag him along, God so permitting, for the greater glory of his Saints.

Being benighted at Urakami, they shut them up in a double enclosure, but the rain coming on at the same time, were forc’d to remove them into a little straw hut till next morning. At break of day three Christians were permitted to speak with them, and amongst the rest, Father Spinola’s catechist, who brought him the first news of his death [-sentence]. The Father was overjoy’d at the account, and in acknowledgment of the happy tidings, presented him with a discipline [a scourge] which he had us’d in prison, and a pair of beads. These were all the riches of that holy man.

He desir’d extremely to enter into the field of battel in his surplice, with an embroider’d banner of the name of Jesus in his hand, which he had caus’d to be made for this purpose, and design’d that Father Kimura should do the same, but the guards positively refus’d it. Then they mounted them again on horseback, and conducted them in the same order as before, to the place of execution, about a league off. The ways were all lin’d with people, and the Christians from all parts flock’d thither to ask their blessing, weeping and lamenting to see their Pastors, who came from the end of the world to teach them the way of salvation, so barbarously murther’d.

Drawing near to the place of execution, on an eminence near the sea side, within sight of Nagasaki, they found the whole bordering plain clad with people, insomuch, that it was impossible to distinguish what the Saints spoke, for the noise and clamour of the multitude. Father Kimura indeed raising his voice, pray’d a moment’s silence, and then said (so that all might hear him) He long’d with all his heart to let them know what joy he felt in his soul upon his approaching end ; but the noise of the people depriv’d us of the rest of his discourse, which he pronounc’d with the zeal of an apostle and Martyr.

Notwithstanding their earnestness to consummate the sacrifice, a stop was put to the execution, till such time as thirty more of their companions, who were condemn’d for harbouring the priests, had joyn’d them. They brought with them their wives, children, and neighbours, as also the families of the four martyrs, that were burnt alive some years before. Being then all arriv’d, they enter’d the list in their robes of ceremony, and express’d in their looks the comfort they had of dying with the Fathers.

They ty’d those that were to be burnt to stakes, but so slightly, that if courage fail’d, nothing was easier than to make an escape. All the religious were bound, except one John Chūgoku, of the Society, whom they beheaded for want of a stake. Father Spinola falling on his knees, embrac’d the wood, to the surprise of the heathens, who much admir’d to see a man take pleasure in dying so cruel a death.

They planted twenty five stakes in a line, and set guards both at the water side, and at the foot of the hill, to hinder the people from approaching, and a kind of throne in the middle, cover’d with China tapistry, for Sukedayu the Governour’s Lieutenant to sit on, who presided in the action.

The time of sacrifice now drawing near, Father Spinola, to excite his companions, and the other Christians to praise God for his great mercy, began to entone the Psalm Laudate Dominum omne Gentes ; immediatly the rest answer’d, and made up altogether a most harmonious concert, insomuch, that if we may believe Gonzales Montero, in his informations at Manila (who was present at the action) he had never heard any thing so charming in his whole life.

The Psalm ended, Father Spinola addressing himself to the Lieutenant, and the rest of the company, began this discourse:

You may guess, noble Japonians, by the joy that appears on our countenances, at the sight of these dreadful torments, whether we came from the other world to seize on your estates, or to teach you the way of salvation. The Christian religion inspires her children, with a contempt of all worldly greatness. It’s your souls happiness we aim at, and not your riches. Fortunate Japonians that embrace the law of the true God, for everlasting happiness will be your recompence. On the contrary, the lot of those that still persist in their infidelity, is Hell fire for all eternity, and flames infinitely more active than those we are now to encounter. The torments we are here to suffer, are of a short continuance, but the glory that’s prepar’d for us in Heaven, and the blessed life, which thro’ his mercy we hope to enjoy, will never have an end. For the rest, don’t think to terrify the preachers of the Gospel with these frightful appearances, for the greatest happiness that can attend us in this life, is to suffer and die for the God we adore and worship.

Then turning to the Portuguese merchants, who were not a little concern’d for their death, he made them so moving a discourse, that one of the heads of them resolv’d to leave the World upon it, and enter into the Society of Jesus.

In the mean while, the executioners were preparing to do their office, and march’d up to those that were to be beheaded. With that the thirty glorious champions fell on their knees, and whilst they were fitting themselves for the work, a gentlewoman of the company call’d Isabella Fernandez (Widow to Don Dominick George the Portuguese) took up her child, who was only four years of age, and call’d to Father Spinola to recommend him to God in his prayers. They call’d the child Ignatius as being born on that Saint’s day. Father Spinola baptiz’d him, and his parents consecrated him to God from his infancy. Being amongst the rest of the croud, and clad after a decent manner, the eyes of the whole multitude were upon him, but Father Spinola not discerning him, cry’d out in a concern to his mother ; Where’s little Ignatius? What’s become of him? With that the devout parent took him up in her arms, and shewing him to the Father, reply’d again : Behold him here in my arms, he is pleas’d to die with me, and I freely sacrifice to God what’s dearest to me in the world, my son, and my life. Then turning to the child, Behold (said she) him that made you a son of God, and gave you a life, better than what you are now going to lose. Recommend your self to his prayers, and beg his blessing.

With that the child fell down on his knees, and joyning his hands, did as the mother had order’d. The people were all strangely mov’d at the passage, insomuch, that the officers were forc’d to hasten the execution for fear of a tumult. The first that suffer’d was Mary, widow to Andrew Tokuan the Martyr. Her head and two more fell down at the child’s feet; and yet he was not in the least surpris’d ; what’s more, when they beheaded his mother who stood next him, he did not so  much as change colour ; on the contrary, falling on his knees, and loosening himself the collar of his coat, cheerfully submitted to the sword.

Father Spinola stood all the while and beheld this butchery from his stake. Questionless the sacrifice of so many noble victims, was a most agreeable spectacle, at the same time, he could not but be sensible of the death of little Ignatius. This first scene over, the executioner set fire to the wood, which stood a matter of five and twenty foot from the Martyrs, and this to prolong their torments, and force them to renounce the Faith.

The fire being well kindled, a hideous shout was rais’d round the plain, some wept, others lifted up their eyes to Heaven, others cry’d for mercy, the Martyrs only were silent, and stood immoveable in the flames. The first that carried the Crown was Father Charles Spinola, and that after two hours rosting at the fire. Probably he died first, as being of a more delicate complection, or thro’ weakness by his long sickness in prison, or perchance by favour of the sparks, which happen’d to light on his cloaths before the fire reach’d his stake. All the time of his suffering he stood streight up, with his eyes, fix’d on Heaven and the cords being burnt, his body fell down into the flames, and was consum’d in a holocaust, to the glory of His Divine Majesty.

The other religious follow’d presently after, and honour’d our Faith, with their invincible constancy and patience. Above all, the Novices of the Society were particularly taken notice of, as expressing a celestial kind of sweetness in their looks, which continu’d with them to their last breath. The last that died, was Father Sebastian Kimura of the Society, and if we credit the report of those that were present, he liv’d by their hour-glasses, three full hours in the flames.

All had not the same resolution, for two young men of the troop, who had lately enter’d into a religious order, unhappily verify’d Father Spinola’s prediction. Being overcome with the torments, after a short struggle to break the cords, without regard to the good advice of Brother Lewis of the Society who stood next them, they forc’d their way thro’ the fire, and falling at the Judge’s feet, call’d upon Shaka and Amida. Virtue is charming in the opinion of its very enemies, on the contrary, the lewdest libertines profess a dislike and aversion to vice. Both one and t’other were verifyed on this occasion. Every one applauded the constancy of the Martyrs, at the same time they conceiv’d so strange an aversion to these apostats, that nothing would serve them, but they must commit them again to the flames, and in effect they did.

A secular Japonian also, breaking his cords, attempted an escape, but reflecting upon the constancy of his wife, who had newly suffer’d before his eyes, he was so touch’d, that he flung himself again into the fire, and so repair’d his fault by a voluntary sacrifice of his life. They speak variously of this latter : However this is certain, he never call’d upon Amida, nor is there any proof, that he deny’d his faith, if then he committed any fault, and afterwards return’d back to his stake, without all question, Almighty God had mercy on his soul.

The Martyrs being all expir’d, the Christians forc’d the enclosure to carry off their relicks. Amongst the rest Leo Sukezayemon disguising himself in a soldier’s coat, press’d in with the guards, and stole one of the Martyrs bones, but being taken in the theft, they seiz’d him, and soon after put both him and his wife to death at Omura. The Governour to hinder the Christians from taking away their relicks, order’d the soldiers to pile up all the bones and instruments, as also the very earth that was stain’d with their blood, and burn them to ashes, and these too to be thrown into the sea. All they preserved was the head of Mary, wife to Tokuan, which was given to the Christians in consideration of her near alliance to the Governour.

Their martyrdom fell on the Second [sic] of September, 1622, and is commonly call’d the Great Martyrdom, in regard of the number and quality of the persons that suffer’d. We may add also the vast concourse of heathens and Christians that came from all parts to see the execution. As for this last I appeal to a letter of Father Baza’s, then Rector of the College of Nagasaki.

Nagasaki (says he) is this day thinner of people than before the persecution, and yet by common computation, they reckon in and about the town, a matter of fifty thousand Christians. Probably curiosity, and devotion together, invited them abroad to assist at the great solemnity. Hence also it’s easie to conjecture what trouble the good Fathers were in, to see their flourishing Church cultivated for the space of sixty years with continual labour and fatigue, so suddainly defac’d. Before the persecution, the number of the Christians all together, amounted to upwards of three hundred thousand, besides children. Questionless, there was nothing but the glory which redounded to God by the Martyrs sufferings, that cou’d make them anywise tolerable easie. Behold the names of those that dy’d on this memorable day.

The names of those that were burnt alive.

Of the Order of St. Dominick.

Father Francis Morales.

Father Joseph.

Father Alphonsus de Mina.

Father Hyacinth Orfanelli.    

Father Angelus Ferrie.

Brother Alexius the Japonian.

Of the Order of St. Francis.

Father Peter Avila.

Brother Leo.

Father Richard of St. Ann.

Brother Vincent.

 

Of the Society of Jesus.

Father Charles Spinola.

Brother Thomas Akohoshi.

Father Sebastian Kimura.

Brother Michael Shumpu.

Brother Peter Sampo.    

Brother Anthony Kiuni.

Brother Consaluus [Gonzalo] Fusai.

Brother Lewis Cavara [Kawaura].

 

Seculars burnt alive.

Anthony a Coreyan.

Paul a Japonian.

Luke Irtites a Japonian. [Error: the original French reads ‘Luce des Irtites Japonnoise’ i.e. a lady. Perhaps Lucia de Freitas]

Anthony Sanga the catechist.

 

The names of those that were beheaded.

Brother Thomas of the Order of St. Dominick.

John of the Third Order of St. Dominick.

Brother John Chūgoku of the Society.

Isabella Fernandes, wife to Don Dominick George a Portuguese, who was burnt for the Faith.

Ignatius her son, at the age of four years.

Mary widow to Andrew Tokuan the Martyr.

Marina a widow.

Mary wife to Anthony Corey [Antonio, a Korean] the Martyr.

Apollonia a widow.

Agnes, widow to the late Martyr Cosmas.

John son to Anthony Corey [son of Antonio, a Korean], a youth of 12 years of age.

Peter his brother at the age of three years.

Mary widow to John Shun the Martyr.

Dominica a widow.

Magdalen wife to Anthony Sanga the Martyr.

Dominick Yamanda [Yamada or Hamada].

Mary late wife to Paul who was burnt for his faith.

Catherine.

Thecla wife to Paul of Nangaixi [Nagaishi].

Peter his son, at the age of seven years.

Dominick Nacavo [Domingo Nakano] son to one Matthias that died for the faith.

Peter Motoyama a child of five years of age, and son to John the Martyr.

Bartholomew Kawano.

Damien and his son Michael a child at the age of five years.

Thomas.

Clement and Anthony his son, an infant of three years old.

Rufus, and Clare, the spouse of a Martyr.

 

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      Crasset’s list of Martyrs is incomplete. In reality, twenty-five were burned at the stake and thirty beheaded. His account, nevertheless, is priceless.

       May all of us who suffer doubt meditate on these Christian stalwarts’ lesson in faith unshakable.

         Luke O’Hara

 

Copyright © 2018 by Luke O'Hara 
Kirishtan.com
and Lukeohara.com

 

 

Two Heroic Priests:

Friar Pedro de la Asunción and Father João Machado

22 May 1617

In 1617 the Shōgun Hidetada (above) discovered that Ōmura Sumiyori, the daimyō of Ōmura, was conniving at the hiding of Catholic priests in his domain in Kyūshū, the westernmost of the four home islands of Japan. The Shōgun’s sledgehammer came down on this daimyō’s head: he had to expunge the priests from his domain at once.

Ōmura Sumiyori, christened Bartolomeo, had been born and raised a Catholic; his grandfather, the illustrious Bartolomeo Ōmura Sumitada, had been the very first Japanese daimyō to receive baptism and had remained a dauntless champion of the Faith unto his dying breath. Sumitada’s faithless son Yoshiaki, however, apostatized, and his son, the great Bartolomeo’s namesake, reluctantly became a persecutor of the Church in the wake of the Shōgun Hidetada’s threats.

Cowed, presumably, by visions of his own unwilling martyrdom, Sumiyori ordered the expulsion of all priests from his domain on pain of death. Rather than abandon their flocks, however, there were some who were ready to give their lives for them. Among these eternal lights were Friar Pedro de la Asunción of the Franciscan Order and Father João Baptista Machado de Távora, S. J. Both were beheaded on Kōri Hill in the domain of Ōmura for the crime of being faithful servants of the God who gave His life for faithless Man.

João Baptista Machado de Távora was born at Angra do Heroísmo (Cove of Heroism) on the island of Terceira, separated westward from Lisbon by about a thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean. His father and mother were wealthy nobles, but his life-story proves that João was no spoiled aristocrat: at the age of ten, on hearing of the Catholic martyrdoms in contemporary Japan, the boy announced that he hoped to go there and become a holy martyr himself.

   At age 16, on 10 April 1597 (64 days after the crucifixion of the 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki), João Machado entered the Jesuit Order at Coimbra, Portugal, where he began his studies at the Jesuit college. He sailed for India in 1601 and there, at Goa, studied philosophy; next, at Macao (off the south coast of China), he studied theology, and in 1609 headed for Japan, where he made astonishing progress in Japanese.

Father João Machado was based at Kyōto, the Imperial Capital, whence he spread the Gospel far and wide. In 1614, however, the Tokugawa Shōgunate promulgated its Christian Expulsion Edict, and Father João found it impossible to remain among his flock incognito, for he was by then too well-known to go unnoticed by the Shōgun’s vigilant henchmen. He therefore slipped away to distant Nagasaki, a longtime Catholic refuge on the west coast of Kyūshū, the westernmost of Japan’s four main islands. From Nagasaki, Father João’s superior would send him on pastoral visits to Sotome, a staunchly-Catholic bulwark nestled in the seaside mountains of northwestern Kyūshū, and to another bulwark of the Faith, the far-flung Gotō Islands. These islands had become havens for Catholic refugees fleeing the Shogunate’s increasingly-bloody persecution; Father João is reputed to have performed awe-inspiring miracles of healing on that archipelago.

In April of 1617, detoured from an intended voyage to the Gotōs, Father João said Mass at Sonogi, a fishing village a few miles up the coast from Ōmura Sumiyori’s castle-town on the shore of Ōmura Bay. At Sonogi the priest was betrayed to the apostate daimyō’s soldiers, who arrested him immediately after he had celebrated Mass; as they were all practicing Catholics, every last man was ashamed, and they explained to Father João that it was only for fear of their lives and those of their families that they were obeying their faithless feudal lord’s orders.

Thanks to contrary winds, the soldiers’ boat had to wait at Sonogi; thus, for a blessed space of days, Father João was able to celebrate daily Mass for both his flock at Sonogi and his captors. No doubt word got out and the faithful came from far and wide to confess their sins and receive the Bread of Life. On 29 April, though, a fair wind having come, that boat with its life-giving cargo sailed for the faithless daimyō’s castle-town; en route, the captive priest heard the contrite soldiers’ confessions. From the dock at Ōmura, Father João was led to the daimyō’s prison at Kōri in a torchlight procession, like Jesus being marched out of Gethsemane.

When Father João Machado walked into the prison, he was met by the Franciscan Friar Pedro de la Asunción, in that prison since 8 April. Friar Pedro—born in Cuerba, near Toledo, Spain—had been caught via a stratagem employed by the sheriff of Nagayo (a town in the Ōmura domain about 9 miles northeast of the port of Nagasaki), who, feigning a desire to confess his sins, had lured the friar into a trap.

Friar Pedro had arrived in Japan in 1608 and had for some years been Father Superior of the Franciscan monastery in Nagasaki. Despite recent animosity between their two religious orders, however, this Franciscan friar knelt to kiss the Jesuit padre’s feet when he saw him walk through the prison door; the humbled Father João, refusing this show of obeisance from his brother in Christ, lifted the man to his feet.

Ōmura Sumiyori reported to the Shogunate that he had captured the two priests and then sat back to await the Shōgun’s orders; in the meantime, the imprisoned priests were celebrating daily Mass, hearing their fellow-prisoners’ confessions, and restoring korobi-Kirish’tan (former Catholics who had been tortured or otherwise cowed into apostasy) to their proper home, Holy Mother Church. On 21 May, the Shōgun Hidetada’s answer came: kill the priests. Since Pentecost they had been celebrating daily Mass together; that morning, during Mass, Friar Pedro said to Father João, “We will not be celebrating many more Masses.” The next morning he told him with certainty, “This will be our last Mass.” Father João agreed.

A few hours later, Lino Tomonaga, Ōmura’s apostate sheriff, came to visit the priests, talked with Father João at length—never mentioning the death-sentence—and left; but he turned right around, came back in, and made his grave announcement. Father João Machado replied, “The three happiest days of my life are: the day of my entry into the college of Coimbra, that of my capture, and this one in which I receive my death sentence.” The two priests burst into song, the Te Deum (Thee, O God, we Praise). Offered a last meal, they declined. Instead, they scourged themselves, confessed their sins to one another, and prayed.

On their long march to the execution ground on Kōri Hill, Friar Pedro carried a crucifix with his scourge fixed to it; from this scourge hung a copy of the Franciscan Rule. Father João carried a bronze crucifix and his breviary. Along the way, the two brothers in Christ preached without ceasing. When they arrived at the execution-ground, a Kirish’tan soldier baptized as Damian presented the holy martyrs with two cushions to kneel on. Friar Pedro, the Franciscan, thanked him for this courtesy and said, “Now may dust return to dust.”

 The two priests knelt beside one another, a few feet apart. First Friar Pedro’s head fell in one slash of the sword. The Jesuit, Father João, had a more prolonged ordeal, however: he had to endure three slashes of that sword before he could meet his God. Perhaps the swordsman had been wrestling with his conscience as he struggled to obey his earthly lord’s orders; afterwards, he would perhaps have taken some mystical consolation from seeing the two priests’ blood flows joining together into one pool: a visual sign of their blood-brotherhood in Holy Martyrdom.

It was 22 May, Anno Domini 1617: the start of a great outpouring of Christian Martyrs’ blood, a baptism of the very soil itself. This heavenly rain, this testimony in blood to the truth of the Faith, to the Living Word who is Himself Truth, would seed a bountiful crop of steely faith throughout Japan, faith that would endure centuries of persecution to outlive the Shōguns and all their puny, merely-earthly power.

The beheading of Padre Machado in an engraving by Pierre Miotte. It appeared in António Francisco Cardim´s Elogios, Rome 1646 (Latin) and Lisbon 1650 (Portuguese).

 

 

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

                  

Under the Fallen Cherry-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 Jinbei. Jinbei 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)

 

 

Humankind—as well as all creation—owes an immeasurable debt of gratitude to Father Antonio Rubino and his companions, fearless men of God who threw their very lives to the wind for the sake of Japan and its blessed people, to give the Japanese an example intended to lead them to freedom in aeternam. They had set out for Japan in 1642 from Manila in a ship secretly prepared for them by the Governor of the Philippines; they had traveled disguised as Chinese; but they died as public spectacles, proudly and fearlessly proclaiming the saving truth of Christ, the Faith they had come to die for.

In October of 1633, the acting Provincial of the Jesuit Province of Japan had apostatized under the most extreme torture and was reputed to be acting as an agent of the Shogun in effecting the apostasies of other missionaries caught by the Japanese authorities. This man, Christovão Ferreira, was indeed acting as interpreter and translator for the Shogun’s men, but there seems to be no evidence that he in fact urged the captives to apostatize; rather, he did his translating work in shame. Nevertheless, his public example of renouncing Christ was a scandal that could lead the whole Japanese nation to perdition, and Father Rubino vowed to offer himself up as a shining counter-example of faithfulness to Christ unto death, a torch of truth to dazzle the eyes and firm the wills of all Japan’s Christians: he and his companions would sail to Japan, enter the country by stealth, and try to bring Ferreira back to life—eternal life, that is—or atone for his apostasy by dying as heroic martyrs themselves.

Giovanni Antonio Rubino was born in Turin in 1578, thirty-one years after Saint Francis Xavier’s pioneering mission to Japan to spread the Word and save yet another race of man. Of noble birth, Father Rubino determined in his youth to devote his life to Christ by joining holy orders. Overcoming his father’s opposition, he joined the Society of Jesus and was sent to Goa in the Portuguese Indies. The consummate scholar, he served the Church in Asia for some forty years at Goa, Cochin, and Colombo as teacher or principal at those cities’ Jesuit academies.

This man, this faithful scholar-priest, is a towering unsung giant of Christian history, a real-life version of the tortured priests in Martin Scorcese’s Silence: a giant because, unlike the fictional priest in that movie who decided to tread on an image of Christ and thus wordlessly proclaim his apostasy, Father Antonio Rubino held out for the heavenly crown of glory—held out to the end, which came on 22 March 1643, when he finally expired hanging in the Pit atop the slope called Nishi-zaka in Nagasaki, Japan’s capital city of martyrs.

Father Rubino and his mission companions—four priests, one brother, and three lay Catholics—sailed out of Manila disguised as Chinese; on 11 August 1642 their ship ran aground on a small island in the Satsuma Strait: they had reached Japan. Within three days they were discovered, arrested, and taken to Nagasaki. There they were interviewed by the Nagasaki Bugyo, the Shogun’s deputy; the apostate priest Christovão Ferreira served as the Bugyo’s interpreter, but slunk out in shame after having been harshly scolded by Father Rubino for his faithlessness.

The Bugyo sent Father Rubino’s party to Mount Unzen, where they would endure the boiling sulfur-water tortures of “Unzen Hell” for seven months; the torturers also burned them with rods of red-hot iron. The final torture session on Unzen, especially gruelling, they suffered on 16 March 1643. None apostatized.

Boiling springs atop Mount Unzen

Father Rubino’s party were given their death-sentence, torture to death in the Pit, on 18 March: they rejoiced at the news, thanking God. The Bugyo, mystified, asked if they understood what he had told them; they replied that they had understood the Japanese perfectly: this was why they had come—to testify to the truth of Christ with their own precious lives, lives they held worthless if not spent for the Faith.

They were paraded through the streets of Nagasaki as spectacles of shame: riding on pack-horses with hands tied behind their backs; their heads and beards half-shaven, the shaven half painted red; iron “tongues” in their mouths to clamp their tongues and keep them from speaking; and signs on their backs proclaiming their crime:

The Emperor of Japan condemns these people to death for having preached the Roman Faith, long proscribed in all these domains.

Atop the slope called Nishi-zaka, on the execution-ground overlooking Nagasaki Bay, Father Rubino and his companions were violently thrown from their horses and their bodies bound in tight coils of rope. Then each martyr was suspended from a gallows head-downward waist-deep into his appointed pit, whose bottom was filled with the vilest filth. A lid was closed around his waist, closing out fresh air, closing in the stench; the lid cut off his circulation, causing excruciating pain. To multiply the martyr’s agonies astronomically, the torturers twisted the rope from which he hung: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, each turn an eternity of earthly hell.

The Pit (an artist’s inaccurate conception)

Yet no-one apostatized: all five men of Father Rubino’s mission held out for the Christian crown of glory, and thus, in their dauntless silence, refuted the lie of apostasy, the vacuous notion that any temporary earthly suffering—no matter its present horror—is too high a price to pay for Eternal Life.

Father Antonio Rubino won the martyr’s crown on 22 March, 1643 at age 64 or 65, the second of his mission-group to gain that victory. The lifelong scholar and teacher had taught his life’s greatest lesson in silence, a silence blaring out its truth to all mankind like a startling angelic trumpet in the heavens.

Copyright 2017 by Luke O’Hara

Website: Kirishtan.com

Today, 6 February, the Church marks the martyrdom of Saint Paul Miki and Companions, also known as the 26 Martyrs of Japan.   Here is their story:

 

 

     

    In the Year of Our Lord 1613, the domain of Arima was in the hands of Arima Naozumi, the son of Arima Harunobu, longtime stalwart patron and protector of the Church in Japan. After Harunobu’s execution in 1612,  Naozumi had apostatized on the orders of the de-facto Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu and received lordship of his dead father’s domain on condition that he do his utmost to exterminate the very Faith that he had from his childhood espoused.            

     Although his domain was far removed from Ieyasu’s castle-town up on the Pacific coast of Honshu, down home in Arima, Naozumi had the ruler’s own hound at his heels: Hasegawa Sahiōye, Governor of nearby Nagasaki—a close advisor of Ieyasu’s and a hell-driven enemy of Christ. Plotting to grab the domain of Arima for himself, Hasegawa threatened Naozumi, greenhorn Lord of Arima, with the Shōgun’s own hellfire if he did not prove his determination to purge the land of Christians with some solid evidence posthaste.           

   Naozumi called in his eight top samurai, formerly his father’s liegemen, and pleaded with them to renounce Christ, if only on paper, to save him from the threatened wrath—indeed, to save all of Arima’s faithful from that wrath, or so he claimed, citing Hasegawa’s threat. Hearing their new liege lord’s artful pleading, five of the eight samurai agreed to the stratagem. Three, however, refused to budge: Leo Taketomi Kan’emon, Adrian Takahashi Mondo, and Leo Hayashida Sakuemon.      

         Naozumi sentenced them to death by burning, along with their wives and children. However, the new, spineless Lord of Arima postponed the order until the three Christian stalwarts were safely out of his castle and headed home. All of them being samurai, they and their families were escorted unbound to their respective prison cells, where each family was locked up together: Adrian Takahashi with his wife Joanna; Leo Taketomi with his son Paulo; and Leo Hayashida with his wife Marta, his eighteen-year-old daughter Magdalena, and his son Diego, eleven years old.                 
Soon twenty thousand Kirish’tan had surrounded their prison, singing prayers and keeping vigil—at which they stayed for three days and nights on end, some huddling around campfires to keep warm in the night, some distributing food to those who were too hungry to bear it. For fear that the faithful would take relics from their remains, Naozumi ordered the martyrs-to-be spirited out of his jail to another location—clear proof that Arima Naozumi, his apostasy notwithstanding, retained a clear understanding of the restorative power of relics. Undeceived, Arima’s Kirish’tan faithful followed the soon-to-be martyrs to their new prison to continue the vigil.      

         On the morning of Sunday,  October 7, 1613, the prisoners were led out of their cells to meet their deaths. All were wearing the kimono of the Guild of Saint Mary, given them by its chief, and each but the youngest—eleven-year-old Diego—had his or her arms bound with rope in the form of a cross. Diego, seeing that all the others were bound, asked that the guards bind him too. They insisted that they had no more rope, and on hearing this, the boy submitted quietly.      

         En route to their deaths, each martyr was flanked left and right by a Marian with a lit candle in one hand and a rosary in the other; these members of the Guild sang the rosary as they marched with the holy ones. Coming to a river, the martyrs were ferried across, after which they had to traverse muddy ground. A certain man offered to carry Diego on his back across the mud, but the boy declined: “Our Lord Jesus didn’t ride a horse up Calvary,” he explained, and he tromped into the mud on his own two feet. Crowds of believers with scissors or knife in hand mobbed the holy ones to strip from their clothing some relic for saving; the condemned protested that they themselves were but mere sinners. Had the Eight not thus rebuffed these adorers, they would likely have been stripped stark naked.       

        They arrived at the place of execution: a wooden stable of sorts filled to the rafters with firewood, surrounded by a stockade, on the beach in front of the hill atop which loomed Hino-eh Castle. Their liege lord was most likely watching from up there, high above the heads of the countless Christians jammed into the town below the castle, people from all over the Peninsula, the erstwhile Christian bastion of Japan.       

        Leo Taketomi climbed onto a pile of wood and made a speech to the thousands, but many of his words were drowned out by the noise of the crowd. His few audible words went something like this:   

             Behold the faith of Arima’s Christians: for the glory of the Lord and as a testimony to our faith we now die. My brethren, my hope is that you shall preserve your faith unshaken to the very end!   

            Leo stepped down; each of the martyrs was tied to a stake; the executioners lit the firewood. Quickly a storm of flames erupted around the three families. The chief of the Guild of Saint Mary, just beyond the stockade, held up a painting of Jesus in his Passion so that the martyrs could see it, a help in their death-throes. The crowd sang the Credo, the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and other prayers to strengthen the martyrs; reportedly the martyrs evinced nothing but joy amidst the flames.       

        The boy Diego’s ropes were the first to burn away: he ran to his mother’s side shouting, “Zézusu! Maria!” and fell. Next his eighteen-year-old sister Magdalena found her arms free of the burning ropes: she reached down to pick up a flaming branch and held it above her head, seemingly worshiping the fire that would send her to Heaven as she held up her head with her other hand. Seeing this, the gasping crowd made the sign of the Cross. Finally, Leo Hayashida boomed the name of Jesus out of the midst of the flames; that word shook the crowd as a whirlwind of fire devoured the eight holy martyrs. All the onlookers beat their breasts as his shout resounded over all the scene.       

        When that shout of Heaven’s victory reached his ears, Arima Naozumi, looking down from his castle’s overlook, must have felt as if that maelstrom of flames were in his own stomach. Meanwhile, down below, all those thousands of his Kirish’tan subjects, fallen to their knees, were praying for the souls of the martyrs—and perhaps for the soul of their earthly lord as well, cowering in his fortress high above.           

      This martyrdom proved to be only a prelude to the litany of sufferings that Arima was bound to endure.

 

             Copyright 2015/2016 by Luke O’Hara 

                     Website:  Kirishtan.com

             The illustration is from a 1624 history of the persecution in Japan by Nicolas                          Trigault;  I borrowed the image from the website of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference               of Japan, at   http://www.cbcj.catholic.jp/jpn/feature/kibe_187/arima.htm

     Behold a heart-wrenching martyrdom in which whole families were burned together—including mothers with their infant children—just to satisfy the almighty Shōgun Hidetada’s ire.

     In October of 1619, Hidetada was passing through Fushimi after a visit to Kyōto, the Imperial capital, when he heard that there were a great many Christians being held in Kyōto’s jail. The volatile Shōgun exploded into rage and ordered them all burned alive immediately, regardless of age, gender, or station. They were to be crucified and burned on their crosses as a mise-shime:  a lesson to recalcitrant believers.

     Itakura Katsushige, Kyōto’s Shogunal Governor, was a decent man—the most moderate man on earth, one account tells us[1]—but he dare not contravene the Shōgun’s orders, not even to “defer the execution of a lady of the first quality who was about to give birth.”[2] He had allowed the faithful Catholics to return to their homes, but now they were rounded up to be loaded onto eleven wagons and paraded through the streets of Kyōto, the men, the boys, and the girls in the foremost and hindmost wagons, and the women, many with babies at their breast or in their arms in the others.[3] History records that

     A crier led the cortege and proclaimed the death sentence: “The Shōgun … wills and commands that all these people be burned alive as Christians.” And the martyrs confirmed the crier’s words, saying, “This is true; we die for Jesus. Hurrah for Jesus!”[4]

     Twenty-seven crosses had been erected along the river called Kamo-gawa, on the outskirts of Kyōto, awaiting these sacrificial victims. Among the martyrs were Johane Hashimoto Tahioye and his wife, christened Tecla, along with their six beautiful children. On the Shōgun Hidetada’s orders, all the children must of course be burned along with their mothers. The martyrs were clamped to the crosses—the mothers with babies in their arms in the center, and the others back to back, in pairs. Historian Leon Pages lists more names: “Magdalena … had her two-year-old daughter Regina in her arms; Maria had Monica, her daughter, four years old; and Marta, her son Benito, two years old,” and on and on, including “little Marta, eight years old and blind.” And Tecla, mother of five, with four-year-old Lucia in her arms, two more of her children tied to her own cross with her, and the other two on crosses to her right and left.[5]

     The firewood was lit; as the Shōgun’s inferno erupted around the martyrs, their voices rose above the roar of the flames, calling the name of Jesus. Mothers with little ones in their arms caressed their babies’ faces to soothe their pain, as if to ward off the horror of the flames.

     Tecla’s daughter Catherine cried, “Mother, I can’t see.”

“Call to Jesus and Mary,” her mother answered.[6]

     Richard Cocks, an English Protestant who witnessed this holocaust, wrote:

   “I saw fifty-five martyred at Miyako, at one time when I was there, because they wold not forsake their Christian Faith, & amongst them were little Children of five or sixe yeeres old burned in their mothers armes, Crying out, Jesus recive their soules.”

            Historian Léon Pagès wrote that a comet “and supernatural fires” marked this martyrdom. Fact or no, no-one of faith can doubt that Christ Himself was there among the martyrs, the Conqueror of Death claiming victory amidst those hellish earthly flames.

Copyright 2015 by Luke O’Hara

Kirishtan.com

 

[1] Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire de l’établissement, des progrès et de la décadence du christianisme dans l’empire duJapon, Vol. 2, p. 187.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Léon Pagès, Histoire de la religion chrétienne au Japon depuis 1598 jusqu’à 1651, p. 413.

[4] Ibid, my translation.

[5] Ibid, my translation.

[6] Ibid.

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 Jinbei.  Jinbei 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)

Father Albert Meczynski, S.J. was born of Polish nobility, the Poraj of Kurozwęki; his father (who, as best I can determine, was the Count of Kurozwęki) died when Albert was a boy. Sent to study at the Jesuit college in Lublin at age fourteen, Albert soon embraced a desire to join the Society of Jesus. His mother, outraged, sent him to school in Krakow to deter this ambition she thought unfitting a nobleman; there he studied medicine, which would later come in handy.

       Despite parental opposition, Albert did eventually join the Society at Rome; he was ordained at Evora after years of study. Having repeatedly requested permission to go on mission to Japan, he finally set sail from Lisbon in 1631. An epidemic of typhus raged on board the ship, during which Father Albert rendered constant medical service; ultimately, contrary winds forced the ship to turn back to Lisbon. Thereafter Father Albert spent two years convalescing because of a circulatory ailment.

       He sailed again on 5 March 1633; on this voyage, too, the crew was plagued by mortal illness, but they finally arrived at Goa, India on 20 August. There Father Albert visited the tomb of Saint Francis Xavier, miracle worker and “Apostle of the Indies,” where he received an infusion of spiritual strength. Setting sail then for Malacca, Father Albert was captured by Dutch pirates, taken to their colony on Formosa and kept captive for seven months; here, too, his medical skills proved useful, as the Dutchmen, who had been starving him, began to treat him more humanely when he effected a cure for their commandant’s ailing son.

       Eventually he made it to Portuguese Macao, near Hong Kong; there he studied Japanese—and presumably prepared himself for martyrdom, for he had early on donated his entire fortune to the Society of Jesus with the words: “Now I have nothing but my blood to give to God.”[1]

         To make this ultimate donation, Father Albert joined Father Antonio Rubino’s bold atoning mission to Japan, which set sail from Manila in 1642. Its purpose was to repair the insult to the Christian Faith and to the Society of Jesus that Father Christovão Ferreira’s public apostasy after four hours’ torture in the Pit at Nagasaki had inflicted—and, if possible, to bring the apostate Ferreira back to Christ.

       As for the ultimate fate of Ferreira’s soul, only God knows, but the Name of Christ suffered no soiling at the hands of Father Rubino’s Jesuit missionaries: in the hands of the Shogun’s torturers they would withstand seven months’ torture being scalded with sulfur-water and branded with hot iron at the volcanic “Unzen Hell” without breathing a whisper of apostasy. Finally they would be condemned to the torture of the Pit, the very apex of contrived human cruelty. From his gallows atop Nishi-zaka in Nagasaki, Father Albert hung upside-down in a dark, stinking toilet of a hole with his waist crimped in a wooden vise and every nerve of his body in torment, enduring a man-made hell far worse than Unzen, giving his blood to God drop by drop, dripping from his ears and mouth and nose into the filth he had to breathe for seven days, seven eternities: atonement seventy times seven for Christovão Ferreira’s apostasy, a debt far more than mere mortal man should ever have to pay.

       Father Albert, holy immortal, entered Eternity on 23 March 1643.
Hallelujah. Glory be to God in all His angels and saints and martyrs.

Copyright 2017 by Luke O’Hara

Kirishtan.com

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