Manila and Japan

On the evening of 27 December 1637 the bells rang in Manila and a Te Deum was sung in the Dominican church of Santo Domingo, inside the walls of the old city. News had come from Nagasaki of the martyrdom of six Christians. Among them were the head of the mission, the Spanish Dominican Antonio González, and a married man with a family, born outside the walls in the suburb of Binondo: Lorenzo Ruiz.¹

Pope John Paul II told that story on 18 February 1981, when he beatified Lorenzo Ruiz and fifteen companions in Manila, and he chose his words with care: Manila, Luzon and Formosa were "the wide and providential starting-point" of the priests who later sailed for Nagasaki.¹For the Church in Japan, Manila was a door. Friars came through it, exiles went out through it, and in the years of the ban the last missionaries left from it to try to land. This page follows that door.

Manila became the base of Spanish rule in the Philippines in 1571, when the governor Legazpi moved there; for more than three hundred years, Heibonsha says, it was the centre of Spanish rule and of "Spanish Catholic power" in the Far East, and the home port of the galleons that linked Mexico and Asia.²The heart of the city was the walled town of Intramuros, with the governor's palace, the archbishop's residence, the churches of the religious orders, the cathedral, a university and hospitals.²The Archdiocese of Manila was founded in 1579, and the Dominican Province of the Holy Rosary was established in 1587, John Paul II recalled, "for the evangelization of the Far East"; the College of Santo Tomás, founded in 1611, became in 1645 the pontifical university.¹²

Until the 1590s the Jesuits had been alone in Japan, coming from Macao. The Franciscan mission began in 1593, the Yamakawa dictionary says, when the Spanish friar Pedro Bautista came as envoy of the governor of the Philippines.³Bautista had gone to the Philippines by way of Mexico and served as superior in Manila.³Hideyoshi received him at Nagoya in Hizen and gave him leave to stay.³The Dominicans and the Augustinians followed in 1602.³

The friars' coming was costly. In October 1596 the Spanish galleon San Felipe was wrecked on the coast of Tosa; in the anger that followed, Hideyoshi had the friars of Kyoto and Osaka arrested, and on 5 February 1597 twenty-six Christians, six of them Franciscans, were crucified at Nishizaka.³⁴Pedro Bautista, who had come from Manila, died among them. Pius IX canonised them on 8 June 1862.³⁴

In 1614 the Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity and shipped the missionaries out of Nagasaki. The ships were few, small and in poor repair. One was to take the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, twenty-three Jesuits and the Japanese exiles, among them Takayama Ukon, to Manila; when someone objected that it was too small for the women, Pagès records, the answer came back that they could be tied to the outside of the hull.⁵Pagès counts those who went to Manila: twenty-three Jesuits, two Dominicans, four Franciscans, two Augustinians and two secular priests.⁵

Ukon reached Manila on 28 November 1614 and was received with great honour by the governor, Juan de Silva, and the bishop.⁵He died there soon afterwards, of fever, the Kotobank encyclopedias say, in 1615.⁶His story belongs to his own page (Blessed Justo Takayama Ukon, the Lord Who Gave Up His Castle).

The mission's printing press went too. After the general ban of 1614, the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten says, the press was handed over to Manila.⁷

Manila already had a Japanese community. In the early seventeenth century Japanese merchants came there on the shogun's licensed red-seal ships, and a Japanese town grew up outside the walls.²⁸Nipponica names its two quarters, San Miguel and Dilao, and says that at its height the Luzon Japanese town, with some three thousand people, was the largest of the Japanese towns of Southeast Asia; among those who went abroad and stayed, it notes, were Christians.⁸The Jesuit Diogo Yūki, who had taught Petro Kasui Kibe Latin, was ordained priest in Manila in 1615 and wrote to the Jesuit General that many Japanese students there were thinking of going to Rome.⁹John Paul II spoke of the Dominicans' ministry "among the Japanese colony in Manila".¹

For the next three decades Manila was a starting point for priests trying to return. In 1620 the English and the Dutch seized a Japanese ship coming from Manila and found two friars hidden on board, the Augustinian Pedro de Zúñiga and the Dominican Luis Flores; they were burned in 1622.¹⁰Japan broke off relations with Manila in 1624, and from then on every priest who sailed north from Manila did so knowing that the ports were closed to him.⁹They went anyway, in small boats like the one Kibe and Matsuda bought, or, like Sidotti later, dressed as Japanese.⁹¹³Kibe passed through Manila in 1625 on his way from Goa to Macao, and came back in 1629 on the Manila governor's embassy ship from Ayutthaya; on 2 March 1630, with Fr Miguel Matsuda, he left Manila in a boat bought with alms for Lubang island, and from there reached Japan.⁹Konishi Mansho landed in Satsuma from Manila in 1632.¹¹

Others never returned. Dutch ships forced the Jesuits Giuseppe Chiara and Marcello Mastrilli off course to Manila in 1636; Mastrilli went on to Japan and was killed there in 1637.¹²In July 1642 Antonio Rubino and four other Jesuits left Manila and were taken on the Koshiki islands off Satsuma; all died in the pit at Nagasaki in 1643.¹²Sixty years later the Sicilian priest Giovanni Battista Sidotti spent four years in Manila, from 1704, studying Japanese with Japanese living in the city; he also ran a seminary and helped found a charity for abandoned children, and people called him "Battista Stella". In 1707 the governor paid for a ship to carry him north; he left Manila on 23 August 1708 and was put ashore on Yakushima.¹³

Lorenzo Ruiz was the son of a Chinese father and a Tagalog mother, John Paul II said, and had been taught the faith in the Dominican school at Binondo and served in the parish church of Saint Gabriel there.¹Guided, the Pope said, "by the Holy Spirit to an unexpected goal after an adventurous journey", he came to Japan with the Dominican mission. At Nagasaki he told the court that he was a Christian and would give his life for God a thousand times.¹He and his companions died in 1637 by the gallows and the pit, an ordeal that lasted three days.¹

The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints lists sixteen martyrs in the group: Lorenzo Ruiz, a layman; Domingo Ibáñez de Erquicia and Jacobo Kyushei Gorobioye Tomonaga, both Dominicans; and thirteen companions, martyrs of Japan, who died in 1633, 1634 and 1637.¹⁴¹The Pope described them: nine priests, two professed brothers, two members of the Third Order, a catechist and a guide-interpreter; nine were Japanese, four Spaniards, one French and one Italian.¹He named two Japanese women among them, Magdalena of Nagasaki and Marina of Ōmura, "courageous women" who with Mary's rosary were "intrepid guardians of his word".¹

The Pope let the martyrs speak for themselves. Before the judges at Nagasaki, the Dominican Guillaume Courtet summed up their mission: "We have come to Japan only to preach faith in God and to teach salvation to little ones and to the innocent and to all the rest of the people."¹Miguel de Aozaraza, contemplating the wounds of Christ, cried out: "What beautiful carnations, what bloodred roses shed for love of you, my God!" Giordano Ansalone asked Mary to restore his health so that he could die only as a victim for Christ.¹Four of the sixteen had been professors at the College of Santo Tomás in Manila, one of them its rector, and a fifth had studied there; before they sailed for Nagasaki, the Pope said, they had worked among the Chinese of Binondo, the Japanese of Manila, the peoples of Bataan, Pangasinan and Cagayan, and in Formosa.¹

They were beatified in Manila on 18 February 1981 and canonised in Rome on 18 October 1987.¹⁴At the Mass he greeted the Churches of Italy, France and Spain, and of Taiwan, Macau, the Philippines and Japan, to which the sixteen belonged "by birth, apostolic work or martyrdom". "By their place of death," he said, "they are all Japanese."¹A few days later he was in Nagasaki, near the hill of Nishizaka where they had suffered, as he had promised.¹¹⁵

Manila and Nagasaki share their martyrs. The Spanish city that sent the friars also sent the boats, the alms and the prayers, and it sang the Te Deum when the news of their deaths came back. The first saint of the Philippines died on a Japanese hill, and the Pope who raised him to the altars went on from Manila to pray at that hill.