A shipwreck in Tosa
In October 1596 a Spanish galleon, the San Felipe, was driven by a typhoon onto the coast of Tosa in Shikoku. The lord of Tosa, Chōsokabe Motochika, reported it to , who sent one of his five commissioners, Mashita Nagamori, to seize the ship's very large cargo.The town of Togitsu's history notes that Hideyoshi's treasury was under strain that year, after typhoons, a great earthquake and the costs of the invasion of Korea.
During the confiscation, a member of the crew said something fatal. The Japan Tourism Agency puts it in the captain's mouth: Spain conquered overseas territory by sending missionaries first and conquistadors after.Togitsu's text says only that a crew member described preaching as a forerunner of colonisation.The early printed accounts give the words to the ship's pilot. The Franciscan Baltasar de Medina, writing in Mexico in the 1680s, names him Francisco de Landa and has him show a sea chart to the Japanese official and answer that the friars went in first with the Gospel and the soldiers after with their weapons.Charlevoix, the Jesuit historian, tells the same scene with a map of the world in the room, and so does the Franciscan Emmanuel Kenners in 1862.All of them were writing long after the event, so the speech is reported here as Tradition, not as verified fact.
Hideyoshi had already in 1587. Now he used that order as his ground. He ordered the arrest of the missionaries and believers who had been preaching openly in .
The twenty-six were killed to frighten Christians away from the faith. The hill where they died became the ground the Tokugawa called unclean, and then a place of pilgrimage. And the church built for them in 1865 was the place where Japan's hidden Christians came out of hiding.
Twenty-four
Twenty-four people were taken: six Franciscan priests and brothers, three Japanese of the Jesuits, among them , and fifteen lay Christians close to the Franciscans.(Togitsu's text says fourteen, which does not add up to twenty-four. Profillet's martyrology counts seventeen lay martyrs, all Franciscan tertiaries, and two of those joined on the road, which leaves fifteen among the twenty-four.)
The Franciscans were led by Pedro Bautista, a Spanish priest who had come to Japan as an envoy of the governor of the Philippines and had been received by Hideyoshi.The Jesuits were Paul Miki, a preacher from Tokushima who had studied at the , and two others.Among the laymen were boys. Thomas Kozaki had been baptised, with his family, after seeing how the Franciscans lived. Antonio, whose father was Chinese and mother Japanese, had served Mass at the Franciscans' house in before moving to Kyoto and Osaka. Louis Ibaraki was twelve.
On 3 January 1597 the prisoners were brought, still bound, to the bridge called Ichijō Modoribashi in Kyoto, and the lobes of their left ears were cut off.The Pauline Fathers' account of the site says Hideyoshi had ordered both ears and the nose cut off, and that the magistrate Ishida Mitsunari, who was not unsympathetic to the Christians, had the sentence reduced to one ear. The executioner threw the ear lobes on the ground; a Christian, Victor Noda Gensuke, picked them up and took them to Father .Then, as was the custom for criminals, the twenty-four were put on ox-carts and paraded through the streets.
The parades went on through Kyoto, Osaka and Sakai.It was then decided that they would be executed at Nagasaki, the city with the most Christians.
The winter road
On 9 January 1597 the prisoners left Sakai on foot for Nagasaki.The Japan Tourism Agency's text describes them walking barefoot, in rags, through the coldest part of winter, about a thousand kilometres (the Pauline Fathers' summary says 800).They had guards, whose orders were to make sure that none of them died on the way of illness or accident.
Two Christians who wanted to share their fate joined them on the road, and they became twenty-six.The Pauline Fathers' summary places this near Okayama.Charlevoix tells how it happened. Father Organtino had sent a Christian named Pierre (Peter) to follow the prisoners with provisions, and another, Francis, devoted to the Franciscans, went with him. After some days the guards turned on them, asked whether they too worshipped the Christians' God, and, when they said they did, added them to the prisoners on their own authority.At Mihara in Hiroshima, Thomas Kozaki wrote a farewell letter to his mother. At Karatsu the youngest, Louis Ibaraki, was offered a way out and refused it.
On 4 February, around midday, they reached Sonogi, on Ōmura Bay. Two Jesuits, Francisco Pasio and , had come there hoping to hear their confessions and give them Communion, but the officer in charge, called Fazambouro or Fazamburo in the French and English accounts, hurried them on. Hesselink's timeline says the executions were in the charge of Hanzaburō, younger brother of the governor Terazawa Hirotaka, and "Fazamburo" may be the same name in Portuguese spelling, though no source here says so outright.Rodrigues was allowed only to greet and embrace them. Pedro Bautista, the Franciscan superior, took him aside and asked pardon, in the name of all the Franciscans, for the trouble they had caused the Jesuits, and Rodrigues asked the same of him, and the two men embraced in tears.Ropes were put round their necks, their hands tied behind them with the same ropes, and they were put into three boats. They crossed the bay to Togitsu, arriving around eleven at night. According to Togitsu's account, they spent that snowy night in the boats, cold and hungry.The older accounts agree: Kenners has them pass the greater part of the night on board in the harbour he calls Tonchizu, about three miles from Nagasaki, in bitter cold, and Profillet says the same.Early on the morning of 5 February they landed and set out on the road for Nagasaki, about the last twelve kilometres.Exactly where they landed is not known: the Togitsu harbour, the Hamada harbour and Kitadomari have all been proposed.
Their road passed through Urakami. The Pauline Fathers' summary says they reached the leprosy hospital in Urakami in the early morning, and from there went on to .
Nishizaka
The hill of Nishizaka overlooks Nagasaki. They reached it during the morning, and there the twenty-six were fixed one by one to crosses and killed with spears.The Pauline Fathers' summary says about four thousand Christians watched, and that the bodies were left on the crosses for more than a month.The words carved today above the monument, Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, are those the martyrs are said to have sung as they died.Paul Miki's sermon from the cross is on his own page.
They were six Franciscans, three Jesuits and seventeen lay Christians.Besides the Japanese, there were four Spaniards, one Mexican and one Portuguese.The three smallest figures in the monument are children who were between twelve and fourteen at their deaths.
Accounts by Jesuits in Nagasaki, among them, carried the story to Europe, where it caused a great stir.Under the Tokugawa, the place where they died was called bateren fujōchi, "the unclean ground of the foreign priests."Hundreds more were martyred there afterwards.
Saints, and a church facing the hill
Pope Pius IX canonised the twenty-six on 8 June 1862.Three years later, in 1865, a church was built on the hill at Ōura and dedicated to them: the Church of the Twenty-Six Martyrs, today's .It was in that church, built for these martyrs, that the of Urakami made themselves known to Father on .
In 1950 Pope Pius XII declared Nishizaka an official place of Catholic pilgrimage.Nagasaki Prefecture designated the martyrdom site a prefectural historic site on 6 April 1956.For the centenary of the canonisation, the sculptor Funakoshi Yasutake made the great bronze relief of the twenty-six, life-size, which faces Ōura Cathedral; the museum and the Church of St Philip beside it, designed by Imai Kenji, opened in 1962.The museum, run by the Jesuits, keeps relics of the three Japanese Jesuits, Paul Miki, James Kisai and John of .
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Distance: 1,000 km (JTA) vs 800 km (Pauline). The early accounts give stage distances only (Kenners: Sonogi about twenty-nine miles from Nagasaki; Profillet: seven leagues), not a total. Still .
- Thomas Kozaki's age: Kenners (1862) says twelve; Profillet (1895) and the Pauline summary say fifteen; JTA puts the three children at 12 to 14.Still (the gap may come from Japanese age counting, which is not stated in these sources). Kenners also makes Louis Ibaraki ten, against twelve elsewhere.