Miguel Kuroda

      In the years before the great Tokugawa persecution of the Catholic Faith, a beautiful cross of cedar stood on a mountaintop in the town of Akizuki in the domain of the Kuroda clan in northern Kyushu. It had been planted there by the lord of Akizuki, a Christian samurai named Kuroda Sōemon Naoyuki, christened Miguel at his baptism in the town of Nakatsu (in modern Ōita Prefecture).

     Naoyuki became Miguel on Easter Sunday of 1587. He took that name in good faith, a commitment he embraced with all his heart and clung to unto death as befits a valiant warrior. Naoyuki had fought as a vassal of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in his teens, in the days before that warlord adopted the surname ‘Toyotomi’ to counterfeit noble birth and thereby smooth his takeover of Japan. Yet it was that same Hideyoshi who in that very year of 1587 banned the Faith, trumpeting his dark proscription on July 25th, the Feast of Saint James.

 Toyotomi Hideyoshi

       Miguel had pledged his sword to Hideyoshi, but not his soul. He went on living and professing his faith despite the falling-away of some notable Catholics, and in 1600, when the head of the Kuroda clan gave him charge of Akizuki, he devoted himself to the protection and nurturing of its Christian community. When the Jesuits were hounded out of the Kurodas’ port-town of Hakata at the instigation of Buddhist clerics in 1602, Miguel not only gave them safe haven in Akizuki but also succeeded in effecting their safe return to their forlorn Hakata flock. In 1607 alone there were 2,000 adults baptized in Akizuki and a new church built at Miguel’s expense. Father Pedro Morejón, who was in Japan throughout this period recording the Jesuit mission’s triumphs and vicissitudes in detail, writes that over 5,000 souls were baptized in Miguel Kuroda’s Akizuki in a mere two years. Father Morejón called Miguel Kuroda “a diehard defender of the fathers and the Christians.”

    And defending they did need. Although the tyrant Hideyoshi had died in 1598, his proscription of the Faith lived on, and the ruler who succeeded him, Tokugawa Ieyasu, would soon prove an even more vicious enemy of the Church in Japan—indeed, its determined executioner.

Tokugawa Ieyasu

       Miguel Kuroda fell mortally ill in 1609. As he lay on his deathbed, he gave his final orders to his son Naoki, christened Paulo, who would be taking the reins of Akizuki. This was Miguel’s only instruction to his heir, the new guardian of Akizuki’s Christian flock: “Keep the faith.”

     To the physician at his bedside, a pagan friend he had long been trying to convert, Miguel Kuroda made a final plea that the man come to his senses, get himself baptized, and possess eternal life. “I declare to you once more that there is no other truth than that taught by my master Jesus Christ: any other religion than His is vanity and folly,” he insisted. Since he was on his deathbed, Miguel went on to assure his friend, he could tell no lie, lest that lie send him to hell.

      Whether or not Miguel’s friend followed his advice this author cannot say, but the fate of Paulo, his heir, is recorded in history. He died in 1611 in unclear circumstances, perhaps assassinated, and the rule of Akizuki devolved to the Kuroda clan’s capital of Fukuoka. There, sympathy for the Kirish’tan sect—i.e. the Catholics—was in ever shorter supply, for the political winds blowing down to Kyushu from the throne-rooms (so to speak) of the second Tokugawa Shogun and his father, Ieyasu, were waxing too cold to bear.   

     Thus, the legacy of Miguel Kuroda Sōemon Naoyuki was in grave peril. But what of the beautiful cross of cedar that he left behind on that mountaintop?

     Within three years of Miguel Kuroda’s death, the church-demolishing and cross-burning frenzy of the Tokugawa persecution had begun. Akizuki was a peaceful town, a picture-perfect haven nestled in the mountains of rural Chikuzen Province, a town where Catholic and non-believer might have gone on living side by side in harmony: witness Miguel’s deathbed entreaty to his pagan friend. Yet the Tokugawa terror did indeed reach Akizuki and there dug in its talons. All Catholics were to apostatize at once; any holdouts would be listed as rebels under sentence of death. Many did in fact hold out, affixing their names to a roster of Christians willing to die for their faith.  

     Alarmed at this onslaught, an old man who lived on the aforesaid mountain climbed to its peak to rescue Miguel Kuroda’s cross from profanation. He took the cross down and buried it, no doubt as discreetly as he could, but the minions of the shogunal terror sniffed it out, dug it up, and burned it on that very mountaintop, perhaps precisely where it had long stood.

     That cross had been the old man’s companion. Mornings he had risen before daybreak and visited it to kneel before it and pray. Perhaps he had known Miguel Kuroda, his erstwhile earthly lord and protector, as a friend and kept him in mind as he knelt before that cross in prayer. Now both Miguel and his cross were gone, with only the ghosts of memory there to console the old man.

     Yet he continued to rise before dawn and climb to that spot to visit with his Lord above and pray.

     As he prayed, perhaps he saw in his memory the faithful souls of Akizuki scourging themselves bloody as they had often done when they climbed that Calvary in penitential sacrifice. Perhaps he saw others puffing with the strain of heavy stones on their shoulders, burdens they would carry up that mountain for love of Christ to share in the weight of their own sins. Perhaps he saw the bereaved bringing their silent griefs to that mountaintop to be close to their God and listen on their knees for His voice as their own Lord and Savior had done. History leaves no clue to the old man’s private thoughts.

     But it does tell us this:    

     One morning, he was given a sign. Rising before daybreak as usual, he went out to pray at his spiritual haven to be met by a marvel: something like a brilliant, translucent ember shining where the cross had stood, resplendent, framed within the predawn darkness, while the mundane props of this material world could be seen in the distance behind it. Nor did this resplendent vision flash away to leave the old man wondering if he had ever really seen it: no, it lingered for “a great space of time,” giving him ample opportunity to ponder it, to test its reality and consider its meaning.  

     Consoled, the old man found the strength to carry on. Surely this sign was not meant to vanish in the memory of one lone old man who lived high up on a mountainside.

     Indeed: come Holy Saturday evening in the Year of Our Lord 1616, a great fire appeared on the mountaintop, a blaze bright enough to be seen for miles around. Many thought that it must be the Christians holding some secret cabal on that peak, perhaps around a bonfire, but it soon became apparent that those benighted souls, Akizuki’s dispossessed Catholic faithful, were there among them gazing up in wonder at the spectacle: a plainly supernatural fire, and in its center a resplendent cross of the same size that Christ’s own would have been, displaying, as many attested—both Christian and pagan—the title that had hung above the Redeemer’s head, its lettering visible through the distance.

      Nor did this dazzling vision flash away, but—as the old man’s had done some two years earlier—remained, steadfast, an undeniable fact, a reality, a sign lingering for two unearthly hours on that sacred mountaintop where so many earnest souls had emptied the burdens of their hearts into the open, loving hands of a grieving God.

     Whose hands returned the measure of their prayers, their sufferings, their sacrifices a hundredfold on the very Eve of Easter, the twenty-ninth Easter since Miguel Kuroda Sōemon Naoyuki felt the cool baptismal water wash away his sins and his old self to give him life anew.

     A gift he had striven with all his might to give to every soul that he could reach, like the angel of the Lord who appeared in the sky above the shepherds to proclaim:

“Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people.” (Luke 2:10, Ignatius Bible)

     Would that the Tokugawa tyrants themselves had been in Akizuki to see the dazzling proof of that good news—and scotched the martyrdoms that soon would follow.

 

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All images used herein are in the Public Domain.

This article first appeared in the National Catholic Register.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Year of Our Lord 1616, a young samurai named Hoshino Kanzō returned to Fukushima Masanori’s castle-town of Hiroshima after some years’ absence to care for his father, who was mortally ill. The young man’s return must have been bittersweet, since his father, egged on by his Jezebel of a stepmother, had thrown him out of his home years earlier over his devotion to Christ. Perhaps his very baptismal name, Domingo, set her teeth on edge.

On his eviction, Domingo Hoshino had made his way to Nagasaki to seek spiritual help from the Portuguese Jesuit priest who had baptized him, Fr. Mattheus de Couros, and afterwards traveled to the island of Shikoku, where he found work as a samurai in the service of a prominent daimyō. When the Tokugawa persecution of 1614 extended its tentacles to Shikoku, however, Domingo was given the choice of abandoning either his faith or his living. Of course, he chose the latter. This made him not only a rōnin—a wandering samurai without a master, and thus perhaps considered a dangerous tramp—but also a Kirish’tan rōnin, perhaps treated as anathema by all and sundry.

Thus, on his return to Hiroshima, Domingo was longing for rest, for a home, and for a chance to repair the filial ties that his stepmother had sundered by dint of her malign influence over the old man—who now lay on his deathbed, shorn of any strength to resist his wife’s predations. It must have wrung his heart to see his eldest son’s face again after those years of absence. Certainly Domingo’s heart, too, would have stung on seeing his father near death, still neither baptized nor converted. Domingo did the little he could to nurse his father’s body back to health, but all his efforts to save his soul were frantically resisted by his Jezebel stepmother until the old man was dead.

One can imagine the desolation that must have followed fast upon the spent anguish in the heart of the dead man’s returned discarded son. His father’s apparently unrepentant death was not the final blow, however: as if not yet having injected enough venom into her despised stepson’s life and soul, that wanton shade of a mother snatched away Domingo’s inheritance, grabbing legal title over the family home. She was determined to make him a Kirish’tan outcast again.

No doubt these facts steeled Domingo’s certainty of the justice of his cause when he marched to Fukushima Masanori’s castle on 26 November 1616 to petition for redress of the theft of his inheritance. He was probably thinking not only of himself, but also of his younger brother, who would be solely under that Jezebel’s malevolent influence in his forced absence. His younger brother’s soul was in jeopardy just as his father’s had been.

Masanori’s castle stood on a rise in Hiroshima armored with massive masonry on all sides, surrounded by a moat, and planted with pretty groves of pine trees. Perhaps it reminded Domingo of his days of samurai service in Shikoku; perhaps he felt readmitted to the human race for a space of moments as he climbed the stone steps into the castle keep for an audience with the daimyō himself. That changed abruptly, though, when one of Masanori’s samurai, an ally of the stepmother’s in her rotten scheme, stood up to denounce Domingo as an incompetent, a coward, a madman, and above all an accursed Christian who had long before been thrown out of the family home for having defied his father’s orders to quit that banned religion—and would he now come storming back to Hiroshima to demand that home for his own?

Since the accuser had publicly denounced the petitioning Domingo as a flagrant violator of the shogun’s prohibition against practicing the Christian Faith, Masanori was forced to act enraged at the ‘discovery’ of the young man’s Catholicism. (This daimyō had in fact been sympathetic to Christianity before the shogun forced him to execute a crackdown; he may well have long known about the young man’s conversion.) He asked if it were true that he was a Christian and that he had indeed defied his father’s orders to renounce Christ; Domingo answered Yes.

Masanori then ordered him to commit suicide by hara-kiri.

“I will gladly die or suffer any torture you give me for the sake of Christ,” Domingo answered, “but I cannot commit suicide, for it is against our [Christian] law, as all know.”

This Masanori acknowledged. He then declared that, since Christians so esteemed the Cross, there was one obvious solution: “Crucify him!”

With his hands tied behind his back and a noose around his neck—gross ignominy for a samurai—Domingo was led out of the castle grounds by a cordon of soldiers. The man at the head of the procession held a sign proclaiming Fukushima Masanori’s sentence of death:

I order this man executed for having become a Christian against the law of the Lord of the Tenka (i.e. the Empire) and for having refused to renounce his religion in defiance of his parents…

It concluded with the charge that Domingo, having gone to Nagasaki to become a Christian, had thereafter returned to Hiroshima. Domingo had actually received baptism in Hiroshima at the hands of Fr. de Couros some years before the 1614 ban. That final charge in the death-sentence was obviously a ploy to absolve Masanori and his domains, far removed from Catholic Nagasaki, of any taint of Christian sympathies.

The condemned Catholic thanked God all the way to the execution ground, where a cross had been prepared, awaiting him. He reverenced the cross, said a prayer, embraced it, and passively allowed his executioners to tie his arms and legs to the wood (Japanese crucifiers did not nail their victims to the cross) and fasten his neck to the upright with an iron clamp. Then he was lifted up.

He began to preach of the truth of the Faith to all within earshot, insisting that they deceive themselves who hold that there is any salvation outside of Christ. Domingo Hoshino ended his sermon with the names of Jesus and Mary, shouted as the spearmen standing at the foot of his cross drove their spears into his flanks, up through his heart, and out the shoulders. This is how Japanese crucifixions culminated.

On Masanori’s orders, Domingo’s body was left to rot eight days on the cross as a terror to any who would dare to worship Christ. Rather than prove a deterrent, though, the corpse of the crucified Christian became a holy shrine, drawing a steady stream of Catholics come to do the faithful martyr reverence—and, if possible, scoop up some of that sacred earth baptized with his blood.

After that octave of would-be terror, the local Catholics took away Domingo Hoshino’s body for proper burial. He was the first Catholic martyred in Hiroshima and the first in all Japan crucified under the Tokugawa persecution, a samurai of 23 or 24 years of age, faithful unto death to his Lord above.

Sources:

1. Pedro Morejón, Historia y Relacion de lo sucedido en los Reinos de Japon y China, en la qual se continua la gran persecucion que ha avido en aq̃lla Iglesia, desde el año de 615. hasta el de 19. Por el Padre Pedro Morejon de la Compañia de Iesus, Procurador de la Prouincia de Iapon, natural de Medina del Campo. (Lisboa: Rodriguez, 1621) 76-77.

2. Webpage of the Pauline Sisters: キリシタンゆかりの地をたずねて,  広島県 広島市 広島キリシタン殉教の碑.   URL: https://www.pauline.or.jp/kirishitanland/20111104_koi.php

 

 

 

 

 

        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 battle 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 the rebels’ leader, Amakusa Shiro. At road’s end, atop the mountain, their armies will have mock combat, eliciting laughs from the crowd as cherry-blossom petals flutter to earth among them.

    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 fifteen-year-old samurai who stood here awaiting the holocaust in that horrific cherry-blossom spring of 1638. Here thirty-seven thousand Christian souls would offer up their starving flesh, writing their testament in blood into this sacred soil. Here stood Hara Castle, the grave of the Shimabara Rebellion, the dying gasp of old Catholic Japan.

In the reign of the Catholic daimyo Arima Harunobu, the Shimabara Peninsula had been the Christian bulwark of Japan. This land, then called Arima, had boasted seventy Catholic churches in her prime, and the nearby Amakusa Islands had been staunchly Catholic too. In 1612, however, the Tokugawa shoguns’ vise began to close. Arima Harunobu was executed that year, and by Amakusa Shiro’s day, all faithful Catholics faced death by torture. 

The current shogun, Tokugawa 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.

      Under Iemitsu’s aegis, the lords of Shimabara and Amakusa were not only suppressing the Faith; they were also practicing tax-extortion. Despite a three years’ drought having starved the land, these two profligates demanded exorbitant tax payments from their captive subjects, or else. Some defaulters were tied up in coats made of straw and their coats 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 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 were blooming out of season. And down in Amakusa there was a teenage prodigy. Fifteen-year-old Shiro was the son of an old Catholic samurai named Masuda Jinbei. Jinbei and his cronies concocted a phony prophecy by a mythical missionary of old that “foretold” Shiro’s coming to liberate the downtrodden Christians; then, in a public ceremony, they acclaimed the boy as their prophesied redeemer.

      Thus was the rebellion seeded. After the explosion in Shimabara, closet-Christians in nearby Amakusa flocked to Amakusa Shiro’s flag to wage war on their despotic feudal lord’s minions, the armed thugs who policed their religion and robbed them blind. The boy-general’s army of reborn Catholics swelled with ever more recruits as it swept from east to west across Amakusa’s three main islands, driving its oppressors before it. These fled to their commander’s mountaintop fortress at Tomioka, an islet dangling from the archipelago’s northwestern corner, scrambling for refuge.

     Meanwhile, entire villages throughout the Shimabara Peninsula were vowing in writing to obey Shiro to the death. After three unsuccessful assaults on the fortress at Tomioka, Shiro decided not to squander his forces but instead took his army across the Hayasaki Strait to Shimabara. There they would join their brethren in arms, and all would barricade themselves, along with all their households, inside the disused fortress called Hara-no-jo, or Hara Castle, in the south of the peninsula.

         On Christmas Day of 1637, Shogun Iemitsu learned of the rebellion and commissioned Itakura Shigemasa, an aristocrat with little experience of war, to muster troops under the shogunal seal, march them to distant Shimabara and there wipe out the despised Catholics. Itakura’s 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 had to 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.

             Next a new, veteran general—Matsudaira Nobutsuna—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 the rebels had run out of rice and some were eating the empty sacks; they were also short of drinking-water, firewood, and 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 Catholic 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 wretched 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 rebel 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 underground 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 man-made 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 the islands of Shikoku and Honshu and installing them willy-nilly in the ghost towns of Shimabara.

            In Japan’s Catholic heyday, at least seventy churches dotted the Shimabara Peninsula; today there are only three—a sad testament to the successful expunging of the Faith from a fervently-Catholic land. Sadder still, the slaughter of those 37,000 who believed themselves ‘timely born to die for the Faith’ goes unnoticed by the Church at large, for they died as rebels fighting against—not praying for—their persecutors.

Yet this view ignores the countless martyred children: martyrs because they, unlike so many of the adults, 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, there to await the holocaust through months of bitter cold, terror, and starvation. These little ones the shogun’s horde executed solely for the crime of being Christian. Even the little girls.

         In this strange April of our own affliction, let us remember the souls of Hara Castle’s little martyrs.

 

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Luke O’Hara became a Roman Catholic in Japan. His articles and books about Japan’s martyrs can be found at his website, kirishtan.com.

 

 

Paulo Uchibori and Sons, Martyrs of Arima

A glowering, scar-faced volcano named Mount Unzen looms over the Shimabara Peninsula in southwestern Japan. Atop it, bubbling, sulfurous hot springs vomit out white crud and belch acrid steam: they call this place “Unzen Hell.” From 1627 onward, the local ruler found the biggest of its caustic, skin-eating pools perfect for torturing Christians. 

In the hands of the Catholic ruler Arima Harunobu, this peninsula, known as Arima, had once been the Christian bulwark of Japan. In 1612, though, the de-facto shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu condemned Harunobu to death and entrusted Arima to Harunobu’s spineless heir Naozumi. Naozumi then renounced Christ, joined Ieyasu’s own Buddhist sect, and vowed to stamp out the Faith in Arima, his family’s ancestral domain. 

As if to seal his apostasy, Naozumi burnt three staunchly-Catholic samurai along with their wives and children on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary of 1613. Arima’s faithful Catholics flocked to this martyrdom in their thousands, wearing rosaries around their necks and singing hymns to the martyrs while Naozumi cowered in his hilltop fortress overlooking the scene. He soon requested transfer to another fief; rather than accompany their apostate lord to his new home, most of Arima’s Catholic samurai renounced their livelihoods and stayed behind in Arima. Prominent among these stalwarts was Paulo Uchibori, a samurai born in Arieh, a coastal village not far from the Arimas’ home castle. 

The shogun’s vise tightened on Arima in 1614: Hasegawa Sahioye, Governor of Nagasaki, invaded her with an army of ten thousand men to wage a gruesome campaign of anti-Christian terror, and he threw Paulo Uchibori into prison. Hasegawa was soon recalled to the capital, but he left behind two hills of Christian flesh, one of chopped-up bodies and the other of heads, in a field below Naozumi’s abandoned hilltop castle in the south of Arima.

This was the spiritual landscape handed over to Matsukura Shigemasa, an old ally of Ieyasu’s, in 1616. At first, Shigemasa turned a blind eye to Arima’s Christians, and since he respected Paulo Uchibori’s samurai grit, he let him out of prison; but in 1626, Shigemasa went up to the capital to pay homage to Ieyasu’s grandson, the Christ-hating Shogun Iemitsu, third of the Tokugawa shoguns. According to the late Jesuit historian Father Diego Yuuki, Iemitsu could think of nothing but the crackdown on Christianity as if he were possessed. (A hypothesis bolstered by this shogun’s appetites for pederasty, for cutting down random strangers with his sword, and for gleefully watching the torture of Christians.)  

Matsukura Shigemasa drank deep of the poison in the wretched Iemitsu’s soul during his stay at the shogun’s capital: he went back to Arima a changed man, determined to purge Christ from his domain, and he had sent down orders to arrest Paulo Uchibori and his family. When Shigemasa got back home, he found thirty-seven Christians in his dungeon. On 21 February 1627, Shigemasa decreed this doom for sixteen of them: cut their fingers off, hang stones around their necks, and drown them in the sea. Paulo’s three sons were among the sixteen. 

Paulo himself and nineteen others were stripped naked and forced to watch the tortures and executions. First, the executioners lined the condemned Christians up along the bank of the moat around Matsukura’s fortress, calling each one forward and cutting that victim’s fingers off one by one: some all ten, some fewer, at the torturer’s whim. Paulo’s eighteen-year-old son Antonio they called first: he bravely strode up and spread his hands out on the cutting-board, evincing not the slightest wince as they sliced his fingers off.

Paulo’s youngest, five-year-old Ignacio, manifested a miracle when they cut his tender little index-fingers off: after each slash, he brought the mutilated hand to his face and smiled, watching the blood jet out. The astonished pagans drew away in fear: like the Gerasenes, terrified by Christ’s power over evil.

After mutilating these heroes, Matsukura’s men stripped them, tied ropes around their necks and ankles, and took them out in a boat for the final torture: hanging stones around their necks, they plunged each into the icy sea, pulling him out and demanding that he renounce Christ to save his life, and dropped him in again, pulling him out to give him another “chance,” and in, and out, over and over. None of them apostatized; every one drowned a Christian.

Looking on from a nearby boat were the twenty other Christians forced to watch the tortures and drownings, with Paulo among them. He heard his heroic son Antonio gasp, “Father, let us thank God for such a big blessing” before they drowned him, and he watched them suspend little Ignacio above the waves before his eyes for a small eternity before they finally sunk the mutilated five-year-old to the bottom of the sea.

The twenty witnesses they then took back to their stripped-off clothes; warning-signs had been sewn on them, threatening with grave punishment anyone who would dare give these Christians any shelter. Next, they cut the three middle fingers off each of their hands, branded the word CHRISTIAN on their foreheads and set them loose to fend for themselves: stark, horrific examples of the shogun’s certain wrath to would-be believers; but rather than succumb to their misery, these stalwart Catholics went around preaching Christ fearlessly, urging apostates to return to the Faith. This was not the lesson that Matsukura had intended for the souls of Arima, so the twenty were eventually ordered back to his castle.

At dawn on February 28, 1627, Paulo and fifteen others were taken out of Matsukura’s dungeon to start their climb up Mount Unzen. Along the way they sang hymns and recited the Creed, and when their guards stopped to rest, they knelt, made an Act of Contrition, and prayed a Rosary. Finally, singing another hymn, they arrived at the “Hell” where they were to die; there the guards tied ropes around their necks for dunking them, as if they were not human beings but the merest meat for boiling.

The first to die jumped into the boiling sulfur-water on the executioners’ command; Paulo admonished the others to wait for Matsukura’s men to do the killing: faithful Catholics must not kill themselves. He kept on encouraging and guiding his fellow-Catholics through their martyrdoms, guiding them Heavenward, which infuriated Matsukura’s executioners; so they saved Paulo for the last, cruelest execution: they hung him upside-down by his feet and dunked him head-first, yanking him out  to see the result. He sang out, “Praised be the Most Blessed Sacrament!”

They dunked him again, maybe expecting better results this time, and pulled him out a second time. Again he prayed, “Praised be the Most Blessed Sacrament!” No whining, no squirming, no surrender to the shogun: only praise for the Conqueror of Death, until they plunged him in a third time, for good.

This was the stuff of which Saint Francis Xavier had exulted on his first arriving in Japan on the Feast of the Assumption of 1549: here was the good earth that bore fruit a hundredfold. 

Eleven years later, Paulo’s prayer would crown the flag of rebellion that would fly over Hara Castle, where 37,000 Catholics would shed their blood for Christ. (It had long been the flag of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament.) Those words of  praise, joy and victory would soar over the Shimabara martyrs’ final battleground while the Shogun’s horde stamped out his fury—words that cannot be erased or silenced, singing through Japan’s buried centuries of darkness; words flying high and ringing still: Praised be the Most Blessed Sacrament.

We dare not shut our eyes, nor stop our ears.

 -End-

Photos Copyright 2007 by Luke O’Hara

 

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On a brisk February morning in the Year of Our Lord 1597, 26 haggard men and boys were marched up a steep slope called Nishi-zaka toward a terrace of land that overlooked Nagasaki Bay. There they would find a row of crosses laid out on the ground awaiting them.

The scene might have looked restful to the condemned men and boys as they surveyed those crosses, for this was the end of a 28-days’ winter marathon. With their left ears mutilated and their hands trussed up tight behind their backs, they had been herded like cattle half the length of Japan to spend their last night on earth shivering in bitter cold, huddled in open boats moored offshore of Togitsu, a fishing village north of Nagasaki. Now, as they stood atop Nishi-zaka, gasping perhaps for breath, there was just one question, voiced by the youngest first:

“Which cross is mine?”

Louis Ibaraki, twelve years old, ran to the cross pointed out to him and fell to earth to hug it: here was the vessel that would carry him heavenward to meet his Lord.

It had all started when a Mexico-bound Manila galleon named San Felipe limped into Urado Bay, battered and blown off course by a typhoon. San Felipe was laden with Chinese silks and other luxuries, her cargo worth a fortune, and the ruler of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was sore in need of funds to finance his war in Korea.

As Urado Bay was blocked by underwater sand bars, the ship’s pilot wanted to take her westward to Nagasaki, but the daimyo of Urado convinced the wearied passengers that he could safely tug her into port, and their demands won the day. Reluctantly the pilot watched as the daimyo’s men tugged his heavy-laden ship over two sand bars; the first merely scraped San Felipe’s keel, but the second broke her back. Seawater flooded into the cloven ship as crateful after crateful of her precious cargo poured out onto the bay, and now San Felipe was a shipwreck, her cargo forfeit by Japanese law.

Gleefully the daimyo reported his jackpot to Hideyoshi, who immediately arranged for the cargo’s transfer to his storehouses; the daimyo he rewarded with 5,000 silver bars.

The exasperated captain dispatched an embassy of two Franciscan friars and two of his crewmen to Hideyoshi’s capital to save his cargo, but such an embassy could be embarrassing for the tyrant: 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.

The Martyrs started their death-march on January 10, 1597. The youngest three were twelve, thirteen and fourteen, and 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.”

On February 5, 1597, after that bitterly-frosty night at Togitsu, the martyrs were marshaled to their feet at dawn and marched double-time toward Nishi-zaka—a twelve-kilometer marathon—as the local Christians lined the roadside in silent reverence. Br. Paul Miki preached all along the way, just as he had been doing all the length of their march: he was said to be the greatest preacher in Japan.

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 flanks and upward through their hearts and out their shoulders. 

At the start of their journey, while being paraded in oxcarts around the capital, 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. 

When the soldiers unsheathed their spears, the crucified martyrs and the crowd blanketing the mountainside all started shouting in unison, “Jesus!  Mary!” This holy cry resounded again and again until every last martyr’s heart was pierced—resounding among the hills of Nagasaki and across the bay, where ships from halfway round the world lay tethered to their moorings, their crewmen watching transfixed by the spectacle above as if it was their holy Faith whose heart was being pierced.

Cheerful despite his mutilated ear, the wintry marathon, that final night of misery, and even his sentence of death, twelve-year-old Louis Ibaraki had long been prepared for this moment. He alone among the Twenty-Six was there entirely by personal choice, for Terazawa Hanzaburo, the sheriff in charge of the execution, had tried to save the boy’s life, offering to make him his page. Louis asked if he could then go on being a Christian, and on hearing “No,” his answer was swift and clear: he chose eternal life over a merely-mortal one.

A faith implicit in his immortal words, prayed 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!”

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Luke O’Hara became a Roman Catholic in Japan. His articles and books about Japan’s martyrs can be found at his website, kirishtan.com.

 

Slaughtering the Healers

 

“It is the little ones who heal us,” said Father Leonard, completely out of the blue.  I had been confessing some now-forgotten sin  when out came this treasure from the store-room of his heart.

It came to me some days later that the face of God must have something in it of the face of a child.  This would explain why Jesus said, “In heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 18:10)  That is, the faces of the angels’ appointed little ones, untainted as yet by actual sin, are so many little faces of God, so much like the face of the Infant Jesus.

When the Pharisees asked the adult Jesus why He hung around with the likes of us, He answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” (Luke 5:31)  Our spiritual forefathers understood the preciousness of each human life, and thus the infinite value of healing.  How appalled they would have been to breathe the putrid ambience of our brave new world where slithery phrases like ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘women’s reproductive rights’ mean the wholesale murdering of babies in their mothers’ wombs, and—horror unspeakable—the slaughtering of babies while they are being born, and even after having emerged alive into our world:  murdered by the very ‘physicians’ who should be delivering those newborn healers into their mothers’ loving arms.  How infuriated our forebears would have been by the hissing sound of those three slithery words—‘Freedom of Choice’—that deny both freedom and choice to the little boys and girls being butchered by so-called physicians.  And how it must wrench the guardian angels to see their own tiny, Godlike charges torn out of the womb with steel pincers piece by piece, limb by limb, tiny hands and feet and torso, and, most wrenching of all, the tiny bleeding head with its tortured face of God frozen in eternal agony.  How bitterly the guardians must weep to see us slaughter their helpless little ones, those tiny healers, as if infanticide really were the merest expression of ‘women’s reproductive rights’ or, God save us, ‘women’s health.’

If only we could hear the angels gasp, or feel the rain of tears they shower over every butchered child; but perhaps we are too far gone, too ‘experienced,’ too hardened of heart:  perhaps our calluses are long since grown too thick for us to hear or feel such holy pain.  We are so desperately in need of love, of innocence, of healing.

How very sick indeed our world will be when we have finally slaughtered all the little ones.

Luke O’Hara

Kirishtan.com

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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