Events

How a faith survived 250 years in Japan with no priests: the story of Urakami, from Xavier to the atomic bomb.

After seven weeks on a Chinese junk whose captain consulted an idol at every turn, Francis Xavier, two Jesuit companions and three Japanese Christians came ashore at Kagoshima on the feast of the Assumption, 1549, and…

In 1571, on a narrow wooded cape at the head of Nagasaki Bay, Ōmura Sumitada's men laid out six new streets for Christians who had nowhere else to go, Father Melchior de Figueiredo built a little church of Our Lady at…

In 1580 Ōmura Sumitada gave the young port of Nagasaki, with Mogi, to the Society of Jesus, and a town begun as a refuge for Christians driven from their homes became for a few years a Jesuit possession.

In 1582 three Christian lords of Kyushu, on the plan of the Jesuit Visitor Alessandro Valignano, sent four boys from the Arima seminary to the Pope; they were received by Gregory XIII in 1585 and came home in 1590 with…

At Hakozaki on Tenshō 15.6.19 (24 July 1587) Toyotomi Hideyoshi declared Japan "the land of the gods" and gave the missionaries twenty days to leave; the order could not be obeyed as written, and for ten years it hung…

In October 1596 the Spanish galleon San Felipe, bound from Manila to Mexico, was driven by storms into Urado in Tosa; Hideyoshi seized its rich cargo, and words reported from a member of its crew, that Spain sent…

On Toyotomi Hideyoshi's orders, twenty-four Christians arrested in Kyoto and Osaka had their ears cut, were paraded through three cities and marched in midwinter to Nagasaki, where, with two more who joined them on the…

At the turn of 1613 to 1614 the Tokugawa issued an edict, drafted by the monk Konchiin Sūden, that outlawed Christianity itself; that November the missionaries and the exiled lord Takayama Ukon were shipped out of…

On 6 October 1619, by order of the shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, fifty-two Christians of Kyoto, all lay people and eleven of them children, were burned alive on crosses on the bank of the Kamo River near today's Shōmen…

On 10 September 1622 fifty-five Christians, priests and brothers of four religious families, the Japanese who had sheltered them, women and small children, were burned or beheaded together at Nagasaki; Blessed Charles…

On 4 December 1623, at Fuda-no-tsuji on the Tōkaidō just outside Edo, fifty Christians led by the Jesuit Girolamo de Angelis, the Franciscan Francisco Gálvez and the samurai John Hara Mondo were burned alive on the…

A rising of farmers in Shimabara and Amakusa, crushed by taxes and persecution, became a Christian last stand behind the walls of the ruined Hara Castle, where some tens of thousands of men, women and children died when…

In the gold fields of the far north, where Christians fleeing persecution had gone to dig for gold, the first Mass in Hokkaido was said on the Assumption in 1620, and in 1639 the Matsumae domain beheaded 106 of them…

On the fifth day of the seventh month of Kan'ei 16 (4 August 1639) the shogunate forbade the Portuguese ships to come to Japan, on pain of destruction and death; it ended the voyages that had carried the Japan mission…

Three times before the arrival of the missionaries, the officials of Nagasaki arrested hidden Christians in the farming village of Urakami; the first two times the villagers answered "we do not know" and were sent home…

On Pentecost Sunday, 8 June 1862, in St Peter's in Rome, Blessed Pius IX declared saints the twenty-six Christians crucified at Nagasaki in 1597, completing a cause that Japanese Christians had begun in 1604; the same…

On a Friday in Lent, a handful of farmers from Urakami walked into a new French church in Nagasaki, looked for a statue of Mary, and ended two and a half centuries of silence.

After the meeting at Ōura in 1865, the Christians of Urakami built four small thatched chapels where priests came by night to teach, baptize and say Mass; before dawn on 15 July 1867, in pouring rain, the magistrate's…

Two years after they made themselves known at Ōura, the Christians of Urakami were arrested, tortured and then exiled, the whole village, to twenty-odd domains across Japan; they called it the tabi, the journey.

Twenty-eight of the firmest Christians of Urakami, and then about a hundred and twenty-five of their families, were held at the empty temple of Kōrinji above Tsuwano and starved, frozen and beaten to make them give up…

On 24 February 1873 the Meiji government quietly ordered the notice boards banning Christianity taken down, ending a policy that had lasted since the early 1600s, without ever saying that Christians were free.

On 31 December 1882, in Ōura Church, Bishop Petitjean ordained three Japanese priests, Fukahori Tatsuemon, Takagi Gentarō and Ariyasu Hidenoshin, the first since the reopening of Japan: boys whom he had begun teaching…

On 11 February 1889 the Constitution of the Empire of Japan gave Japanese subjects "freedom of religious belief" for the first time in law, within limits of "peace and order" and the "duties of subjects"; for Catholics…

On 5 May 1932 two or three Catholic students of Sophia University, the Jesuit university in Tokyo, did not bow at Yasukuni Shrine; the army's reaction nearly closed the university, and the Church's question to the…

At 11:02 a.m. on 9 August 1945 an atomic bomb exploded above Urakami, the old hidden Christian village of Nagasaki, killing most of its Catholics and destroying the cathedral their ancestors had built on the ground…

From 23 to 26 February 1981, John Paul II made the first visit of a pope to Japan: he came, he said, as a "pilgrim of peace" to return the visit of the Tenshō envoys, spoke to the world from Hiroshima, ordained fifteen…

On 24 November 2008, at the first beatification ever held in Japan, the Church in Nagasaki declared Blessed 188 martyrs of 1603 to 1639: four priests, one brother and 183 lay men, women and children.

On 30 June 2018 UNESCO inscribed the Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region, twelve places that tell how Japan's Christians kept the faith in hiding for two centuries and how the hiding ended at Ōura in 1865.