Story
A sacred plot in the city
In 1954 the Jesuit historian Hubert Cieslik opened his study of this martyrdom by pointing to a small plot of land beside the main road from Tokyo to Yokohama, "especially sacred to Tokyo's Catholics," where, on 4 December 1623, fifty Christians died by fire.Among them, he wrote, "were the leading missionaries and Christians of the Edo mission," so that the event "practically spelled the end for this once so flourishing mission."It also opened the long, methodical persecution of the third shogun, .The date, the 13th day of the tenth month of Genna 9, falls on 4 December 1623 by the national observatory's calendar tables, and Cieslik notes that Japanese and European sources agree on it.
The priest from Sicily
Girolamo de Angelis was born at Enna in Sicily in 1568 and entered the Society of Jesus at eighteen.He sailed for the East with Charles , who would die at , and their journey became a small epic: storms off the Cape, a forced landing in Brazil, capture by an English ship near the Azores and a month as prisoners in England before they could start again from Lisbon.He reached Japan in 1602.For eight years he worked at Fushimi, south of , where, Cieslik says, he gained "that deep understanding of Japanese manners and customs and that gracious skill in dealing with the people for which he was especially renowned."He then founded the Jesuit residence at Sunpu, the retired 's town; on one visit in 1611 he heard 1,200 confessions and baptized 270 adults.
When the missionaries were expelled in 1614 he received permission at the last moment to stay in hiding.He was sent north to the exiled Christians and their converts in the far provinces, carrying the alms collected for them at in a famine year, travelling in disguise through snow-bound mountains.He crossed to Ezo, the present Hokkaidō, the first European to visit it and the first to write a detailed account of it.In 1621 he was called to Edo, where he spent two years in disguise, so worn by hardship, Cieslik writes, that he "became emaciated almost beyond recognition."
His companion through all of it was Simon Empo, born in 1580 at Nozu in Higo, who had been raised in a Buddhist temple, followed his own teacher into baptism at sixteen and gave his whole life to the mission as a lay catechist of the Jesuits.
John Hara Mondo
The third leader of that day was a samurai. Hara Mondo, baptized John, was the son of the lord of Usui castle in Shimōsa, born in 1587 according to the Kodansha biographical dictionary.He served Tokugawa Ieyasu as a page and later commanded a troop of his bodyguard.He was baptized around 1600, by the Jesuit Pedro Morejón at Osaka according to the testimony Cieslik cites, and joined the Third Order of St Francis.In 1612, when Ieyasu ordered the Christians of his own household to renounce their faith, Hara Mondo was among those who refused; he was dismissed and banished.Some later Japanese chronicles, and one Franciscan writer, also accused him of a liaison with a lady of the court; Cieslik, weighing them, found that the sources "disagree with one another as to the date and other details so much that it is impossible to judge where the truth lies."In 1615 he was arrested again. His hands and feet were mutilated and a cross was branded on his forehead, and, the Franciscan account says, he lived for a time among lepers before reaching Edo, where he hid in the Franciscans' house for lepers.Cieslik's judgement is that whatever his earlier faults, "his guilt was to be atoned for through long years of suffering and finally by his painful martyrdom."
Betrayal and arrest
In the summer of 1623 handed the office of shogun to his son Iemitsu, who returned to Edo from Kyoto in October.The missionaries had hoped for a gentler reign; instead, the Jesuit annual letter for 1624 says, "the son succeeded not only to his father's high office but also to his hatred and cruelty toward Christians."Rewards were offered for information.A servant who had grown up in the Hara household, in debt through gambling, betrayed his master's hiding place and the names of leading Christians and members of the Third Order to the city governor.
Under torture someone revealed where de Angelis was staying. He moved, and the police pressed his host to give him up. When de Angelis learned that his host had promised the governor that the priest would surrender, he resolved to go himself, so that no other Christian would suffer on his account.The Christians begged him to stay hidden, as they had once in Sendai. Simon Empo pleaded to go with him, and he consented. That night he visited the families accused of sheltering him and urged them to stand firm; the next morning he and Simon presented themselves to the magistrate.Francisco Gálvez, the Franciscan, was taken at Kamakura with his host, Hilary Magozaemon, secretary of the Third Order, after a hired guide fled with their money.Hilary's wife, the annual letter says, insisted on wearing her best clothes to prison, since she knew of no greater honour than to suffer for Christ.
The prison of Kodenma-chō
The prisoners were held in the city prison at Kodenma-chō, in what is now Chūō-ku.Cieslik reprints the Franciscan description of the same prison eight years earlier: dark, packed, stifling, with corpses left for days.De Angelis and his host Leo Takeya were kept in the guardhouse at the entrance, chained by the ankles.The two priests heard each other's confession.Simon Empo preached day and night to the men held for other crimes and won forty of them to Christ; de Angelis instructed and baptized the eight non-Christians who shared his room, and, his chains tied up round his neck with a cord, made mats of paper for prisoners he could not otherwise help.He heard the confessions of the Christians, who, the letter says, seemed "to be overflowing with joy," all except one man who wept night and day for having betrayed the others.
Hidetada returned to Edo at the end of October and left the decision to his son, who used it, Cieslik says, "to set an example for the whole country."All fifty were sentenced to the stake. When the sentence was read, only one wavered.
Fuda-no-tsuji
The execution was held not at the usual grounds but beside the Tōkaidō at the very entrance to Edo, where the city's stood, at a moment when many feudal lords were in the capital.The condemned were led straight from the prison along the high road through Nihonbashi, Kyōbashi and Ginza to Shiba.The annual letter, based on eyewitnesses and gathered with a view to a cause of beatification, describes three groups: de Angelis on horseback at the head with a placard bearing his name, followed by Simon Empo, Leo and the others; Gálvez on horseback leading the second; Hara Mondo bringing up the rear."They paraded as though in triumphal procession with banners unfurled and flying."
Fifty stakes stood on the field below a wooded hill, three of them set apart nearest the city.The forty-seven were tied first, with the firewood heaped a little way from each stake, so that each might still recant once the fire was lit.The three leaders were made to watch from their horses. De Angelis and Simon Empo preached to the crowd. The martyrs called on the names of Jesus and Mary, and the letter says none was seen to complain.A man and a woman in the crowd ran forward and declared themselves Christians; they were taken to prison.One man who had faltered on the road was held back.
Then the three were bound: Hara Mondo nearest the city, de Angelis in the middle, Gálvez last.De Angelis reminded Hara Mondo how short the pain would be beside the glory awaiting them. He turned first towards the city to pray for it, then preached until he died, falling to his knees. Hara Mondo, the letter says, put his arms round the flame "as though it were something cherished." Gálvez, last alive, died standing against his stake.After three days under guard the Christians carried away the bodies of the two priests.The informer was rewarded publicly with the house of one of the dead and thirty pieces of gold.
What followed
Three weeks later, on 24 or 25 December by different reckonings, the wives and children of the martyrs, with others who had sheltered Christians, were executed near the same place; Laudate counts twenty-four Christians and thirteen others who had given them shelter.Among them was Leo Takeya's mother Mary, who refused every offer of an easy life.The persecution then spread across Japan as lords who had seen the Edo burnings went home to their own domains.
The cause of beatification began soon after but halted with the closing of the country.On 7 July 1867 Pope Pius IX beatified Girolamo de Angelis, Francisco Gálvez and Simon Empo among the 205 martyrs of Japan.On 24 November 2008, at Nagasaki, John Hara Mondo was beatified with Peter and his companions.The Archdiocese of Tokyo prepared a pilgrim guide for the occasion, to the places of Hara Mondo and Peter Kibe in the city.A memorial to the Genna martyrs now stands on a raised plaza behind the Mita Twin Building West at Mita 3-chōme, and the stone pillar raised by Catholics at the temple of Chifukuji in 1956 is kept at Takanawa Catholic Church.
