Blessed Julian Nakaura, the Envoy Who Came Home

The boys reached Rome on 22 March 1585. The next day Pope Gregory XIII received them in a public consistory, with the bells of the city ringing and the guns of Castel Sant'Angelo firing in salute. Julian was not there. He was in bed with a high fever.⁴When the old pope heard that one of the boys was ill, he sent his own doctors to him at once.⁴The Japanese bishops' account of Julian's life says that the pope embraced the sick boy.¹Takada adds that Julian, alone of the four, was received by Gregory XIII in a special audience of his own.⁵

He missed more than the consistory. Gregory XIII died on 10 April, and Julian was still too unwell to attend the coronation of Sixtus V on 1 May.⁴Still, he had met two popes and Philip II of Spain, and a Japanese government heritage text names all three.³Of all the boys, Cooper notes, Julian was always the sickly one.⁴

The envoys landed at Nagasaki on 21 July 1590.²⁴Japan had changed. In 1587 Toyotomi Hideyoshi had ordered the missionaries out. Even so, on 3 March 1591 he received the returning envoys at his Jurakudai palace in Kyoto, asked them about Europe, and had them play Western music for him.¹⁴

Julian chose his road at once. In 1591 he entered the Society of Jesus with the other three, at the novitiate in Amakusa, and took his first vows two years later.¹²His first posting was Yatsushiro.¹In 1601 he was sent to Macau to study for the priesthood, but his ordination was put off; he came back in 1604 and worked at the Arima seminary, in Kyoto and in Hakata.¹²At last, in 1608, he was ordained priest in Nagasaki.¹

In 1614 the Tokugawa banned the faith across Japan and sent the missionaries into exile. Of the four envoys, Mancio had died in 1612 and Michael had left the faith; Martin sailed for Macau.⁴Julian stayed. He was one of twenty-seven Jesuits who remained hidden in Japan.²

The months before the exile show what kind of priest he was. In March 1614 a Christian named Matthias Shichirobyōe was martyred at Akizuki in Chikuzen; twenty days later Julian and the young Petro Kasui Kibe dug his body from its grave and carried it to Nagasaki, to lie in the martyrs' cemetery.⁵In May, at real risk, Julian slipped into Kokura castle to visit the family of Ogasawara Gen'ya, Christians held prisoner there; the Jesuit annual report for 1614 records the visit.⁵When the ships left in November he saw the body of his old teacher Fr Diogo de Mesquita put aboard for Macau, and he carried the bones of his friend Mancio Itō home to Mancio's mother at Obi.⁵Then he went to Kuchinotsu, where twenty-two Christians had just been killed, and became its parish priest.⁵

For the next eighteen years he worked from Kuchinotsu, at the tip of the Shimabara peninsula, travelling to Amakusa, Yatsushiro, Yanagawa and Kokura to visit the scattered Christians, hear confessions and say Mass.¹In the spring of 1620 the Jesuit report has him in Chikugo and Buzen, where sheltering a missionary now meant death; on Ascension Day, 28 May, he said Mass in the house of a sick Christian woman.⁵On 21 December 1621, the feast of St Thomas, in a hidden chapel in the house of the village headman Miguel Sukeemon at Kazusa, he made his final vows as a Jesuit before the Provincial, Fr Francisco Pacheco. The signed vow is kept today at the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum in Nagasaki.⁵

He was not strong. In 1624, Takada writes, a stroke left him hardly able to walk, and the Christians carried him from place to place in a palanquin.⁵²In a letter he wrote that he did it all "for Christ and the Roman Church".¹Rome was never far from his mind. Since his first visit he had kept up a correspondence with Fr Nuno Mascarenhas, a Portuguese Jesuit in Rome who became his spiritual director by letter, and he wrote to him again in September 1621.⁵

In his last years he worked in Buzen with a catechist, Thomas Ryōkan. At the end of 1632 he was taken at Kokura.⁴Takada places the arrest in December 1632, by the men of the new lord, Ogasawara Tadazane, with Thomas Ryōkan beside him.⁵The Japanese bishops' account places his capture at the time when Hosokawa Tadatoshi, lord of Kokura, was moving to Kumamoto.¹He was sent to Nagasaki and held for about ten months in the Kurusu-machi prison.¹

That year Nagasaki's new magistrates brought in a new torture. In July 1633 the Japanese Jesuit Nicolás Fukunaga was the first to be hung in the pit, and he died praying to the Virgin Mary. Through August and September others followed, among them Julian's close friend Fr Bento Fernandes and Fr Paulo Saitō, who died on the same day.⁵Julian had ten months in prison to know what was coming.

On 18 October 1633 eight men were led out to the pit at Nagasaki, the torture in which a prisoner hung head down in a hole until he gave up his faith or died. Julian was one of them.¹²Another was the Jesuit superior Cristóvão Ferreira, who gave up his faith.¹Others did not: the Dominican Lucas del Espíritu Santo, who died in the same pit, was canonised in 1987 among the martyrs of Nagasaki.¹

Portuguese witnesses said that as he was taken to the pit Julian said, "I am Julian Nakaura, who went to Rome."²⁴He lived until the fourth day. He died on 21 October 1633.¹²His last words, as the bishops' account gives them, were: "This great suffering is for the love of God."¹

On 24 November 2008, at Nagasaki, Pope Benedict XVI's representative beatified him with 187 other martyrs of Japan.¹³At Nakaura, his birthplace in what is now Saikai city, a memorial park and statue keep his name.¹⁴

Julian went out from a little fishing village to the centre of the Church, and he had been held by a pope. He could have stayed in Macau, or in Rome. He came home instead, and spent his priesthood in hiding with the poorest Christians of Kyushu, burying their martyrs, visiting their prisoners, and at the end being carried by them. When the end came he named himself by the journey that had joined Japan to Rome. The man who had been too ill to meet the pope in public died a public witness for him.