Life
She was the daughter of , lord of Bungo. She married Ichijō Kanesada of Tosa but they separated, and she later remarried Kiyota Shigetada, a retainer of the Ōtomo house.Miyamoto dates the second marriage to about 1575 (Tenshō 3), after her divorce from Ichijō Kanesada.Tenshō ran from 1573 to 1592.
Her husband was baptized in 1578, when her father Sōrin was baptized; Justa was baptized later, in 1580, after persistent opposition from her mother Isabel.Kōdansha gives a different year (Disputed): baptized in Tenshō 10 (1582), she helped her father, a Christian , in his work.
The couple lived as Christians in Bungo for about ten years and worked to convert the people of their lands.In 1587, during the Shimazu attack on Bungo, Shigetada was stripped of his lands by Ōtomo Yoshimune on the charge of having sided with the enemy, and husband and wife were both driven out of Bungo; a Jesuit annual letter for 1588 says they lived for a time "in a certain place".Miyamoto suggests this was in Kikuchi district, Higo (Unverified; his own inference).Shigetada, already ill, died in that same year, on Tenshō 15.11.23 (December 22, 1587).
Justa stayed. She spent the next forty years in Nagasaki and died of illness on Kan'ei 4.8.7 (September 16, 1627), attended by the Shiga family, who were also from Bungo and had become village headmen of Fuchi.Kan'ei ran from 1624 to 1644. Her date of death can be confirmed in the Shiga family records: the Shiga genealogy, the Tennyo-byō stele put up in Bunsei 12, and the shrine built in Meiji 33.
Because Christian graves were forbidden, the Shiga family set up a small natural-stone mound in a corner of the headman's house; it was moved in the Meiji period and, in 1936, into the grounds of Fuchi Shrine, where it is the Kuwahime-sha shrine honoring Justa.That identification is Miyamoto's conclusion and is Disputed.
Not to be confused with
Blessed Magdalena Kiyota is a different woman. She was a widow, one of the companions of Blessed Francisco de Santa María martyred in Nagasaki in 1627, and was beatified by Pius IX on July 7, 1867.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Disputed: the year of her baptism. Miyamoto gives 1580; Kōdansha gives Tenshō 10 (1582).
- Disputed: whether she died a martyr. A book on the Kiyota family, Kanō Teruki and Maeda Shigeharu's 『大友の末葉・清田一族』, p. 38, says she was arrested and martyred on Kan'ei 4.8.17 (1627). Miyamoto argues that this confuses the martyrdom date of Magdalena Kiyota (Kan'ei 4.8.17) with Justa's date of death by illness (Kan'ei 4.8.7), and notes that no Jesuit, Dominican or Franciscan source records a martyrdom of Justa.The Kanō and Maeda book itself has not yet been seen.
- Disputed: whether she is the "Kuwahime" (Princess Kuwa) of the Kuwahime shrine. Miyamoto identifies her through the Shiga family records and the gifts of the Takenaka Uneme. He says Kataoka Yakichi mistakenly took Kuwahime to be Masencia, Sōrin's granddaughter, a nun who died in 1605 aged 18.Miyamoto had earlier proposed Magdalena Kiyota and later withdrew it.
- Unverified: the year of the first marriage (Miyamoto writes "1564?").
- Unverified: facts that rest on Miyamoto's blog alone . These include the 1580 baptism, the ten years in Bungo, Shigetada's death date, the Shiga family's care, her death date (from the Shiga records), and the moves of her stone.
- Unverified: a second memorial in Bungo. Kanō and Maeda, as reported by Miyamoto, say a gravestone for her was moved from Kiyota village to Chōkōji at Matsuoka in Ōita district.No primary source for it has been seen.