Captives of the Korean war
The invasions of Korea by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣秀吉) in the 1590s brought thousands of Korean captives into Japan, and their arrival changed the shape of the Jesuit mission.Estimates of their number range from tens of thousands to more than a hundred thousand.During the attack on Seoul, women and children dirtied their faces, wore poor clothes and pretended to be disabled to avoid capture, but they were taken as servants all the same.The Buddhist monk Kyōnen (慶念), who followed the second invasion in 1597, watched slave dealers rope captives together and drive them with clubs, and wrote that "they looked just like demons torturing sinners in hell".
From 1592 the slave market of Nagasaki (長崎) was flooded with Korean captives sold by returning soldiers.In 1597 a visiting merchant bought five Korean slaves there for just over twelve scudi.Between 1592 and 1597, as many as one to two thousand Korean captives a year were sold to the Portuguese, most of them women.
Church leaders judged the war and the trade to be wrong.In 1592 Father Valignano called the war unjust, waged only from greed of conquest, and asked who could oblige the Christian lords to restore their spoils, captives included.In 1598 a consultation under Bishop Cerqueira ruled that Korean captives were not legitimately enslaved, since the war was unjust and the Korean king had rightly refused passage to China.One Christian lord, Dom Jerónimo Itō (伊東祐勝), dying on his return from Korea, told his wife to keep his female Korean captives, not as slaves, until they could speak Japanese and support themselves, and then to free them.
Baptism and a Korean catechism
The first baptisms came during the war itself: a Christian samurai of Bungo (豊後) had a servant carry water and baptised about two hundred abandoned, dying Korean children.Early in 1592 the Vice-Provincial, Father Pedro Gómez, ordered literate Korean captives to learn Japanese and the faith, and to translate a summary of the catechism and the prayers into Korean.At Christmas 1593 the Jesuits in Nagasaki baptised 100 catechumens, most of them Korean captives.More than 2,000 Koreans were baptised in 1594 in the Arima (有馬) and Ōmura (大村) area and in the city itself, and the rest in 1595.The young Korean catechists were gathered in "a kind of little seminary" (translated), which was probably dispersed in 1597.
Jesuits also served the Christian lords in Korea itself.After 1593 the division of Konishi Yukinaga (小西行長), mostly Christians, held a chain of fortified camps on the south Korean coast, where Father Cespedes was soon at work.Back in Nagasaki, the new converts' devotion moved the missionaries.On Good Friday 1596, Korean slaves who could not join the daytime procession because of their work came at night to the church of St Paul and scourged themselves, moving the fathers to tears.One convert, Antonio Korea, baptised at Isahaya (諫早), was freed and later became a member of the Misericórdia of Nagasaki.
A Korean community in Nagasaki
Most Koreans in Nagasaki had to live on the left bank of the Nakajima (中島) river, where they formed the town's most discriminated group.In 1610, though poor, they pooled alms, bought a site and raised a chapel dedicated to St Lawrence, with a confraternity of their own.Some captives returned home: about 7,500 are usually said to have been repatriated, though one study could confirm only 6,323.Among those who went back were two men who had lived in a Jesuit church and travelled by way of Europe, Lee Unseung (李雲勝) and Ryu Gimyeong (柳起溟).
A few rose to positions of trust.Julia Ota, a Korean noblewoman taken as a child and brought to Japan by Konishi, became a leading lady at the court of Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康).In 1612 she was exiled to the Izu (伊豆) islands for her faith.
The Jesuits hoped Korean Christians would open their homeland to the Gospel.As early as 1605 Father Spinola offered to go to Korea, but sudden disturbances there prevented it.Brother Vincent Kaun, a Korean protected by Konishi, was chosen to enter the country with Father Zola.When no way opened by sea, he was sent through China in 1612, almost as far as Beijing, and returned to Japan seven years later a master of Chinese characters.
Hidden helpers and martyrs
After the expulsion of the missionaries in 1614, former Korean slaves in Nagasaki hid incoming priests in their houses, and many served as catechists.They belonged to the confraternities of the Dominicans, Jesuits and Franciscans.At Kuchinotsu (口之津) in November 1614, a poor Korean labourer named Michael, captured in the war and baptised at Nagasaki, died under torture as the tendons of his knees were cut.He had taken Christian lepers into his house and warmed them at his fire, calling them his brothers.Peter, another Korean, died with him, having insisted on being enrolled as a Christian although he was too poor to be listed.
Cosme Takeya, captured in Korea at the age of eleven and baptised at Nagasaki, was burned there on November 18, 1619, and has been called the first martyr of Korea.In the Great Martyrdom of September 10, 1622, Blessed Antonio, a Korean catechist of the Jesuits and host of Father Sebastião Kimura (木村), was burned alive.His wife, Blessed Maria, and their sons Juan, aged twelve, and Pedro, aged three, were beheaded the same day.Antonio's own maid, a Korean whom he had freed, had betrayed him and the priest for money.That same year a Korean widow named Agnes bought the relics of Blessed Luis Flores and kept them in her Nagasaki house, where Dominicans used to meet.
More Korean martyrs followed.Brother Vincent Kaun was burned at Nagasaki on June 20, 1626, aged 46.Blessed Caio Jiyemon, a former Buddhist monk who sheltered the Dominicans, was burned there in August 1627.At Unzen (雲仙) in 1629 a Korean woman, Isabel, held firm when told her husband had given in, saying, "I have an eternal spouse in heaven" (translated).After thirteen days of torture, the governor's men forced her hand to sign a paper of apostasy.In March 1643 a Korean named Thomas, who had served in the church of the Japanese Christians in Cambodia, died in the pit at Nagasaki with the Rubino group.
Later links between Japan and Korea
Contacts between the two Christian communities resurfaced in the nineteenth century.In 1826 Korean Christians learned that the shogun had asked the King of Korea to send back six Christian men who had fled there by boat.In 1838 Bishop Laurent Imbert, looking toward Japan, had a catechist sent to the Japanese at the southern tip of the peninsula to ask whether any remnant of the old Church survived; he was martyred near Seoul in 1839.In December 1864 Father Petitjean (プティジャン) slipped into the quarter of some Koreans held in the port, several of them Catholics, and one showed him a crucifix hidden on his breast.Nagasaki later became a refuge for the Church in Korea.On July 14, 1882, Bishop Blanc received episcopal consecration there from Bishop Petitjean, and the relics of Bishop Daveluy and his companions, martyred in 1866, rested in the city from 1882 until 1894.
Under Japanese rule the relationship changed.After the annexation of Korea, the Japanese Kumiai churches began evangelising Koreans with the support of the colonial authorities.In the 1930s Korean Catholics came to terms with the shrine ceremonies, but in November 1935 two American Presbyterian missionaries refused them at P'yongyang, which led to widespread persecution of Korean Christians and the imprisonment of many ministers.Korean Christians held that emperor worship and the lordship of Jesus Christ were incompatible, and some died as martyrs.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- The number of captives. Japanese estimates give 20,000 to 30,000 and Korean estimates more than 100,000;Yamaguchi gives at least 50,000 and Naitō 30,700 for Satsuma alone;Naitō also gives 50,000 to 60,000 in all; a Korean memorial speaks of 30,000 to 40,000 men and 60,000 to 80,000 women.
- Repatriation. about 7,500 are usually said to have returned, but Yonetani could confirm only 6,323.
- The Korean church in Nagasaki. the annual letter of 1610 describes a chapel of St Lawrence, while Tronu, citing Oliveira e Costa, places the Korean brotherhood of 1610 probably at a church of St Lazarus in the Korean neighbourhood.
- The night of penance in 1596. Fróis places it on Good Friday,Bartoli on the night of Holy Wednesday.
- The Kuchinotsu martyrdom. Profillet and Bartoli give November 22, 1614,Anesaki's list November 23.Peter's age as printed by Profillet does not fit his years as a slave.
- Pierre Arizo. Profillet says he was killed in his house at Ōmura on July 19, 1619; other lists place his beheading at Edo on July 19, or on July 10.
- The two Korean martyrs named Caio. Anesaki doubts they were different men;Profillet dates Caio Jiyemon's death to August 16, 1627, Anesaki to August 17, and Delplace calls him Gaspar Jiyemon.
- Antonio's wife. Spinola calls her Japanese, while Anesaki's list reads "Maria, wife of Joan, Korean".
- Thomas in 1643. Marnas says he died on March 20 after three days in the pit,Profillet on March 21 after four days.
- Calling Cosme Takeya the first martyr of Korea is Boero's opinion.
- Profillet says that St Leo Karasumaru, one of the twenty-six martyrs of 1597, was born in Korea.
- Murdoch rejects the view of Church historians that Hideyoshi's war aimed to remove Japan's Christian lords to Korea.