Story
The street of Deus
In the early years of the seventeenth century had its Christian quarters. The geographer Aso Masaru describes the Daiusu-chō, the "Deus streets," Christian communities that grew up on the edges of both the upper and the lower city, with a church in the upper quarter.Around 1605, he notes, more than three hundred people were baptized in Kyoto in a single year.The bishops' canonization committee writes that until 1612 the Kyoto Church lived "days of glory"; most of its faithful were poor and lived quietly in the street called Daiusu-chō, keeping their faith in peace.
The first blow came with the , when the church buildings in the Deus streets were pulled down.The second came under . Early in 1619, the committee writes, the shogun stepped up the persecution, and the governor of Kyoto, Itakura Katsushige, who until then had pretended not to notice the Christians, had most of them put in prison.The French historian Léon Pagès, drawing on the Jesuit letters, tells how thirty-six of the leading residents of the Christian street were chained to a long rope and led through the city to the court, while crowds filled the way.Their goods were confiscated and sold. At New Year, he adds sadly, some creditors used the persecution to strip the Christians of what they had left, and some debtors refused to pay them.
The prison
By the summer, Pagès says, sixty-three Christians were in the prison of Kyoto. Among them was Jean Hashimoto Tahyōe, with his wife Tecla and their children; one son, Michel, who was away at the time, was taken later but released by a judge unwilling to wipe out so considerable a family.The prison was foul: the prisoners' breath fell as dew, and hunger, thirst, sun and rain wore them down. Eight of them died there before the day of execution, among them two children of two years.
Pagès gives two portraits of those who died in prison. One was a blind man, André, prefect of the Congregation of the Annunciation, who, when his host could no longer keep him, had himself led to a bridge where the guards would find him rather than put anyone else at risk. Pressed in court to renounce the faith, "the blind man made himself deaf."Another was Jean Chenzai, a very old physician: "My crime would be too great," he told his judge, "if in my old age I denied the faith that took me in my swaddling clothes." In prison he said, "After being fed and cared for by my brothers for so many years, I see myself suffering for Jesus Christ: what more can I desire?"Their bodies were given back to the Christians, who buried them with honour.
The shogun's order
Hidetada came to the capital in 1619.At Fushimi, the committee and the city's monument record say, he learned that Christians were still held in the Kyoto prison, and in anger ordered that they be burned, young and old, men and women alike, including those who had already been let go; he is said to have decided the manner of execution himself.Pagès says that the governor, who had meant to open the prison, was forced to bring back even those he had allowed to wait at home.The heaps of wood and the twenty-seven crosses raised at the place of execution told everyone what was coming.
The carts
On the day of execution the fifty-two were bound onto carts: eleven carts, Pagès says, with the men and youths in the first and last, and the women with babies at the breast or in their arms in all the others.The Kyoto city monument record says they were loaded onto large handcarts and paraded from Rokujō to Shichijō as a warning.A crier went in front proclaiming the sentence: "The Shōgun, emperor of all Japan, wills and commands that all these persons be burned alive as Christians." And the martyrs answered, Pagès writes, "It is true, we die for Jesus! Long live Jesus!"
Who they were
Pagès's list, taken from the annual letter of the Jesuit Gaspar Luis, shows how far the Christians in the Kyoto prison had come from. Some were natives of the capital, like the Hashimoto family; others came from Bungo, from the Hokkoku (the northern provinces), from the Chūgoku region, from Yamashiro, Yamato, Owari, Kawachi, Tamba, Ōmi and Aki, though Pagès does not say what had brought each of them to the capital.There were whole households: husbands and wives, parents with their children, and at least one grandmother with her granddaughter. A man named Gabriel, of Owari, had left the service of a lord and a large income, Pagès writes, "to lead a life of poverty and to feed on the bread of sorrows for the love of Jesus Christ, his new master."A woman named Rufina rode to her death on the cart as if rapt in God, a state, the letter says, that was almost usual with her.And a woman of Ōmi named Monique had secretly practised holding a red-hot iron, telling her sister: "I am training for martyrdom. I have already fought and overcome hunger; I want to take a new step by trying the heat of the fire."
Pagès, writing as a Catholic historian, compares Tecla to the mothers of the early Church, Symphorosa and Felicity, who saw their sons die before them: she was the mother of six, and when her eldest son Michel was spared, "the seventh child living in her womb" took his place among the martyrs.
The crosses by the river
The crosses stood on the between Rokujō and Shichijō, near the present Shōmen bridge, facing the great Buddha hall of the Daibutsu.They were set four or five fathoms apart, the wood heaped a little way off around them, and the martyrs were tied two by two, back to back. In the middle were the mothers with their children.Pagès names them: Madeleine with her daughter Régine, two years old; Marie with Monique, four; Marthe with her son Benoît, two; another Marie with her son Pierre, four; Mencia with Lucie, three; and Rufine with her daughter Marthe, eight years old and blind.
"When I was in Kyoto," one eyewitness wrote, "I saw fifty-five Christians killed because they would not give up the faith. Among them were small children in their mothers' arms. The mothers were crying, 'Lord Jesus, receive the souls of these children.'"The bishops' committee calls the Kyoto martyrdom "a martyrdom of Japanese infants, and the offering of young mothers."
The relics were guarded by soldiers for seven days and then given to the Christians.Two priests who would themselves later die as martyrs, Bento Fernandes and Diogo Yūki, cared for the condemned, buried the dead and wrote down what had happened.On the same day, at Fushimi, a Christian named Ignacio Shichiemon was burned.After 1619, the city's monument record says, Christians never again appeared openly in the history of Kyoto.
Remembered
Of the three great martyrdoms of the persecution, , and Kyoto in 1619, the Kyoto martyrs waited longest: the committee notes that, despite detailed records, their cause was long left untouched.The Kawaramachi parish adds that, unlike the others, the Kyoto martyrs included no missionaries or religious, only lay faithful, and that Pope John Paul II's words in Japan in 1981, asking whether there were not other martyrs in the "land of martyrs," spurred the cause on.
In 1994, the 1,200th year of the city, a memorial of Kurama stone inscribed "元和キリシタン殉教の地," "Place of the Genna Christian martyrdom," was set up by the river.Beneath it, the Laudate guide and the Kawaramachi parish say, lies a white jar holding fifty-two ribbons with red roses, each bearing a martyr's name; Bishop Tanaka Ken'ichi blessed it.The fifty-two were , among Peter and his 187 companions.