The friars in Japan: Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians

In Kyoto in the 1590s a boy named Thomas Kozaki and his family were baptised. Our page on the twenty-six martyrs records why: they had seen how the Franciscans lived.¹A few years later Thomas, still a boy, walked with the friars from Kyoto to Nagasaki and died with them on the cross at Nishizaka on 5 February 1597.¹

That is the best way into the story of the mendicant orders in Japan. Mendicant means "begging". The Franciscans and the Dominicans, the encyclopedias explain, are called the begging orders because, following the poor Christ, they gave up all property, worked with their hands and lived on alms.²³Nipponica describes the first Franciscans keeping rough clothes, refusing money, living in small houses in the towns and walking from place to place to preach the Gospel.²When they came to Japan, by way of Spanish Manila, people saw that way of life, and some of them, like Thomas Kozaki's family, were won by it. The thread of this page is the friars and the poor and sick who were their special charge.

Until the 1590s the Jesuits had been alone in Japan. The Franciscan mission began in 1593, Yamakawa's dictionary says, when the Spanish friar Pedro Bautista came as envoy of the governor of the Philippines.⁴Bautista had joined the order in 1566, gone to the Philippines by way of Mexico, and served as superior in Manila.⁵He was received by Hideyoshi at Nagoya in Hizen, obtained leave to stay by asking to see Kyoto, and founded friaries in Kyoto, Osaka and Nagasaki.⁵The boy Antonio, whose father was Chinese and mother Japanese, served Mass at the Franciscans' house in Nagasaki.¹

The friars preached openly, although Hideyoshi's expulsion order of 1587 was still in force. Yamakawa notes that this helped bring about the arrests of 1596, and that the arrival of the friars began a long dispute with the Jesuits, who had until then had the Japan mission to themselves.⁴It was a dispute between two ways of mission, both sincere. The friars' way cost them dearly. When the Spanish galleon San Felipe was wrecked in Tosa in October 1596, Hideyoshi ordered the missionaries in Kyoto and Osaka arrested.¹⁵Twenty-four were taken: six Franciscan priests and brothers, three Japanese of the Jesuits, among them Paul Miki, and fifteen lay Christians close to the Franciscans; the martyrologist Profillet counts the lay martyrs as Franciscan tertiaries.¹Two more joined them on the road. On 5 February 1597 the twenty-six were crucified at Nishizaka. They included four Spaniards, a Mexican and a Portuguese, and three boys of twelve to fourteen.¹Pope Pius IX canonised them in Rome on 8 June 1862.⁵¹⁷

The Dominicans came next. Their mission began in 1602 in Satsuma.⁷Our place guide for Santo Domingo tells their first years. They had a church on Shimokoshiki island in 1602, moved it to Sendai in 1606, and opened at Kyōdomari in Satsuma their first church dedicated to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary.⁸When the lord of Satsuma ordered them out in 1609, their leader, Father Francisco de Morales, had the church taken apart and carried by sea to Nagasaki. He took with him some lepers for whom he had founded a hospital, because he would not leave them to the mercy of strangers.⁸On land given by the Christian magistrate Murayama Tōan he built the church of Our Lady of the Rosary and St Dominic.⁸It stood for five years.⁸

The Augustinians, Ōbunsha's dictionary says, came in 1602 too, and worked mainly in Kyushu.⁹Other friars went north. The Franciscan Luis Sotelo, who arrived in 1603, preached in Kyoto, Osaka and Edo and opened a hospital for lepers at Asakusa in Edo; with the favour of Date Masamune he preached in the north-east, and in 1613 he sailed with Hasekura Tsunenaga on Date's embassy to Spain and Rome.¹⁰Yamakawa says the embassy itself was the order's plan.⁴

In 1614 the shogunate banned Christianity. For six months, from April to October, the religious orders of Nagasaki led processions and public penances through the city, hoping that the edict might yet be softened.¹¹Then the missionaries were shipped out of Nagasaki to Manila and Macao. Pagès counts two Dominicans, four Franciscans and two Augustinians among those who went to Manila.¹¹But the friars did not all go. By agreement with the local Christians, boats slipped out after the ships once the guards turned back, and took off two Dominicans and two Franciscans, who changed into Japanese clothes on the way back.¹¹Pagès counts, hidden in Japan, seven Dominicans and seven Franciscans alongside the Jesuits.¹¹Yamakawa's dictionary gives the same seven Dominicans and adds what they did: under persecution they organised the Rosary confraternities, Rozario no kumi, among the Christians in many places.⁷

These confraternities were how lay Christians held together without priests. In Nagasaki the Dominican Father Morales lived in the house of his host Andrew Tokuan, who led the men of the city's confraternity of the rosary.⁸He was taken there on 15 March 1619. To the officer sent to arrest him, a former Christian named Yasuemon, he said: "You are welcome, Yasuemon-dono. Far from bearing you any bitterness, I am grateful to you, and I could know no greater happiness than to be a prisoner for Jesus Christ."⁸

The great persecution began with an Augustinian and a Dominican. In 1620 the English and Dutch seized a Japanese ship captained by Hirayama Jōchin and found two missionaries hidden on board, 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.¹²

On 10 September 1622 fifty-five Christians died at Nishizaka in the Great Martyrdom of Genna. Heibonsha's historian counts twenty-one members of religious orders, nine of them priests, killed at one stroke, among them the Dominican vicar provincial Francisco Morales.¹²At the stakes stood the Dominicans Angelo Orsucci, José of St Hyacinth and Jacinto Orfanel, and the Dominican and Franciscan friars Richard of St Anne, Alonso de Mena, Pedro de Ávila, Vicente of St Joseph and Leo of Satsuma, beside the Jesuits Spinola and Kimura.¹²Before they died Morales blessed Tokuan's wife Mary, who knelt at his feet.⁸

The next year, on 4 December 1623, fifty Christians were burned at Fuda-no-tsuji outside Edo; their leaders were the Jesuit Girolamo de Angelis, the Franciscan Francisco Gálvez and the samurai John Hara Mondo.¹³Gálvez had been taken at Kamakura with his host. On the road to the stakes, the Jesuit annual letter says, he rode at the head of the second group, and they went "as though in triumphal procession". He was bound last, and, last alive, he died standing against his stake.¹³Sotelo, who had come back secretly in 1622, was caught at once in Satsuma, and in 1624 he was burned near Ōmura.¹⁰Japanese friars shared the work. The Dominican Jacobo Tomonaga, a Japanese priest, came back into the country in 1632 in the same junk as Konishi Mansho.¹⁴

Ōbunsha dates the end of the Augustinian mission to 1637; Yamakawa says the Dominicans' work lasted until 1637 and that the Franciscans were wiped out in 1638.⁴⁷⁹Pius IX beatified the martyrs Gálvez and Sotelo among the 205 martyrs of Japan in 1867.¹⁰¹³

The orders came back when Japan reopened. The Dominicans resumed their mission in 1904 and the Franciscans in 1907, Yamakawa records.⁴⁷In 1921 Canadian Franciscans took over the mission on Amami Ōshima, where they opened a girls' high school in 1924; in the 1930s the Amami faithful and their priests suffered a campaign of suspicion and pressure, which our Amami page tells.¹⁵

And on 24 April 1930 a Polish Conventual Franciscan landed at Nagasaki with almost no Japanese and a printing press. Maximilian Kolbe went first to Ōura Church, published the Japanese Knight of the Immaculata within a month, and founded the friary of Mugenzai no Sono on the slopes of Mount Hiko. At Auschwitz, at the end of July 1941, when the commander picked prisoners to die of starvation, he came forward, John Paul II recalled at his canonisation, "and declared himself ready to go to death in the place of" another man.¹⁶The friary he founded still stands in Nagasaki.¹⁶

The friars brought their own way of mission, which sometimes clashed with the Jesuits'. What they gave the Japanese Church was their poverty, their care for the sick, the rosary confraternities that held the hidden faithful together, and a great many martyrs. When the boy Thomas Kozaki saw how the Franciscans lived, he saw what the rest of Japan came to see at Nishizaka.

Read the pages on the twenty-six martyrs, Paul Miki, Santo Domingo church, the Great Martyrdoms of Genna (1622) and Edo (1623), Maximilian Kolbe, and Amami in the 1930s.