Story
A year of hardening
By 1622 the had been in force for eight years, and in the Genna era, the Japanese encyclopedias agree, the shogunate's repression became ferocious.The spark for what followed, the historian Murai Sanae writes, was the affair of Hirayama Jōchin. In 1620 the English and the Dutch seized a Japanese trading ship captained by Hirayama and found two missionaries hidden aboard, the Augustinian Pedro de Zúñiga and the Dominican Luis Flores. In the summer of 1622 Hirayama and the two priests were burned and the crew beheaded, and this affair opened a great persecution.
The prisons of and of Suzuta in the Ōmura domain held the missionaries already taken, the Japanese who had given them lodging, and their families.On the 5th day of the eighth month of Genna 8, which by the national observatory's tables was 10 September 1622, they were brought out to die.
Charles Spinola
The best known of them was the Italian Jesuit . Born in 1564 at Genoa (Britannica says Tassarolo, the family's fief), he was ordained in Milan in 1594 and asked for Japan. His first voyage, from Lisbon in 1596, was a run of misfortune: driven to Brazil, then to Puerto Rico, and on the way back captured by an English ship and released in London. He sailed again in 1600 and reached Nagasaki in 1602.He worked in Arima and then in , where from 1605 he was treasurer of the mission and taught the mathematics and astronomy he had learned in Rome from Christopher Clavius, the scholar behind the Gregorian calendar.Back in Nagasaki in 1612, he observed the lunar eclipse of 8 November and, by comparing his times with those taken by Giulio Aleni and other Jesuits in , fixed the longitude of Nagasaki: the first scientific observation of an eclipse in Japan, Heibonsha's encyclopedia says.
After 1614 he stayed on in hiding. He was taken, he wrote to his cousin, at midnight on the night beginning 14 December 1618.After some months in a thatched hut, he and his companions were moved in July 1619 to the prison at Suzuta, which he described as a cage "twenty-four palms long by sixteen wide, just recently built, like a birdcage, of thick square posts, open to the wind and rain, but safe under God's protection." Eight religious and fifteen Japanese catechists and servants were crowded into it, short of food; his Jesuit companion, Brother Ambrose Fernandes, died there of cold and want.Spinola was held there nearly four years.
The road to Nagasaki
On Friday, 9 September 1622, a day the prisoners kept as a fast in honour of the Passion, twenty-four religious and other prisoners were taken from Suzuta.Two religious and six Japanese, arrested outside Nagasaki's jurisdiction, were kept back to die at Ōmura two days later, and the 1868 Life of Blessed Charles Spinola, drawn from the Italian account of the postulator Giuseppe Boero, describes the farewell as a scene of tears and embraces in which the men left behind envied those who were going.The others were shipped across Ōmura Bay, and all the way, the Life says, they exhorted the soldiers and sailors to keep the faith, or to accept it, or to repent if they had given way under torture. "It is for you," they said, "for your eternal happiness that we came."Landed on the Nagasaki side, they were put on horseback because of the crowds of Christians, and taken by way of to the place of execution.
The holy mountain
The place was the low promontory outside Nagasaki where the had been crucified in 1597. By the Life's account the people of Nagasaki called it ever since "the Sacred Mountain," and the Nipponica names the site as .(Several Japanese dictionaries say Tateyama instead; see .)On a carpeted platform sat the presiding official; two lines had been laid out on the plateau, one for those to be beheaded and one of twenty-five stakes, each with its pile of wood set about six yards away so that the victims would roast slowly.The ground was fenced, with lancers of on the sea side and musketeers of Ōmura at the foot of the hill. The Life says that some thirty thousand Christians covered the hillside and the shore, besides non-Christians.
From the Nagasaki prison came the second group, men, women and five children, most of them condemned to the sword for having housed religious, for being the wife or child of such a host, or simply for living next door. They could have saved themselves by renouncing the faith, the Life says, and had refused.
Fifty-five
The encyclopedias give the numbers: fifty-five Christians, twenty-five burned and thirty beheaded.Britannica's Japanese dictionary counts nine priests, thirteen religious brothers, thirteen laymen, fourteen women and six children; Heibonsha's historian Gonoi Takashi notes that twenty-one members of religious orders, nine of them priests, were killed at one stroke, among them Spinola and the Dominican vicar provincial Francisco Morales.The Nipponica adds that an old woman of eighty was among them.
The Life lists those at the stakes in order from the shore: the Japanese Antonio Sanga, Paulo Nagaishi, Antonio "of Korea," and Lucia de Freitas, the Japanese widow of a Portuguese; then Spinola; then the Dominicans Angelo Orsucci, José of St Hyacinth and Jacinto Orfanel; then the Jesuit Fr Sebastian Kimura, the Dominican and Franciscan friars Richard of St Anne, Alonso de Mena, Pedro de Ávila, Vicente of St Joseph, Francisco Morales and Leo of Satsuma; then the young Jesuits Spinola had trained, Antonio Kyūni, Gonzalo Fusai, Tomás Akahoshi, Pedro Sampo, Miguel Shumpo and Luis Kawara; and last the Dominican brother Alexis.(Spellings follow the Life; check against the beatification list.) The Life also records, with sorrow, that three of those bound to the stakes broke loose and fled. Their hands had been tied only lightly, it explains, and gaps left between the woodpiles, precisely to tempt the condemned to run.
"Laudate Dominum"
When Spinola reached his stake, the Life says, he fell to his knees and kissed it, and a cry went up from the crowd. Then, in the silence, he intoned the psalm "Laudate Dominum omnes gentes," "Praise the Lord, all ye nations," and his companions took it up, and the Christians on every side with them. "Never," witnesses said afterwards, "did we hear anything so sweet."These details, the Life explains, come from the sworn depositions of eyewitnesses, some of them taken at a juridical inquiry in .He spoke to the presiding official, telling him that the joy of the religious should show what they had come to Japan to seek: not lands or honours, but the salvation of souls, and that "from the ashes of a single one a hundred others will rise."
The beheadings came first. Among those to be beheaded was Isabel Fernandes, the widow of Domingos Jorge, who had been burned alive in November 1619 for giving Spinola lodging, and with her was her four-year-old son Ignacio, whom Spinola had baptized.She came onto the field, the Life says, with a crucifix in one hand and her rosary in the other, singing the same psalm; the child, like all the Christians that day, was dressed in his best clothes.Spinola, not seeing the child, called out to ask where he was. His mother lifted him up: "See, my dear son, this is Father Charles, who made you a child of God; ask his blessing." The boy knelt and joined his hands; the priest, with his own hands bound, raised his eyes to heaven and looked down on him. Ignacio saw his mother's head fall and then bowed his own.
Then the fires were lit, and kept low, so that the victims would burn slowly; Fr Sebastian Kimura, the Life says, lived for three hours in the flames. Spinola, whose stake was beside that of Lucia de Freitas, gave her absolution. He feared above all that one of his companions might give way, and told the executioners not to wonder at any sign of weakness, "We are not made of iron," but to trust that God would give them strength.
Aftermath and remembrance
The Nipponica judges that the martyrdom marked a turning point: it pushed the domains towards thoroughgoing repression, while the news of it, reaching Manila, fired a zeal for martyrdom that sent missionaries to slip into Japan at the risk of their lives for years to come.Britannica's dictionary says that the martyrs' calm amazed those who saw them and that the scene was painted and became known abroad.A painting of the martyrdom by an unidentified artist now hangs, on loan, in the Jesuit church of the in Rome, as the Nipponica notes.The Life also records a Japanese painting made by a witness, showing each confessor at his stake and the twenty-one religious in their habits.
Spinola and his companions were beatified by Pius IX on 7 July 1867, among 205 martyrs of Japan.
