This story begins on Christmas Day in the Year of Our Lord 1560, when the town of Laino in Cosenza, Italy was graced with the birth of a boy of noble blood, Pietro Paolo Navarro. Eschewing the life of privilege that could have awaited him, Pietro chose instead to serve his God and save the souls of his fellow men in a foreign land.

Pietro Paolo Navarro entered the Society of Jesus at Nola (Kingdom of Naples) in 1579, the very year that Father Alessandro Valignano, the great Italian Jesuit, entered Japan at the port of Kuchinotsu to remake the face of her Church and spread its fame across the Catholic world. Father Navarro arrived in Japan in 1586, landing at the port of Hirado along with seven other priests aboard the trading-ship of Domingos Monteiro.  Saint Francis Xavier had visited Hirado in 1550, leaving a number of converted souls in his trail of miracles, along with great hopes for the future of the Japanese Church.

First, Father Navarro applied himself assiduously to the study of Japanese. He learned the language quickly and could soon preach powerfully to the Japanese in their own tongue, so he was sent to Iyo in Shikoku to found a new apostolate. Sadly, that was to be short-lived.

On July 25, 1587, the Feast of St. James, the dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi proclaimed a ban on the Catholic Faith and ordered the expulsion of all clergy. Fr. Navarro withdrew from Iyo but stayed on in Japan, moving secretly around the island of Kyushu to serve her orphaned Christians.

By 1596, Father Navarro was pastoring the church of Yamaguchi, famously founded by St. Francis Xavier with an astounding display of courage. In the face of constant threats to his life, the saint had preached the Gospel in the streets of that city, railing against the unspeakable abuses committed by the Buddhist clergy of his day, particularly the “abominable sin” of pederasty so rampant among them. He had preached the same lesson in an audience with the ruler of Yamaguchi, an addicted pederast, while Brother Juan Fernández, his companion and interpreter, trembled for their lives.  

 

On February 5, 1597, Hideyoshi crucified the 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki in a fit of megalomania. The following year he died in a frenzy, babbling incoherently about “a thousand things out of context” and talking about crowning his little son King of Japan.[1] This dream never saw fruition, nor did Hideyoshi’s command, in his last will and testament, that he be deified after death as Shin-Hachiman, i.e. the New God of War.

 

Father Navarro professed his fourth solemn Jesuit vow at Nagasaki in 1601. It seemed a time of great promise for the Japanese Church: Hideyoshi was dead, and his successor, the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, seemed anything but hostile to the Catholic mission. Dutch and English protestants, bitter enemies of everything Catholic, had arrived in Japan in 1600, however, and their calumnies were quick to find the Shogun’s ear. In 1612, things came to a head when the Catholic lord of Arima got duped into bribing a shogunal official for a phony promise to enlarge the Arima domain. Both schemer and victim were Catholic; this infuriated the Shogun, who banned the Faith in all shogunal territories. The ban would extend to all Japan in 1614.

1617 was a year replete with the shedding of Christian blood on Japanese soil. We find Father Navarro in the domain of Bungo, where, given the frantic hunt to round up and exterminate Catholic missionaries, he was forced to hide for some days on end in a hole he had dug. There, having no help from his fellow man, he turned to God, who not only sustained him, but gave him strength to ‘return to his work with ardor’ once the danger had passed. He went about disguised as a baggage-porter, wearing a straw hat under which he could presumably hide his face in shadow.[2]

In May of 1619, Fr. Navarro was given responsibility for all of the Shimabara Peninsula (Arima) and the far flung Amakusa Islands to the south, among the most fervently-Catholic regions of all Japan. He must have foreseen his end, for, come Advent of 1621, he made a general confession to the Jesuit Provincial at Kazusa in southern Arima. He sailed northward from there to the hot-springs town of Obama and, two days later, passed by night to the village of Hachirao, where he went on retreat to do the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. He had intended to then celebrate the Nativity at the old Catholic castle-town of Arima, but the locals wrote him urging him to stay away for fear of the daimyo’s spies. He thus celebrated Christmas at Hachirao and afterwards set out for Arima in the night, a risky journey, for he had to take the main road in bright moonlight. He was readily spotted by a servant of the daimyo’s, who grabbed him by the robe; the priest submitted without protest.

Matsukura Shigemasa, the daimyo of Arima, was as yet no enemy of the Christians. He had taken over the domain from Arima Naozumi, an apostate who had failed in his promise to the Shogun to purge his ancestral religion from the land. Matsukura put Fr. Navarro under house arrest but gave him the privilege of receiving visitors, saying Mass and hearing confessions. In the meantime, he strove to get shogunal permission to merely deport the well-beloved priest to Macao rather than burn him alive as the Shogun’s law demanded, often summoning him to his fortress, Shimabara Castle, to question him about the Catholic Faith.[3] Father Navarro’s answers clearly moved Matsukura profoundly, for at their final meeting, he, the lord of the castle, escorted the priest of that banned ‘foreign’ religion outside, fell to his knees, put his palms to the earth, and bowed his head to the ground—a gesture that could have cost him his life.

The Shogun’s answer—death by fire—arrived on the eve of the Feast of All Saints. On the morning of 1 November, 1622, Father Navarro said Mass “with an abundance of tears,” apparently informed by the Spirit that this was his last day in this Vale of Tears, for he had not yet been told of his death sentence. Matsukura gave him the word two hours before noon.

Father Navarro “put his chaplet around his neck to prepare himself for the final combat” and stepped outside into a windy autumn day.[4]  He would be burned along with three companions—Jesuit brothers Dennis Fujishima, 38, and Pedro Onizuka, 18; and layman Clemente Kyuemon— none of whom could keep up with 64-year-old Fr. Navarro in his zeal to reach the site of his holocaust. The condemned Christians were accompanied by fifty armed soldiers to the execution-ground outside the gate of the city, all of them presumably sprinting to keep up with that old Italian priest burning with an unquenchable love of the Lord he would soon meet face to face.

Reaching his appointed stake, he took off his hat and bowed to it before the guards tied him to the instrument of his death as they would the three others. When Matsukura arrived, the firewood was lit, and a gust of wind engulfed Fr. Navarro’s mantle in flame, yet he used all his strength to encourage his companions to hold on for the crown of glory. When his ropes had burnt away, he fell onto his side shouting, “Jesus! Mary!” These holy names he shouted to his last breath, with the hair-shirt he had worn for penance clinging to his skin, revealed under his burnt-away mantle. His three companions, too, held on to the end, all worthy sons of St. Francis Xavier.

 

In 1623 a new Shogun took over: Tokugawa Iemitsu—sadist, pederast, and such an enemy of Christ that it seemed he was possessed by a demon. Matsukura Shigemasa he soon won to his side, turning him into a persecutor who tortured his Catholic subjects by mutilation, branding, and boiling them in the hot sulfur springs atop Mount Unzen.  

Matsukura fell mortally ill in 1630 and summoned 200 apothecaries to bring their cures to Shimabara Castle. In a panic he took all their concoctions together, creating a brew that boiled noxious in his stomach and drove him to a frenzy in which he hallucinated demons from hell. Or were they hallucinations? For stones came flying from out of nowhere in the corridors of Shimabara Castle, and ‘long, supernatural howls’ resounded within its walls.[5]

On 19 December, Matsukura fled to the hot-springs town of Obama, where he slipped into a bath whose water his servants had tested and found merely tepid. Yet their raving master felt himself burning, and he thought that the fire inside him could devour his surroundings. This was his final frenzy.[6] The mountain atop which he had tortured and killed so many Christians in boiling sulfur-springs towered over his bath-house; perhaps as he died he was hearing the voices and seeing the faces of the martyrs he had murdered.  

I wonder if he saw the face of Father Pietro Paulo Navarro looking benignly down at him as he bowed his forehead to the earth to do the priest reverence on that bygone day at Shimabara Castle? Or did he see him wrapped in flames, cheering on his companions in martyrdom? Either memory, with a wriggle of repentance, might have saved poor Matsukura Shigemasa’s soul.

 

Copyright © 2021 by Luke O’Hara

 

 

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A Ladder to Heaven, Part I

It all started in 1620 with some Japanese Catholics, bereft of their pastor, pleading for his return to Nagasaki to console them in their sufferings and their needs.

After Tokugawa Ieyasu’s expulsion of all Catholic clergy from Japan in 1614, Augustinian Friar Pedro de Zúñiga had stayed on to minister to his flock in secret, his survival in that deadly task being due in large part to the connivance of Hasegawa Gonroku, the Shogunal Governor of Nagasaki. Gonroku had succeeded the former governor, his uncle Sahioye, in 1615 — but, unlike him, had no taste for overseeing gory scenes of torture and bloodshed in the name of the Shogun’s law.

By 1619, though, finding himself increasingly compelled to shed the blood of Christians, Gonroku urged Father Zúñiga, whom he knew and respected, to leave for the Philippines lest he be forced by the Shogun Hidetada to burn him alive. On conferring with the Augustinian Vice Provincial in Japan, the friar was ordered to do just that, for he was known to all and sundry in and about Nagasaki. With Gonroku’s guarantee of safe passage out of Nagasaki, Father Zúñiga sailed for Manila via Macao.

The following year, two letters arrived in Manila from Father Zúñiga’s former flock — one for the friar himself and another for the Definitor of the Augustinians in the Philippines — requesting that he return to them. In exchange for that favor, they offered to send the remains of the Augustinian martyr Friar Hernando de San José, which they had managed to fish out of the depths of Omura Bay, where the bodies of five martyrs had been sunk together on 1 June 1617.    

The letters arrived just as the fathers of the Augustinian Province of the Philippines were holding their provincial meeting of 1620.

Léon Pagès writes,

After having consulted one another on the fruits that might be expected if Fr. Zúñiga were sent [back to Nagasaki], they proposed to him the apparent advantages of this new voyage.

Fr. Zúñiga, with a wealth of onsite experience under his belt, pointed out that, being so well known in Nagasaki, he would be seized immediately upon arrival, and although his inevitable suffering and martyrdom might redound to the greater glory of God, his former parishioners’ desire of his pastorship would remain unfulfilled; nevertheless, he added, he would render obedience to his superiors, whatever they decided.  

Fr. Zúñiga’s orphaned flock had promised in the letter to rendezvous with his ship and bring it to safe haven. Given that assurance, the Augustinian fathers felt compelled to grant those persecuted Christians that gift they so desired, and Fr. Zúñiga surrendered himself to the will of God.

Among the local Dominicans, meanwhile, Fr. Luís Flores, aged and infirm, had retired from active mission work in Nueva Segovia, Philippines, and settled into a life of prayer and contemplation. News of the Japanese persecution fired his spirit, though, with a desire to join the Japan mission, which could bring him suffering, Pagès explains, and, perhaps, martyrdom. In early June of 1620, Fr. Flores found himself in Fr. Zúñiga’s company, along with two other Spaniards, headed for Japan aboard a junk captained by Joachim Hirayama, a staunch Japanese Catholic. They soon hit heavy seas and were forced to dump part of their cargo and put in at Macao. The suffering had already begun.

On 2 July they set out again and, 20 days later, were within sight of Formosa when English pirates on the bark Elizabeth attacked, took them captive, and commandeered their ship. The Elizabeth, captained by Edmund Lenmyes, had sailed out of Batavia (now Jakarta) in a merchant-pirate fleet of five sail, three English ships and two Dutch, to prey upon Portuguese and Spanish shipping and sell their booty (as well as some trade goods) to the Japanese at Hirado.  

Captain Lenmyes soon sussed out the fact that two of his prisoners were “Papist” priests, a fact discernible in their deportment. He locked them below in the hold without food or drink, jammed in among a heap of deerskins whose stench was insufferable, afraid, apparently, of losing such valuable cargo as those two friars. If their priestly identities were proven, the captured junk would, by the Shogun’s law, become the pirates’ prize, with her captain and crew condemned to death for transporting Catholic priests to Japan.

As the Dutch and English were cooperating in brigandage in the Eastern seas, the captured junk and its cargo became their common property. They sailed their prize to the Dutch trading-post at Hirado with her passengers and crew imprisoned below, all chained together so closely that none could move without jostling the others. At Hirado, the Dutch found three letters in their captives’ luggage, one conferring the title of Augustinian Provincial Vicar on Fr. Zúñiga and two confirming Fr. Flores’ authority among Dominicans in Japan, yet neither priest would acknowledge his identity for fear of thereby condemning Captain Hirayama and his Japanese crew to death. Now the real suffering would begin.

The priests were lowered into a dark pit, where they languished in filth and near-starvation for thirteen days, squatting on the naked earth as vermin fed on them. This was but a prelude to their torture. The Dutchmen pulled them, crawling with vermin, out of the pit to strip them to the waist, tie their hands behind their backs, and hoist them up to hang them by their wrists with boxes full of gunpowder attached to their feet. They threatened to light the powder if the fathers didn’t confess their identities, to no avail; they would move on to more exquisite tortures in due time.

Eventually, thanks to the concerted pleading of the Spaniard Alvaro Muñoz — a friend of the English trading-chief in Hirado — the fathers were moved into a small cell with a narrow window, a distinct improvement over the torture-chambers they had grown used to.

On 16 February 1621, Gonroku left Nagasaki to head up to the Shogun’s court in Edo (Tokyo) and pay his New Year’s respects. On the way he stopped at Hirado, where he summoned the Dutch merchant-pirates to appear before him in audience and bring along the two prisoners in whom they placed such high hopes of lucre. Although the Dutchmen produced the aforesaid letters as proof that their prisoners were priests, the two friars denied the charge, and Gonroku rejected the proffered evidence as counterfeit, upbraiding the brigands for scheming to appropriate a Japanese merchant’s ship and holding its passengers hostage without substantiating their charges. He even warned them that he might cut off trade with Holland entirely if they couldn’t produce real proof. He sent the Dutchmen packing with a warning to look after their prisoners carefully until his return, assigning two of his own men to see that they did just that.

Incidentally, as Gonroku knew Fr. Zúñiga quite well, he must have strained his acting skills to the limit — and his performance would have unexpected and unforgettable consequences: consequences that will play out in Part 2 of this story.

A Ladder to Heaven, Part II

          On 22 July 1620, English corsairs on the barque Elizabeth seized a Japanese junk headed for Japan carrying two friars disguised as Spanish merchants: Augustinian Fr. Pedro de Zúñiga and Dominican Fr. Luís de Flores. Soon, the two were imprisoned in the Dutch trading-post at Hirado, north of Nagasaki, while the Dutchmen and their English cohorts strove to prove to the authorities that their prisoners were Catholic priests. If successful, they would see the two burned alive and keep the ship as their prize to boot.

The Dutchmen decided to wrench the truth out of their prisoners with torture: they bound Fray Pedro to an X-shaped “Saint Andrew’s cross” and poured a flood of water onto his face and down his throat so that he could hardly catch his breath; during this torture, blood vessels in the victim’s neck would often burst in his struggle to breathe. Once Fr. Zúñiga’s belly was swollen with water, his torturers beat on it to force it back out; as he vomited the mess out, bloody water seeped out through his pores. Jacques Specx, the Dutchmen’s boss, then demanded that the friar confess his true identity, and this failing, ordered more water poured. They repeated this procedure again and again, emptying a full hogshead of water onto Fr. Zúñiga’s face and down his throat before resignedly sending the tortured priest back to his cell in defeat.

Fr. Flores was next. Elderly and frail, he looked like a corpse by the time his torture was over. Nevertheless, neither man had given in, for the lives of Captain Joachim Hirayama and his crew hung on the fiction that their former passengers were merchants, not Catholic priests come to save endangered human souls.

In November, Hasegawa Gonroku, Governor of Nagasaki, visited Hirado to clear up the problem of the imprisoned friars and the sequestered ship. Along with Matsuura Takanobu, the local daimyo, he held four hearings wherein the Dutch merchant-pirates laid on the charge that their prisoners were the vanguard of Spanish conquest, agents sent by the very king who had subdued the Philippines and many other lands. Will Adams, the famous Englishman-turned-samurai, and Richard Cocks, his compatriot in Hirado, had kept that same bug of suspicion buzzing in Tokugawa Ieyasu’s ear as long as he lived, a bug now grown into rage in the mind of the Shogun Hidetada, Ieyasu’s son.   

Gonroku therefore had to tread as if on eggs as he pretended to disbelieve the ever-more-convincing proof that the prisoners were indeed priests. Witnesses from Nagasaki who knew Fr. Zúñiga were brought in, one of them a blind man who swore he recognized the friar’s voice. Richard Cocks, head of the English trading-post in Hirado, had earlier said he wanted his own head cut off if the man before him was not in fact Fr. Zúñiga. Ignoring the mounting evidence could wind up being Gonroku’s self-inflicted death-sentence.

He had priests brought in from the prison in Omura: Jesuit Fr. Carlo Spinola, Dominican Fr. Francisco de Morales, and Fr. Pedro de Avila, Franciscan — pallid men (and future martyrs) who looked like walking corpses with hair and beards grown wild and fingernails curling beyond their fingertips. They barely had the strength to stand when called upon, yet all answered with discretion, neither lying nor admitting that they knew Fr. Pedro to be a priest as they tried to preserve the lives of Joachim Hirayama and his crew — and perhaps Gonroku’s life as well.

But things had gone too far: to go on denying the obvious could only lead to scandal, the priests concurred together, and thus, on 7 December, the feast of St. Ambrose, Fr. Zúñiga donned his Augustinian habit, shaved his tonsure, and declared himself a priest, insisting that the mariners he had sailed with hadn’t known.

Gonroku duly proceeded up to Edo to report this news to the Shogun. Infuriated, Hidetada ordered the priests and Captain Hirayama roasted by “slow fire” and all the ship’s crew beheaded. James Murdoch writes that all religious held in prison, along with their hosts, were also to be burnt alive, and the wives and children of the latter beheaded, “as well as the wives and children of the martyrs immolated three years before.” All the latter would be accomplished in the Great Martyrdom of 1622.

Just outside of Nagasaki lay a plain between two mountains stretching from the town to the sea. Nishi-zaka, also known as Martyrs’ Hill, overlooked the scene. Léon Pagès writes:

A stockade enclosed the place of execution. Three large stakes of two palms’ diameter were destined for the confessors who were to be burnt alive; the wood and the fascines lay twenty-five palms, or twelve feet, distant. … Opposite the stakes, a long table, arrayed with pegs, would receive the heads of the twelve condemned to decapitation.

         The firewood was set at a distance to prolong the martyrs’ agonies. The condemned arrived to find a sea of Christians spread across the plain: Nagasaki’s faithful, numbering thirty or sixty or even one-hundred-thirty thousand — various sources differ — raising their voices to Heaven in prayer and song. Children’s choirs were intoning Magnificat; Laudate, Pueri; Laudate Dominum, Omnes Gentes; songs that would not cease until all was accomplished. The martyrs knelt to pray once inside the execution-ground, and the twelve sailors were quickly beheaded. Seeing their heads lined up on the table, Fr. Zúñiga called them flowers of Paradise.

The three knelt and recited the Creed. Then, before being tied to their stakes, the two priests blessed the crowd. Captain Hirayama, finding his stake unsteady, stamped the dirt around it, firming up the vessel he would ride to Heaven. He then preached to the crowd, telling them that the Son of Man came to heal mankind of the infirmities they suffered because of sin. He went on:

The fathers you see, O Japanese people, are come from the ends of the earth, sent by the Lord Jesus to work your salvation, to reap the divine fruits of Redemption, and to make you worship the true God instead of idols of stone and wood.

Meanwhile, the executioners were beating him to shut him up, to no avail: what terror could they inflict, he asked them, when they were about to burn him alive? Captain Hirayama proclaimed to all Nagasaki that the bloody scene before their eyes was in fact a ladder to Heaven.

The fire was lit; to keep the flames from blazing too freely, the wood was doused with water, for “slow fire” was the torture the Shogun prescribed. It took forty-five minutes of roasting to wrench the souls out of those three images of God standing firm against the ruler’s odium fidei: first Fr. Luís de Flores, the eldest, bowed his head in death, and then Joachim Hirayama — the ship’s captain who had dared to bring Christ to his beloved land — followed him up that ladder to eternal life. Fr. Pedro de Zúñiga held on the longest, enduring hellish agonies for the sake of his former flock, whose dream of his return to them was being immolated before their eyes.

Yet they knew that in that fiery hell their precious pastor’s soul was climbing straight to Heaven.

Hallelujah.

A version of this story (not edited by me) first appeared on ChurchMilitant.com

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.

 

*******

      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

 

 

Thus began the reign of Christ in Japan, carried on the wings of his own almighty wind. 

Luke O’Hara Blogs August 17, 2022

“There is only one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and His Son Jesus Christ. He is not a foreign God. No, He is the God of all the world.” — Robert M. Flynn, S.J., The Martyrs of Tsuwano

Japan is a land of mystery and paradox — a bright, shining promise at first sight, but a puzzling perplexity on deeper study. St. Francis Xavier would find that out as he labored to plant Christ in the hearts of the Japanese. 

On the feast of the Assumption of 1549, his pioneering mission to Japan landed at Kagoshima. Clearly the saint was moved by his early encounters there, for in his first report from Japan, he states:

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. … They are a people of very good will, very sociable and very desirous of knowledge; they are very fond of hearing about things of God, chiefly when they understand them.

“When they understand them” would prove to be a huge challenge at first, for Padre Francisco tells us, in his first weeks in Kagoshima:

Now we are like so many statues among them, for they speak and talk to us about many things, while we, not understanding the language, hold our peace. And now we have to be as little children learning the language.

And yet, his mission was clearly ordained of God, for although all hell’s furies seem to have conspired to stop his getting there, all things worked together for good in the end. The saint writes that he and his men had “set out from Malacca on the feast of St. John Baptist” and continues thus:

We sailed on board the ship of a heathen merchant … who promised the [Portuguese] Commandant at Malacca that he would carry us to Japan. By the goodness of God we had very favorable winds. However, as perfidy so often rules barbarians like him, our captain at one time changed his intention, and began to give up keeping to his course toward Japan, and loiter about the islands that came in the way, for the sake of wasting time. 

Wasting time, that is, until the monsoon wind for Japan had quit its seasonal blow. To St. Francis Xavier’s horror and disgust, the captain and his crew depended utterly on the auguries of an idol graven on the prow of their ship, where they sacrificed birds to the thing to glean their sailing orders. This captain was in fact a Chinese pirate, his ship having been the only one in Malacca ready to sail for Japan on short notice — and St. Francis Xavier was determined to carry the Gospel there without delay. The Commandant of Malacca had secured the Jesuit mission’s safety by holding the captain’s wife hostage until his return, and off they went. 

Enroute the balmy weather turned foul, and the captain saw one of his daughters fall overboard into a raging sea that swallowed her up; the idol later “told” him that she wouldn’t have died if one of the Catholic mission’s men had been killed instead. Tensions, thus, were high between the captain and his missionary passengers when he “learned” from the entrails of a bird that he would have no safe return to Malacca should he sail onward to Japan that year. He changed course for the Chinese port of Quanzhou.

But God Almighty overruled the idol. As the saint relates it, they were nearing that port …

… when on a sudden a boat puts out to us in a great hurry, telling us that the harbor is invested by pirates, and that it will be all over with us if we come any nearer. This bit of news frightened the captain, who moreover saw that the brigantines of the pirates were not more than four miles distant from us; and so, to avoid that immediate danger, he determined to shun that port. 

Reluctantly the captain turned toward Japan, whereupon Providence took over in the form of a marvelous wind.

The word kamikaze, often translated ‘divine wind,’ is a landmark in Japan’s history, but it connotes diametrical opposites in the minds of Westerners and Japanese. At the mention of kamikaze, any Western student of history worth his salt will picture those suicide planes that came screaming down on Allied ships in the Pacific. To the ordinary Japanese, though, kamikaze conjures up chest-swelling visions of the seemingly heaven-sent typhoons that sank two Mongol invasion fleets attacking Japan in the 13th century — and thus the name, derived from kami (god, as in “the gods”) and kaze (wind).

But let me show you a truly Divine wind. Padre Francisco writes:

But now the wind was adverse to a return to Canton and favorable to sailing to Japan, and so we held our course thither against the will of the captain, the sailors and the devil himself. So by the guidance of God we came at last to this country, which we had so much longed for, on the very day of the feast of our Blessed Lady’s Assumption 1549. We could not make another port, and so we put into Kagoshima, which is the native place of Paul of the holy Faith. We were most kindly received there both by Paul’s relations and connections and also by the rest of the people of the place. 

Thus, that wind blew the reluctant pirate’s ship, along with him, his crew and his passengers, straight to Kagoshima — the home town of the mission’s main guide and interpreter, disallowing any turning back toward China or even heading for another port of Japan. The pirate captain later died in Kagoshima — unconverted, to Padre Francisco’s regret — having done one great service to God, if against his own will.

“Paul of the holy Faith” was none other than Anjiro, a Japanese refugee from justice who had sailed to Malacca in 1547 after learning from a Portuguese ship’s captain of this priest, Padre Francisco, who could heal wounded souls. St. Francis Xavier sent Anjiro to Goa in Portuguese India to study the Faith and the Portuguese language, which he learned quickly. Arriving in Goa himself, the saint baptized Anjiro, christening him Paulo de Santa Fe. This man would do yeoman’s work for the mission through the countless perplexities facing them at every turn once they reached Japan. 

The mission comprised three Spanish Jesuits: Padre Francisco himself, a Basque; Father Cosme de Torres, born in Valencia; and Brother Juan Fernández, from Córdoba. Their helpers were Paulo de Santa Fe (or Anjiro), from Kagoshima; João and Antonio, two other Japanese converts; Amador, from India; and a Chinese christened Manuel. Having made it to Japan in spite of all that man, nature and the Enemy could throw at them, they made dry land just in time to celebrate the glorious feast of the Assumption. Forty-five days later, Shimazu Takahisa, the Daimyo (or Duke) of Satsuma, gave them a warm reception at his palace on Sept. 29, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, and granted them permission to spread the Faith in his domain. 

Shimazu would soon scotch his seeming kindness and withdraw that permission when he saw that Portuguese trading ships were bypassing Kagoshima to trade at other ports and enrich other daimyos: he had expected St. Francis Xavier to command them to give him precedence. The mission thus moved on to greener pastures, notably Hirado, Ikitsuki and Yamaguchi, and conversions — which had been lagging — took off. 

And in Yamaguchi, the Jesuits added one to their number, a remarkable blessing in strange disguise. While boldly preaching the Gospel in the streets of that metropolis, the capital of the sprawling Ōuchi domains, St. Francis Xavier found himself standing face to face with a most curious image and likeness of God. Blind in one eye and almost sightless in the other, a bald-headed man with a misshapen face and a biwa lute slung over his shoulder heard the Word of God from the mouth of this strange foreigner and kept coming back time and again, asking ever more questions until there was no doubt in his mind. 

St. Francis Xavier baptized him as Lorenzo, the first Japanese Jesuit. Abandoning his old life as a wandering minstrel, Lorenzo would live out his days preaching brilliantly and fearlessly, daring any and every sort of affliction or danger to impede his spreading Christ’s love throughout his beloved land, and he is credited with bringing countless thousands of souls into the Kingdom of God, where the weak confound the strong.

And thus began the reign of Christ in Japan, carried thither on the wings of his own almighty wind. 

THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER.

          Seventy-seven years ago, on August 6, 1945, B-29 Superfortress number 82 dropped an enriched-uranium bomb called Little Boy over its designated bull’s eye, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in downtown Hiroshima. The pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, plunged her into a dive to pick up speed and turned to get as far as possible from the bomb before it exploded. Forty-three seconds after the weapon’s release, its shock wave hit the Superfortress, which “cracked and crinkled from the blast,” although it had sped eleven and a half miles distant by then. That blast smashed the city below like a titanic anvil dropped from the heavens while the bomb’s flash incinerated man and beast indiscriminately. Richard Rhodes writes:

People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball … were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. … The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands.

Three hundred thirty-three years before that bombing of August 6, 1945, Tokugawa Ieyasu set in motion the genocide of Japan’s Catholics by the smash of his seal on a ban on the Catholic Faith in all shogunal domains. Mark this: the ban, that death-warrant for the faithful, was sealed on the 6th day of the 8th month of the old Japanese lunar calendar in the year 1612. The late Yakichi Kataoka, eminent historian and martyrologist, regarded that day in A.D. 1612 as the true start of the Tokugawa persecution rather than the more commonly accepted Christian Expulsion Edict of 1614 as its beginning. Given the horrors inflicted on the Catholics of Arima in conjunction with the edict of 8/6/1612 (by Japanese reckoning), this author must agree with Dr. Kataoka.

The legacy of the Hiroshima bombing is eerily reminiscent of the legacy of the Tokugawa shogunate’s protracted war on Catholicism, waged with countless  martyrdoms spread across two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. At the mention of those “internal organs boiled away,” the martyrdom of Fr. Peter Kasui Kibe springs to mind, while the “bundles of smoking black char” could describe the remains of countless priests and other faithful burnt to cinders by the Tokugawa terror, often by the slowest means possible. Additionally, the bombardment, starving-out and final extermination of Hara Castle’s 37,000 Christians by fire and sword offers a panoramic snapshot in miniature of the Empire-wide persecution of the Body of Christ under the Tokugawas.

Arai Hakuseki, whom Britannica lauds as “one of the greatest historians of Japan,” calculated in 1705 that two to three hundred thousand Kirishitan had been martyred by that writing. Most European chroniclers of the persecution give much lower numbers, but they had little (if any) access to accurate information from within much of the Empire after 1620 or earlier. Indeed, the frenzy of the persecution in the little domain of Arima alone suggests large numbers of anonymous martyrs, especially if one considers those starved by ruthless taxation or hounded out of their homes to scrape out a living in the wild.

That persecution went on into the Meiji Period, after the so-called opening of Japan—her door actually only slightly ajar with a security chain stopping anything wider than the tip of a nose from getting in. Thus, modern weapons, modern manufacturing, even foreign languages poured in, but not that dreaded religion that made clear nonsense of the “gods” created out of rocks, trees, monkeys and the like until Western diplomatic pressure forced the door open wider.

Meanwhile, with those modern weapons, Japan sank a Russian fleet, annexed Korea (where they forbade the speaking of Korean), rampaged into China (300,000 unarmed Chinese murdered in Nanking alone, not to mention the gang-rapes and the discarded, bayonetted victims), bombed Pearl Harbor, enslaved the Philippines, drove the Bataan Death March, invaded Singapore and cut off the city’s water supply to parch its populace into submission; starved, tortured and executed prisoners of war against all international law; and on and on and on.

And to top it all off, the Japanese army was training women and girls to thwart any invasions of foreign troops by mass suicide-charges with sharpened-bamboo spears. And the smaller schoolboys were being trained to blow up foreign tanks by rolling under the oncoming armor and pulling the detonator on suicide bombs strapped to their chests.

So the Atom Bomb, once proven at Trinity in July of 1945, was the obvious choice to stop the madness. But then, mysteriously, came Nagasaki.

The target designated for Fat Man — a plutonium bomb, unlike Little Boy with its charge of U-235 — was the Kokura Arsenal, at least by Man’s planning. Superfortress number 77, nicknamed Bockscar, was to drop its weapon over that “massive collection of war industries” on the northeast corner of Kyushu on the morning of 9 August, but before reaching Kokura, Bockscar wasted fuel circling over Yakushima Island for almost an hour awaiting a rendezvous plane that never showed up. On top of that, the reserve fuel tank was inaccessible because of a stuck valve.

Once over Kokura, the pilot, Major Charles Sweeney, and his bombardier found the city blanketed in smoke and cloud too thick to spot any hint of their aiming-point. They made three passes over Kokura to no avail, and with fuel dwindling, Major Sweeney turned southwest towards Nagasaki, the secondary target, whence he could reach Okinawa for an emergency landing.    

About twenty minutes later, Bockscar reached the west coast of Kyushu to find Nagasaki also blanketed in cloud; but a hole opened in that blanket just long enough to give the bombardier a glimpse of Nagasaki’s stadium, and he let Fat Man drop. Forty-three seconds passed before the Apocalypse flashed in the face of Urakami Cathedral, incinerating all at the eleven o’clock Mass.

Priceless Nagasaki, with her Catholic roots dug centuries deep, exploded into pulverized ash and white-hot flame as students and teachers at her university saw the ceilings collapsing onto their heads and windows exploding into glass shrapnel, while factories became smoking heaps of twisted steel. Only the mountains surrounding Urakami stopped the blast and fireball from reducing the whole city to cinders, just as Mount Hijiyama in Hiroshima had shielded a stretch of the city behind its shadow.

Hiroshima had housed the military headquarters of western Japan, set to direct war within that sphere to the last drop of blood in case of invasion and national fracture. In Nagasaki were the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Torpedo Works in addition to a shipyard and a major port, among whose laborers were Korean slaves and Western prisoners of war.  

 

Some hours before the Apocalypse, as Major Sweeney was aiming for Japan, plowing his bomber through stormy skies at 17,000 feet above the Pacific, St. Elmo’s fire had shrouded his ship in unearthly light. William Laurence, watching from an escort plane, wrote,

           The whirling giant propellers had somehow become great luminous discs of blue flame. The same luminous blue flame appeared on the plexiglass windows in the nose of the ship, and on the tips of the giant wings it looked as though we were riding the whirlwind through space on a chariot of blue fire.

That same blue fire had appeared atop the masts of the Mexico-bound galleon San Felipe in 1596 as a typhoon drove her relentlessly toward Japan, where the ruler’s greed for the rich cargo in her wrecked hull would drive him to crucify the 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki. Their crosses stood atop a slope called Nishi-zaka, from which Urakami would have been in plain view. A great red brick cathedral would stand on a hilltop at Urakami three and a half centuries later, overlooking Nagasaki’s stadium.

That cathedral, Urakami Cathedral, was dedicated to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. Her feast day is December 8th.

Japanese naval aircraft bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hawaii time, plunging America into war with Japan. In Japan, though, it was December 8th when those bombs came whistling down on America.

The Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ first reached Japan in the hands of St. Francis Xavier with his landing at Kagoshima on August 15, 1549, the Feast of the Assumption. Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender to the Allied powers in a radio broadcast to his broken nation on August 15, 1945, another Feast of the Assumption.

Somewhere in the great vault of Heaven, countless thousands of martyrs from both sides of that abysmal horror must be singing God’s praises as their hearts weep along with Heaven’s Queen.

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

AN EDITED VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER.

He who receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true.                  John 3:33 (Ignatius Bible)

     Enduring hell to gain Heaven: what better declaration of freedom could mortal man make than testifying to the truth of Christ in one’s own death? This is the essence of martyrdom, and thus does ‘martyr’ derive from Greek μαρτύριον (martyrion), i.e., testimony, proof.

     Meet the scion of a Catholic family, a samurai youth who saw the dayspring from on high on the remotest shore the Church had ever reached and pledged to Him his life and breath and blood. He traversed half the world to become a priest and risked countless mortal dangers to get back home, knowing he would face a gruesome death there, for he had vowed to bring light to his benighted land if only for a day, a week, or, God willing, a few restless years. His name is Peter Kibe.

     Peter Kasui Kibe was born in Urabe, a seaside hamlet in northeast Kyushu perched beside the Bungo Strait. His parents were both samurai and Catholic, kin of the castellan of Kibe Castle. The word ‘samurai’ derives from the verb ‘saburau,’ ‘to serve,’ but Peter Kibe had a higher calling than serving a merely-mortal lord. Peter’s birth in 1587, the very year of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s ban on the Faith, looks like the hand of Providence taking up a fiery sword. He was baptized in the church at Nakatsu, a coastal town north of Urabe, where Miguel Kuroda, samurai and future lord of Akizuki, was baptized on Easter Sunday of that very year.   

     At age 13, Peter entered the Jesuit Seminario at Nagasaki, but the school was moved to Arima, the staunchest redoubt of Catholic Japan, after a fire in November 1601. While studying in Arima, young Peter must have imbibed the spirit of that land so Catholic that the Faith would flourish there even when driven underground, its flame burning bright until all its adherents were slaughtered by the Shogun Iemitsu’s horde in April of 1638.

      On his graduation in 1606, Peter requested admission to the Society of Jesus, but first he would have to labor as a humble dojuku—a lay helper, preacher, translator and catechist. He chose the name ‘Kasui’ as his dojuku surname; some presume it was written “living water” in kanji ideographs, though no record of its kanji spelling survives. Notably, Peter labored in Miguel Kuroda’s Catholic haven of Akizuki, where a miraculous apparition, a burning cross, would appear on a mountaintop on the Easter Vigil of 1616, in the early years of the Tokugawa persecution.

The elder shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu set loose that persecution in 1612, a juggernaut that bared its fangs with a demonic venom specially destined for Arima, where hundreds of Catholics signed their names to registers of those willing to suffer for the Faith rather than apostatize. The tortures inflicted on them by Ieyasu’s governor in Nagasaki, Hasegawa Sahioye, are too repulsive to recount here: suffice it to say that he left behind virtual mountains of human flesh when he withdrew from Arima with his 10,000 shogunal troops.

This was the prelude to Ieyasu’s exile of all Catholic missionaries to Macao and Manila in November 1614. Undaunted, Peter continued his studies in Macao, dreaming of a future as an underground Jesuit priest serving his countrymen under the heel of the Tokugawa tyranny.        

But the Jesuits in Macao, finding their resources strained by the huge influx of Japanese exiles, discontinued their Latin lessons in 1618 and later closed their Seminario entirely. Clearly, the top brass were reluctant to see these young Japanese ordained and sent back into the inferno of Tokugawa Japan. Many dojuku left Macao for Manila, while three sailed for India, seeking ordination in Rome: Miguel Minoes (from Mino), Mancio Konishi (grandson of the famous Catholic general Augustine Konishi, beheaded by the Shogun Ieyasu), and Peter Kibe. From India, Miguel and Mancio would sail for Rome via Portugal, but the intrepid Peter Kibe would set off on foot, aiming first for the Holy Land, trekking through 3,000-odd miles of mountains, deserts, and countries hostile to Christians to reach Jerusalem (the first Japanese to do so), and thence on to Rome.

Where, having appeared out of the blue with no proof on paper of his studies in Japan and Macao, he nevertheless conquered the churchmen’s doubts, and on Sunday, November 15, 1620, he became Father Peter Kibe by the laying-on of the Bishop’s hands in a chapel at the Lateran. He was 33 years old. When he showed up in his cassock at the Jesuits’ door in Rome five days later, they didn’t turn him away, despite the Jesuit Visitor’s exhortations, written from Macao, to distrust wandering Japanese exiles like him: he won them over too, and he entered the Jesuit novitiate — normally lasting two years.  

     But two years was too long to wait for a samurai-priest determined to save his countrymen’s souls. Father Peter asked the General of the Society for permission to complete his novitiate enroute to Japan, and his fervor won the day. A fervor stoked, no doubt, by the Canonization Mass of St. Francis Xavier, which Peter Kibe attended, possibly shaken to his knees. More fuel was added to that fire in his soul, no doubt, by his studying in Rome with St. John Berchmans and his acquaintance with St. Robert Bellarmine. On 6 June 1622, he left Rome for Portugal, and while in Madrid read the Jesuits’ 1621 report from Japan: the persecution was worsening, with house-to-house searches for underground priests and once-friendly daimyos turning up the heat on Catholics in their domains—not only priests and dojuku, but even laity were now in their sights.

Finishing his novitiate on 21 November 1622, Peter Kibe made his public Jesuit vow in Lisbon and then entered the Colegio there to await passage to India. A fleet of six sail — three huge, lumbering carracks and three galleons to protect them — embarked on the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March 1623, carrying an archbishop, two auxiliary bishops and seventeen missionaries, and ran into a fierce gale that very afternoon. They returned to port to wait out the storm and get repairs: one carrack had a broken mast and a galleon had smashed into rocks.  

A few days later they set sail again into the crucible of nature’s dangers and Dutch and English pirates’ predations, aiming for the Cape of Good Hope. In the tropics their food and water would putrefy; cholera, typhus, dysentery and the like would flourish; and many of the passengers and crew would spend weeks flat on their backs, mortally ill, as their vessels crawled interminably on under the merciless sun. The archbishop himself was bled nine times during two months’ prostration. Rounding the Cape, they met a gale that destroyed the mainsail of the archbishop’s carrack, then doldrums, and finally a contrary wind that blocked their way to India; they wintered in Mozambique.

On 28 May 1624, the fleet would reach India, only a rest-stop for Fr. Peter Kibe. He was off to Macao, whence he had begun his pioneering journey.

Macao: an outpost of Catholic Portugal at the very gate of Ming China. Portugal’s commitment to the Faith ordained her as Christ-bearer to the Orient in an era when the Portuguese were “the finest [ship’s] pilots and seamen in the world.” Thus, St. Francis Xavier, the Basque Jesuit titan from Navarre who seeded a swath of Christendom from India to Japan, could always depend on Portuguese captains’ support for his mission in times of need.

     And yet, when Fr. Peter Kibe arrived in Macao after traversing the globe just to become a priest and a Jesuit, he hit a dead end. No ship’s captain would dare carry a priest to Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate’s ban on Christ, for Macao’s economy depended on her merchants trading precious Chinese silks in Nagasaki. This surrender to Mammon would have invited fire and brimstone from St. Francis Xavier were he still in the flesh.

     But down in Siam was a flourishing royal capital, Ayutthaya, replete with Japanese ronin swordsmen hired to protect the king, and the place was frequented by traders carrying spices to Japan. In February 1627, Fr. Kibe embarked in a lumbering Portuguese carrack for Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, intending to go northward to Ayutthaya from there and eventually catch a ride to Japan on a trading ship.

And the devil did his damnedest to stop him. As the Portuguese behemoth was nearing Malacca, four nimble Dutch pirate ships appeared and attacked her. Many aboard the carrack abandoned ship and swam for shore, including Fr. Kibe carrying his breviary and other necessities on his shoulders. All made shore, but they had to survive without food for three days, walking in pouring rain through territory rife with bandits, until they reached Malacca and safety. Fr. Kibe was just regaining his strength when a fever laid him low.  

Once recovered, he boarded a ship for Siam. Now the weather turned so foul that the normally-short sail turned into a three-month slog, another ordeal, before he could disembark and hunker down among his countrymen in the guise of a sailor while looking for passage to Japan.

However, every Japan-bound ship’s captain demanded denials of Christian faith from all boarding passengers, given the horrors awaiting Catholics (and their accomplices) in Nagasaki. Such treachery was out of the question for Fr. Kibe, a samurai with the power to confect the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ out of simple bread and wine. After two years’ fruitless wait, he boarded a Manila-bound Spanish ship, sailing on the Feast of the Visitation of 1629.

To find Manila as inhospitable to Japan-bound priests as Macao had been. But there in Manila, Fr. Peter found a brother in intrepidity: Fr. Miguel Matsuda, a former schoolmate from Shiki in Amakusa. They bought a beat-up boat, limped it to an island in Manila Bay, and in great secrecy set to work patching it up with some Catholic sailors’ help. Then, as they awaited fair winds, termites feasted on their hidden prize, a fact discovered just days before they were set to sail. Undaunted, they patched her up with planking and put her out to sea. It was June of 1630, sixteen years since their exile from home.  

      They had fair sailing almost all the way to Kyushu — until a typhoon hit and smashed them onto an islet’s rocky shore, their ramshackle vessel destroyed but their lives preserved. The friendly islanders sheltered them and, when the typhoon had passed, sailed them to Bōnotsu, near Kagoshima. Perhaps it was Providence that landed them so close to the spot where St. Francis Xavier had landed 81 years before, carrying the Dayspring to Japan.

Both priests slipped into Nagasaki to serve the underground Christians, but Fr. Kibe soon headed for northeast Japan (Tōhoku), home to some 26,000 persecuted Catholics dispersed far and wide. There he found shelter at Mizusawa in the home of a Catholic samurai, Miyake Tōemon. It must have been good to finally have a place to lay his head.

     Until, on 13 February 1639, a certain Chōzaburo reported him and his hosts to the shogun’s spies. Behold the Shogun Iemitsu: pederast, sadist, rumored leper. Iemitsu derived special pleasure from observing the torture of Catholic priests.    

     Along with four other priests captured in Tōhoku, Fr. Peter was taken to Edo, the shogunal capital. Two were burnt alive at Fuda-no-Tsuji, a crossroads (I know not their names), while Fr. Kibe and two other Jesuits — Frs. Giovanni Battista Porro and Martinho Shikimi — were imprisoned to await the former-Jesuit apostate Christovão Ferreira, now called Sawano Chuan, who was charged with persuading captured priests to follow his wide and easy path to destruction. Instead, Ferreira found his own eyes opened to Christ Crucified preached by a Jesuit willing to traverse the world braving mortal dangers to become a priest and come back just to die for Him.

     After ten days’ fruitless browbeating, they subjected the three priests to the ‘wooden horse torture’ — with weights on their feet, they had to straddle, in great agony, a triangular wooden saddle like a sharp-peaked roof. When this failed to force their apostasies, they were subjected to “the pit.”

     The victim, hands tied behind his back, would be tightly coiled in rope from the feet up to the chest, hung upside-down from a gallows, and lowered head-first into a hole six feet deep containing human waste or other filth and covered with a lid to trap the stench. The lid comprised two boards closed together; crescent cutouts in the center crimped the victim’s body, pinching his waist and cutting off his circulation. It felt like his head was going to explode; his mouth, nose and ears would soon start oozing blood into the filth below his head.  

     François Caron, a Dutch eyewitness, wrote, “Some of them who had hung two or three days assured me that the pains they endured were wholly unsufferable, no fire nor no torture equalling their languor and violence.”

     While the victim hung clamped in the dank, stinking hell of the pit, the torturers would twist his body back and forth to elicit maximum torment, urging him to chant to Buddha — a sign of apostasy — and thus gain his life and “freedom.”

     In the throes of their torment, perhaps in delirium, Frs. Porro and Shikimi each emitted mumbled groans. The torturers pulled out the half-conscious priests, marking them as apostates, and sent them away for medical care. Both later denied having renounced Christ, but their protests were ignored.

     Fr. Kibe, though, not only held firm, but kept blasting volleys of encouragement to two dojuku hanging in the pits beside him — preaching Christ, urging perseverance to the end.

     This the shogun’s torturers could not abide. They pulled Fr. Peter out for special treatment, piling firewood on his naked belly and setting it alight. Still he held firm, even as his belly split open, even as his bowels came bursting out, for he, true Jesuit, true samurai, had conquered oceans and deserts and myriad perils to come back just for this: to testify that Christ alone is King.

Father Peter Kasui Kibe died unbroken on July 4, 1639, a cry of freedom to rouse all humankind.

 

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.

This story first appeared on ChurchMilitant.com in two parts under this title: Spiritual Independence on July Fourth, here:

https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/another-fourth-of-july-part-i

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        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.

Statue of Amakusa Shiro on the grounds of the citadel. Photo by Luke O’Hara

    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 banners 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. 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.

 

 

Paulo Uchibori sat fixed like leaden ballast, straining to see beyond the horror before him and glimpse Eternity, for nothing else would stanch the pain. Ignacio, his five-year-old, was hanging from the torturers’ ropes naked, mutilated, blue with the frigid wind and sea; being dangled above the waves until they saw fit to sink him into the deep. Ignacio must die, for he, like his father, was an unflinching Christian, a terror to the lord of Arima, who had sold his soul to the Shogun Iemitsu.

Matsukura Shigemasa had once been sympathetic to the Catholics in his domain; after all, the three previous lords of Arima had themselves been Catholics, and although the last one, Arima Naozumi, had apostatized, the land was filled with staunchly-Catholic laity, many of them veteran samurai. Thus, when the Shogun moved Shigemasa into Arima in 1616, he and his own corps of samurai maintained a tacit truce with the locals. He even took a liking to Father Pietro Paolo Navarro, the Italian Jesuit captured in Arima after celebrating Christmas Mass in 1621. Shigemasa had such respect for Fr. Navarro that he merely put him under house arrest, gave him freedom to celebrate Mass and hear confessions, and invited him often to Shimabara Castle to hear him out on the Catholic Faith. After their final meeting, Shigemasa escorted that priest of the forbidden law outside, knelt, and bowed his head to the earth to show the man of Christ his deep respect, for he would soon have to burn him alive: this was the Shogun Hidetada’s law.

Such sympathy was long extinct by 1627. In January, Shigemasa returned from the shogunal court intent on destroying Christendom in his domain, for the Shogun Iemitsu, Hidetada’s successor, hated Christ as if he were possessed. Thus, Shigemasa’s own life hung on the barest thread should he not quench his lord and master’s bloodlust.

His ally in bloodletting was his headman, Taga Mondo, who had developed exquisite tortures while his master was away. He would not merely beat Christians with clubs; he stripped them naked, tied them hand and foot to an upright rack of sorts, and burnt them with torches—but first, he branded their faces with red-hot iron, searing three Chinese characters spelling KIRI-SHI-TAN (“Christian”) into their cheeks and forehead. Since these cruelties were not producing the apostasies he desired, he started singeing the flesh off their fingers with red-hot tongs and then cutting the exposed bones away—but only bit by bit, so as to prolong the torture. Finally, he left the Christians tied to their racks stark-naked, exposed to public derision and the winter cold until nightfall, when they would be shut up indoors so as not to die prematurely and spoil Mondo’s horror-show: for he took his traveling circus to all the towns of Arima to scare her Christians out of their faith, collecting new victims along the way.

Notable among these was Maria Piriz (or Perez), 88 years old and blind. When they brought the branding-iron close to her face, she pulled away, unaware of what this meant; but when her daughter told her she was being branded as a Christian, she held still, proud to be given this badge of honor.     

Mondo had no compunction about torturing children. His men burned the face and body of 12-year-old Maria with torches and hot coals, trying to force her parents’ apostasy. They beat Sukuemon of Arie unconscious, and coming to, he started singing Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel, so they tied him to the rack and started burning him: he sang Gloria Patri. Furious, they started this torture on his wife Susana, to no effect, so they threw their three-year-old daughter into the fire. When Mondo ordered 16-year-old Andres to step into a fire of hot coals, he made the sign of the cross, kicked off his sandals, and jumped in, standing there long enough for one to pray twenty Hail Marys before Mondo bashed him out of the fire with a club.  

All this was but a prelude to Matsukura Shigemasa’s Lenten holocaust. His prison was brimming with unshakable Catholics, with Paulo Uchibori, former Arima samurai and lay Catholic leader, chief among them. On the First Sunday of Lent, 1627, thirty-five prisoners were led outside, each with a noose around the neck in the hands of an executioner. Maria Piriz had been so crippled by torture that she could barely move, but for this Lenten holocaust she found the strength to march out to her martyrdom like a healthy young girl.

They were taken to the moat and lined up in two rows. Fifteen would have their fingers cut off, more or fewer at the torturers’ discretion, with the others forced to watch.

Paulo’s three sons were the first called to the cutting-board. Antonio, 18, bravely spread out his fingers to offer up that sacrifice, as did his elder brother, Baltasar. When five-year-old Ignacio stepped up to take his turn, the executioner sliced off the index finger of his right hand. Raising the hand to his face, the child calmly watched the blood spurt out as if beholding a beautiful rose. Next, the other index finger: Ignacio raised his left hand and beheld that wound and its jetting blood without a flinch. Unable to bear this sight, many onlookers fled the scene—perhaps, like the Gerasenes, overwhelmed by Christ’s power over evil.

When the cutting was over, the twenty were stripped of their upper garments and all taken out to sea, the fifteen in two boats and the twenty in another, forced to watch. The torturers stripped the fifteen naked and tied ropes to their hands and feet. They would suspend the victims, one at a time, between the boats, dunking them and pulling them out time and again to demand apostasy until, vanquished, they tied a stone around the victim’s neck for the death-plunge into the deep. In the midst of this torture, Antonio, shivering with the February cold, shouted, “Thanks be to God for such a singular mercy!” Little Ignacio they suspended above the waves for a full hour before finally sinking him to the bottom. All the while, Paulo watched in silence.  

The killing done, the twenty were taken back ashore to find signs sewn on their garments forbidding anyone to give them shelter. Next, with a blunt knife the torturers cut the three middle fingers, bit by bit, off each of the Christians’ hands and branded their faces in three places—but four for Paulo—and set them loose as public horrors to anyone daring to embrace Christ.

That night Paulo fell unconscious for loss of blood and, coming to, reported that he had seen his three beloved sons. Juan Kihachi, unconscious for an hour, told the others that he had been taken up to a place too rich and beautiful to describe with words.  

Public horrors they might have seemed to any cowed apostate, but to Arima’s dauntless Catholics they were Christ’s Passion incarnate treading the very soil under their feet. This fact soon dawned on Matsukura Shigemasa, who ordered the heroes rounded up and brought back to his prison.

Morning dawned on the Second Sunday of Lent. A scar-faced volcano named Unzen beckoned from afar as a holy procession headed out of Shimabara Castle to start the long climb to its smoldering peak—its boiling, sulfurous pools caustic enough to burn off one’s skin. They call it “Unzen Hell.”

After their climb, the condemned Christians sang Laudate Dominum Omnes Gentes, recited the Creed, and prayed. Paulo Uchibori  then preached Christ to his persecutors, explaining that he and his companions were happy to die for the Creator and Redeemer of the world. Next they knelt, prayed the Confiteor, and sang Laudate again. Finally, Paulo sang Nunc Dimittis as they approached the so-called “Mouth of Hell” where all were to die.

As the executioners stripped them bare, Paulo urged all to have no fear, but to trust in God and Our Lady. Nooses would be used to dunk the Christians, like meat, into the boiling hell. Luis Shinzaburo, ordered to jump in on his own, made the sign of the cross, said the names of Jesus and Mary, and leapt. Paulo warned the others that Christians must not commit suicide, and the dunking began. Plunged into the murky, boiling hell, each Christian would sink and reappear to gasp, “Jesus! Mary!” and sink again helplessly, perhaps to bob up and pray again, and again—until only smoking bubbles appeared.

They saved Paulo till last, he who clung to that banned religion so tenaciously, he who was so intent on fanning its flames into a fire fit to light all the world. They would tie a noose to Paulo’s feet and dunk him head-first.

Plunging him in, they pulled him out quickly to plunge him in again—and again and again, until finally they dangled him, well-boiled, above the seething hell, just as they had dangled his youngest son.

“Praised be the Blessed Sacrament!” he proclaimed.

Clearly that Christian samurai had won: his vanquished torturers sunk him to the depths of that hell to join his brethren in faith.

Imagine the reunion in that place too rich and beautiful to describe with words.

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

This article, in a slightly-different version, first appeared in the National Catholic Register.

 

 

Exactly when or where the words escaped my lips I can’t recall—perhaps after a miraculous First Saturday rosary at a certain Nagasaki church. At any rate, I vowed to the Mother of God that I would pray Her rosary at every Catholic church in Nagasaki.

Nagasaki Prefecture, that is, not just the city. At the time I didn’t realize how much landscape that promise encompassed, nor how many churches—some prominent, some tucked away in hidden nooks, and others, historical gems, almost crumbling away. It would be an ongoing, step-by-step pilgrimage.

One step of which I’ll now recount.

In my guide book I had marked a swath of churches stretching westward toward Sasebo (of the Naval base) from my starting-point, Kawatana, a town perched atop the pate of Omura Bay. Kawatana lies just a few miles west of Higashi Sonogi, where the 26 Martyrs, on the penultimate day of their death-march, were herded to the shore and into three boats that would take them to Nagasaki and the crosses that awaited them there.

Before setting out, I prayed a crucial prayer to Jesus on my knees in my sardine-tin of an apartment:

“Lord, give me victory over Satan.”

             Some hours later, I reached Kawatana but couldn’t find the church at first. Dumb luck—or “God-incidence”—won the day, though: passing a store, I was inspired to circle back and drop in. Turning left, there I found the church, set off on a rise above the street, beyond a stone wall.

The door was unlocked; I prayed my rosary in a pew and, done, took a little tour. To the right of the Altar stood the Blessed Virgin on a pedestal, in her eyes a look of triumph and her foot crushing the Serpent’s head, its tongue lolling out. I had been Catholic a few years but had never seen this depiction of Her up close, nor was aware that the same crushed Serpent, too small to make out with the naked eye, hung around my neck on the face of a small Miraculous Medal.

Next on my agenda: Funakoshi Catholic Church. I headed onward, westward, to find that my guide-book was of little help once I had ventured off the highway and into the suburb where the church supposedly stood.

I ended up ascending a narrowing, winding road past a score or two of houses on a hillside, no church in sight, until I found the road shrunken to a virtual footpath and myself plumb in the middle of a zoo—I must have made quite an exhibit for the visitors—and, backing out with difficulty, I wended my way back down. Luckily, I spotted a man in front of his house, who pointed out the driveway to the church, descending out of sight right next to his property. Squeezing my car into a leafy spot at the edge of the road, I headed down on foot.

A modest little church, the doors locked, opened perhaps only for Sunday Mass. I prayed my rosary on its front step and went back up to my car to find a curious present there beside my right front tire: a big, fat, brimstone-colored viper—a mamushi—coiled up and on the verge of death, its head smashed and mouth strangely twisted, and its forked tongue lolling out to one side.

Being an inveterate hiker, I had seen many mamushi in my day, but never one so big, nor ever one thus colored, as if it had come fresh-smelted from a furnace—or perhaps a Lake of Fire. I must have run over its head on pulling in.

The helpful man and his wife were now packing up their car, perhaps for a picnic, with their little son and daughter at play on the street. I pointed out the moribund viper for their safety’ sake, and the father, startled, said, “Mamushi?” Apparently not an everyday event in his neighborhood.     

Sadly, I can’t recall my itinerary of churches that followed immediately on Funakoshi, but it must have been about 36 hours later that I found myself heading north toward Sasebo in the wee hours of the night, very short on sleep and gulping coffee to keep myself awake.

A song from The Wizard of Oz came to me—I knew not why—and, buzzing on caffeine, I started doing jazz improvisations on its melody in my head while navigating the dark, narrow, twisty road before my straining eyes. What with the lack of sleep and the caffeine overdose, I thought myself quite the musical genius as I plunged onward toward Sasebo.

But first, one must get past Yokose-ura to reach the turnoff to Sasebo. That turnoff was easy to miss in the dark; somehow I found myself passing the same spots time and again, circling Yokose-ura as if I were invisibly tethered to it.

The first Japanese feudal lord to receive baptism, Omura Sumitada, had built the port of Yokose-ura and a church for the Jesuits in 1562; in fact, he was baptized there. Enemies of the new religion soon razed the place to cinders. That perhaps is why my car was tethered to that ghost of history, as if I were racing to nowhere on the inside of a centrifuge.

Meanwhile, my own seeming musical genius was wowing me as I played with that melody in my head, drilling my eyes at the onrushing pavement in the wee-hours darkness, trying to find that turnoff, when something—or someone—inspired me to blare out the words of that song:

Ding-dong, the witch is dead!

            And I hit my brakes with a Screech!—something in the road.

I backed up to get my headlights on it before getting out to inspect the thing: a black viper, coiled up dead, its head smashed and its mouth open in that same eerie twist, the forked tongue lolling out to one side.  

Now what was that prayer again?

Lord, give me victory over…

“But,” you protest, “ya run over snakes all the time.”

Really? In more than two decades in Japan, I wore out four cars exploring nooks and crannies tucked away in far flung places, and what with all those journeyings, my tally of smashed snakes totals…

Three.

As for the third one…

There was to be a memorial Mass down in Shimabara on the grounds of what once was Hara Castle. That stretch of earth was my spiritual home; many an hour had I spent there, rosary in hand, alone with the silence of the 37,000 Christian souls buried in that sacred soil, victims of the Shogun Iemitsu’s demonic wrath. For his horde had put them to the edge of the sword in the cherry-blossom season of 1638, beheading “even the little girls,” as one soldier lamented.

I had never before attended one of these memorials and knew not what to expect, but having hightailed it down to the Hara Castle ruins from my home some hours away, I got there with only minutes to spare before Mass would begin, and I was in sin and desperate for a confessor—desperate to receive my Lord on that soil seeded with the blood of the 37,000. To my surprise, the grounds of the bygone citadel were swarming not only with faithful, but also with priests from all over Japan: there must be a familiar face among them.

Indeed, a solid Japanese priest: the pastor of Hondo Parish in Amakusa, that verdant archipelago off in the distance, just across the strait to the south. I ran to him with my plea and he led me out of the crowd, to the precipice overlooking that rare panorama, heard me and absolved me, and left in a rush to duck into a tent beside the makeshift stage that held the Altar. A moment later he emerged decked out for Mass: he was the main celebrant, but he had had time to hear my confession at the last minute; now there’s a priest.    

 

After Mass I left reluctantly, having a long drive home—but I was free of my sin and had received my Lord there on that soil ringing with the silent cries of the 37,000 slain and baptized with their Christian blood. The outer grounds were crowded with visitors as I wended my way down the drive most carefully; but I heard a Thump-thump! beneath my tires and stopped to investigate.

Behind my right rear tire, you guessed it: a fat viper coiled up, head smashed, mouth twisted, and that forked tongue lolling out to one side.

I stood there edified, staring down at the Biblical creature, the Sacrament confirmed.

Ding-dong: the Witch is dead.  

 

A version of this story first appeared in the National Catholic Register.