A ship from Manila
The Hirayama affair began in 1620, when the Japanese Christian sea captain Hirayama Jōchin (平山常陳) agreed to carry two friars to Japan on his ship, knowing the risk.Born into a noble family and baptized in Kyoto (京都) by the Jesuit Fr Baltasar de Torres, the captain had settled and married in Manila, taking the Spanish surname Díaz.Among the Japanese on board were the master, León Sukezaemon, the clerk, Juan Foyamon, and Tomás Koyanagi, a former Jesuit seminarian.
The Augustinian Fr Pedro de Zúñiga, born in Seville in 1585, was the son of Don Álvaro de Zúñiga, a viceroy of Mexico.He had already served in Japan, until Hasegawa Gonroku (長谷川権六), governor of Nagasaki (長崎), warned him repeatedly to leave and his superior sent him back to Manila.In 1620 Japanese Christians asked the Augustinian provincial chapter to send back their former pastor.The friar warned that everyone in Nagasaki knew him, but the chapter sent him on the Christians' promise to meet the ship and hide him.
His companion, the Dominican Fr Luis Flores, was a Fleming who had become a friar in Mexico City and gone to the Philippines in 1602.The two priests boarded disguised as merchants, with two Spanish laymen, and sailed from Manila early in June 1620.
Captured off Formosa
After storms drove it into Macau, Hirayama Jōchin's ship sailed again on July 2, 1620, and was soon afterwards taken off Formosa (Taiwan) by the Dutch and English.As the strange ship approached, the captain hid the two friars below deck among his cargo of deer hides.They spent a day and a night there in stench, hunger and thirst, until one of their party, terrified by drawn swords, said that a Father was aboard.The English recognised the two passengers as clergy, which under the shogun's edicts made the ship a lawful prize, and the four passengers fell to the Dutch share of it.
The ship was brought into Hirado (平戸) on August 4.There the Dutch factor Jacques Specx and the Dutch and English captains questioned the two priests to establish that the prize was valid.
Torture and denial at Hirado
For more than a year, Pedro de Zúñiga and Luis Flores denied that they were priests, because admitting it would bring death on Hirayama and his crew.The Dutch tried to force a confession by torture.The friars were kept thirteen days in a dark pit on rice and water, then hung by the strappado with boxes of gunpowder tied to their feet.The Flemish friar was also tied down while water was poured on his head until he choked and fainted.Two Japanese, the interpreter Gaspar Nakamura and Juan Chiam Gorobioye, a clerk for the Dutch, secretly carried letters and help to the prisoners.
The captain sued his captors for piracy, while the Dutch called the friars Spanish spies preparing a conquest.Gonroku, who knew Zúñiga personally, delayed the hearings and wrote to the shogun that the two were not religious.Late in 1621, Fr Carlo Spinola, a Jesuit, the Dominican Fr Francisco de Morales and the Franciscan Fr Pedro de Avila were brought from their prison at Ōmura (大村) to identify the prisoners.Before the lord of Hirado and Gonroku, the accusers were aided by the apostate priest Thomas Araki and by witnesses including a Portuguese renegade and a Tagalog.Asked to swear that the two were not religious, Spinola freed himself and his companions from the oath, and privately urged the two that public edification mattered more than the captain's interest.
On November 30, 1621, after nearly all the witnesses had identified him, Zúñiga declared himself a priest in a signed statement for the shogun.He explained: "Until this day I have denied being a priest, and I have suffered everything, in order to save our poor Japanese brothers" (translated).On December 23, 1621, the Augustinian was shut in a cage on the deserted island of Ikinoshima.His Dominican companion, still taken for a layman, stayed behind in prison.
The rescue that failed
The Dominican Fr Diego Collado made several attempts to free Luis Flores from his prison at Hirado.His agent, the Christian Luis Yakichi, paid a Dutch servant 400 taels from Portuguese alms to open the gaol door, but the man lost his nerve.On March 4, 1622, the same agent and four other young Christians came from Nagasaki in a fast boat to carry the Dominican away.Flores slid down a rope from a postern, but the rope broke and he fell into the sea.He reached the boat, but the rope holding the mainsail also broke, and the Dutch caught the fugitives in the mountains.When the Japanese rescuers faced torture, Flores declared that he was a Dominican priest, and the Dutch fired their artillery in celebration.He was sent to join Zúñiga on Ikinoshima.
The lord of Hirado reported the attempted rescue to the court at Edo (江戸).The shogun Hidetada (秀忠) took it as an act of lèse-majesté, his anger fed also by rumours that the Augustinian was a natural son of the King of Spain sent to prepare a conquest.He ordered Gonroku to burn alive the two religious and the captain, and to behead the rest of the crew as accomplices.The order reached far beyond the ship: the wives and children of those executed over the previous three years for sheltering priests, and 32 prisoners at Suzuta (鈴田), were also to die.
Sentence at Nagasaki
Hasegawa Gonroku came back to Nagasaki with the shogun's sentence on July 27, 1622.Next morning he had nineteen Christian sailors and merchants of the ship arrested and offered them their lives if they gave up the faith.All refused, and their wives and children were jailed with them.The two friars, Hirayama, the master and the clerk were brought from Hirado in a boat with a plank prison on its deck, guarded by 200 soldiers, and kept in the harbour until August 19.
The captain, chained with heavy irons and a yoke of iron and wood, spent eight days in the Spiritual Exercises before his death.On the evening of the Assumption, August 15, 1622, the Dominican Fr Pedro Vázquez, disguised as a guard with two swords, slipped into the prison and heard the confessions of nineteen prisoners until midnight.
On August 19, 1622, Gonroku sentenced the two friars and Hirayama to be burned at a slow fire, and twelve of the Japanese from the ship to be beheaded.When the captain asked the reason, the governor replied, "It is as preachers of the Gospel" (translated).Preaching the law of Jesus Christ was forbidden in Japan, he said, just as practising it was forbidden to all Japanese.
The fire on August 19, 1622
On August 19, 1622, Luis Flores, Pedro de Zúñiga and Hirayama Jōchin were burned alive at Nagasaki, and twelve Christians from the ship were beheaded before them.The execution ground was enclosed by a stockade with three great stakes, and the firewood was set well back so that the agony would last longer.
About 9 a.m. the condemned came down from the town in procession, the friars in their habits and the Japanese in Dominican livery, while children sang the Magnificat and litanies.A crowd of tens of thousands watched, among them the Dominican priests Collado, Vázquez and Domingo Castellet.The twelve were beheaded first, one by one, and their heads were set on pegs facing the three at the stakes.
Zúñiga, in the centre, greeted the heads as flowers of paradise.Flores stood on his left, the place of honour by Japanese custom, and Hirayama on his right.The captain, seeing that his post "was badly planted and that it was moving, himself made it as firm as he could" (translated).He passed on to the crowd what the friars whispered to him in Spanish, and preached a long final sermon, calling martyrdom a ladder to heaven.
No fire could be found in the nearby huts of Christian lepers, so new fire was struck from flint, and the executioners pulled back or wetted the wood to slow the burning.In the flames the Augustinian cried out to St Augustine, and the Dominican told the captain that he would be captain of heaven.Flores died first, then Hirayama, and Zúñiga last.
Relics and remembrance
After the executions of August 19, 1622, the bodies of the three martyrs were guarded for several days so that the Dutch could see the punishment.Then Gonroku, saying he did not count them as martyrs, unexpectedly let the Christians take them.According to tradition, Christians divided even fragments of the posts and blood-soaked earth as relics.
Flores's body passed to the widow Inés Correa, who took it into exile at Macau in 1624 and gave it to the Dominicans.The Portuguese nobleman Martim de Gouveia took Zúñiga's body to the same city, where it passed to the Jesuits, who gave it to the Augustinians in 1651.
The affair cost more lives: Gaspar Nakamura, who had helped the prisoners, was beheaded at Nagasaki at the end of September 1622.On October 2, 1622, Luis Yakichi's wife Lucía and their four-year-old son Francisco were also beheaded.Flores, Zúñiga and Hirayama are honoured as Blessed, as are companions beheaded with them such as Tomás Koyanagi and Marcos Takenouchi Shinyemon.In 1866 a printed positio for the beatification of the Augustinian, the captain and other martyrs was published in Rome.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- The date of the capture. Profillet, Pagès and Hesselink give July 22, 1620; Boero (1867) and Bartoli give August 2; the Spanish edition of Boero (1869) gives May 2; Delplace in one passage says November 1620; the 1868 Spinola life and Marnas put it in 1621; Charlevoix even dates the proceedings to the end of 1619.
- The capturing ship. Profillet, Pagès and Hesselink name the English ship Elizabeth, later handing the prize to the Dutch; Wilberforce and Boero speak of a Dutch ship, and Bartoli calls the Elisabetta Dutch.
- How the friars were found. Flores himself wrote that one of their party, frightened by swords, said a Father was aboard, and blamed the Japanese crew; Wilberforce says a pagan sailor betrayed them.
- The sailing date from Manila. Profillet and Pagès give June 4 or 5, 1620, but Profillet elsewhere gives June 6.
- The order of the confessions. the 1868 Spinola life and Charlevoix have both friars declare themselves together at Spinola's urging; Profillet, Bartoli and Pagès have Zúñiga declare on November 30, 1621 and Flores only after the escape in March 1622; Wilberforce puts the escape before Zúñiga's admission.
- How long the friars were held and denied their identity. Murdoch says Zúñiga denied being a priest for sixteen months; Bartoli speaks of two years in prison at Hirado, and the translator of Boero of nearly a year and a half in Dutch hands.
- The month of the hearings with Spinola. the 1868 Spinola life and Pagès give November 1621, while another passage in Pagès says the case was ordered tried in December 1621; Bartoli says the priests came from the Suzuta prison rather than Ōmura.
- The date of the executions. nearly all sources give August 19, 1622; a chapter heading in the 1869 Boero gives 1623, and Marnas gives August 10, 1622.
- How long the burning lasted. Profillet, Delplace, Murdoch and Pagès say three quarters of an hour; Wilberforce, Boero (1869) and Bartoli say about two hours.
- The number beheaded. most sources say twelve; Delplace adds a Spaniard, Ferdinand Civerez, for thirteen, and Solier names him as condemned for sheltering the friars; Marnas speaks of thirteen crew.
- The names of the twelve are spelled very differently from source to source, and Boero reverses the roles of the master and the clerk between two passages.
- The size of the crowd. Profillet gives 30,000, adding that others said 60,000.
- How long the bodies were guarded. Wilberforce, Boero and Bartoli say four days; Profillet says the guards withdrew only on the evening of August 23, after five days, and Delplace speaks of five days in which Christians tried to take relics.
- Flores's birthplace and age. the 1868 Spinola life cites an Antwerp register giving April 9, 1589, which would make him 33 at death, against Boero's figure of sixty; Profillet gives Antwerp between 1565 and 1570; Delplace and Pagès say Ghent. His family name is given as Fraryn, Frarijn, Frayrin or Froryn.
- Zúñiga's origin. catalogues list him as Mexican, while the 1869 Spanish edition of Boero calls him a Spaniard who grew up in Mexico and gives Seville as his birthplace.
- The name of the Portuguese who took Zúñiga's body to Macau appears as Martin Govea, Martim de Gouveia and Martin de Gova, and Flores's body is said to have gone first to Andrés Tomonaga or to a widow's house.