Edo, 1639
In the summer of 1639, in Edo, the city we now call Tokyo, three Catholic priests were hung upside down in pits. Two of them gave in. The third, a 52-year-old Japanese Jesuit named Petro Kasui Kibe, would not. Hanging beside him in the same pit were two catechists, and he kept urging them to hold on, until the guards killed him.
By then he had travelled farther than almost any Japanese of his day. He had gone from to Rome by way of India, Persia and Jerusalem, become a priest in Rome, and then spent ten years fighting his way back into a country that had shut its doors. Japanese writers call him "Japan's Marco Polo" and "the who walked the world".
Here is how it happened.
A boy from the Kunisaki coast
Kibe is a real place: a village on the north shore of the Kunisaki peninsula, which juts into the sea in today's Ōita Prefecture, in northeastern Kyushu. The Kibe family were local gentry there, part of a seafaring band called the Urabe who served the Ōtomo, the lords of the province of Bungo. Their roots go back at least to 1285.
Petro's father, Romano Kibe, was a relative and retainer of the lord of Kibe Castle. In 1585 he asked the Jesuits at Funai for a priest and a brother, and that year about 140 of his family and household were baptized.
Romano was trusted. The padres allowed him to baptize, pray and bury when no priest was present, and in 1589 he baptized the dying wife of the lord of Kibe himself.
Petro's mother was Maria Hata, from another local family of standing.
Petro was born in 1587, the very year the ruler of Japan. We know this from his own words, written in Rome years later: "I am called Petrus Kasui, son of Romanus Kibe and Maria Hata. I am now 33. My homeland is Urabe in the kingdom of Bungo."
Hard times came early. The Ōtomo lost their lands in 1593. In 1600 their heir tried to win them back, and Romano seems to have fought for him at the battle of Ishigakibaru near Beppu, where the head of the Kibe clan was killed. Local tradition says the family then hid at a spot in Imi still called Shōgatsu-yashiki, the "New Year house", where they ate radish at New Year instead of the usual rice cakes.
A catechist in dangerous times
That same year, aged 13, Petro went off to the Jesuit seminary, a boarding school for boys who might one day become priests. It was in at first and moved in 1601 to Arima, on the Shimabara peninsula.
He finished the six-year course in 1606 and hoped to join the Jesuits. They did not take him. Why, the sources do not say.
So he took the next path open to him and became a dōjuku: a lay catechist who lived with the priests, taught the faith and helped in their work. He shaved his head and took a new name, Kasui, often written with characters meaning "living water".
He also made a private vow that he would join the Society of Jesus one day, using a form of vow drawn up by a Jesuit named Nuno Mascarenhas. Remember that name. Years later he wrote: "The motive of my vocation was my own free will; fourteen years ago I made such a vow of my own accord."
For the next eight years he worked at the Jesuit house at Akizuki, in today's Fukuoka Prefecture, under the protection of a Christian lord, Kuroda Naoyuki.
Then, in 1614, the shogun's government banned Christianity everywhere in Japan. That March a leading Christian of Akizuki, Matthias Shichirōbei, was executed. Kibe dug the body out of the grave with his own hands, put it in a wooden box and carried it to the church of Todos os Santos in Nagasaki. He later swore that twenty days after the death, fresh blood still flowed from it. He also cut off one of the martyr's fingers as a relic. He would carry that finger halfway round the world.
Thrown out of Japan
In November 1614 the missionaries, many dōjuku and the Christian samurai were put on ships for Macau and .
Kibe, it seems, did not go with them. By his own later testimony he hid around Arima and the port of Kuchinotsu. There he saw a field of wheat that people said had ripened overnight after a Korean Christian named Miguel was martyred. About March 1615 he slipped away to Manila, in the Philippines, with Matthias's finger.
In Manila he ran into his old Latin teacher, Diogo Yūki, who was ordained a priest there that year. Yūki wrote to the head of the Jesuits that many Japanese students were even thinking of going to Rome.
A closed door in Macau
Later in 1615 Kibe moved on to Macau, the Portuguese port on the south China coast where the exiled Jesuits now had their college. He hoped to study there and finally join the Society.
In 1616 he got his answer. He could be admitted to the Society, but he would not be ordained a priest.
He was not alone. In June 1616 a Jesuit in Macau reported that four senior Japanese preachers, discouraged, had asked to go to India to study. Kibe was probably one of them, along with two friends, Miguel Minoes and Mancio Konishi.
Alone across Asia
In the autumn of 1616 the three friends left Macau and sailed by way of Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, to , the Portuguese capital in India. At Goa they parted. Minoes and Konishi took ship for Europe. Kibe set out alone, overland.
His exact route is lost. The sources mention Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, then Persia (today's Iran), Baghdad and Damascus. A Jesuit history says simply that he "crossed Persia and came to Jerusalem".
It is often said that he walked to Rome. That is not quite true, since a good part of the trip was by sea. But the overland stretch through Persia and the Middle East was real, and nobody can say how much of it he did on foot.
Then comes one of the best finds in the whole story. On 2 April 1618 the Franciscan friars at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem wrote down the pilgrims they received that day. Eleventh of fourteen is "D. Petrus Japonensis": Lord Peter of Japan. A Japanese historian identifies him as Kibe, which makes him the first Japanese known to have visited Jerusalem.
That same day a group of French nobles were made Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. Pilgrims like them normally went on to Rome, and Kibe may have travelled with them. One account says he went by ship to Venice. After that the trail goes cold until Rome.
Rome says yes
He reached Rome about May or June 1620, three and a half years after leaving Macau. He came to the Jesuit headquarters, the , with no papers or certificates of any kind.
He gave Mascarenhas the relic of Matthias Shichirōbei, the finger he had carried from Japan.
Then things moved fast. The register of ordinations in Rome records each step: the tonsure on 18 October 1620, minor orders on the next two days, subdeacon on 1 November at Santa Maria Maggiore, deacon on 8 November, and priest on Sunday 15 November 1620, in a small chapel in the sacristy of St. John Lateran, the pope's own cathedral. Four weeks, start to finish.
Five days later he entered the Jesuit novitiate of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. The house inventory lists everything he owned: a hat, his dōjuku's robe, a wool cloak, trousers, cloth drawers, shoes and a shirt. Under it is his signature: "I, Petro, acknowledge the above." Fourteen years after that first refusal, he was a Jesuit.
Rome in those years was full of great events, and he lived through them. Pope Paul V died and Gregory XV was elected in early 1621. Cardinal Bellarmine died in the very house where Kibe was a novice. And on 12 March 1622, at St. Peter's, Kibe and his old friend Minoes were there when Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and , the missionary who first brought Christianity to Japan, were declared saints.
Soon after, he asked the head of the Jesuits, Father General Muzio Vitelleschi, to let him go home to Japan. The General said yes.
The long way back
He left Rome on 6 June 1622 with a few other novices bound for India. In Madrid he read the latest Jesuit letters from Japan and learned that the persecution had grown worse. He kept going.
In Portugal he finished his novitiate, made the full thirty days of the Spiritual Exercises, and took his vows as a Jesuit in Lisbon on 21 November 1622.
On 25 March 1623 he sailed from Lisbon with the India fleet. The voyage took fourteen months. The ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope in July, wintered at Mozambique, off East Africa, and lost many people to disease and bad water. He finally reached Goa on 28 May 1624.
Ten years at a locked door
The ships for Macau had already left Goa. So he went to Manila and on to Macau, arriving late in 1625, nine years after he had left it.
On the advice of the Jesuit Visitor, André Palmeiro, he tried another way in: Siam, today's Thailand, where Japanese ships still called. In February 1627 he sailed for Malacca. Near the Singapore Strait four Dutch ships captured his vessel. He wrote later: "I took only my breviary, my cloak and the fathers' letters and went ashore with the Portuguese." He wandered fourteen days through the forest to Malacca and nearly died of fever there.
He reached Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam, at the end of July 1627, and lodged with a good Christian in the Japanese quarter. For two years he tried every way to get aboard a ship for Japan. One account says he lived there disguised as a servant. Another says that for two years he rowed as an oarsman, barefoot and with his head shaved. Juan López, the Jesuit rector in Manila, summed it up: he tried for more than two years to cross to Japan, "but could not".
In July 1629 he sailed to Manila on the embassy ship of the Governor of Manila. There he met Fr. Miguel Matsuda, another Japanese Jesuit, born in Amakusa in 1578. With alms from devout people and help from the Jesuits, the two of them and a priest from Iyo named Jerónimo bought a boat and hired a Japanese captain and crew.
They left Manila on 2 March 1630 and anchored at Lubang, a small island about 160 kilometres from Manila, to wait for the right wind. They waited three months. Kibe said Mass every day in a little hut on the shore. The boat turned out to be holed by shipworm, so they patched it from the inside with boards.
From Lubang he wrote his last letters. In one he admitted, "I have lost hope in all my affairs." Yet in the same letter he wrote: "If the wind of God's grace blows, and trusting in it we raise the sail and it brings us safely to Japan, I will report to you in detail about our journey and the state of the Church in Japan."
About 20 June 1630 they sailed. A storm wrecked them in the Tokara islands, south of Kyushu. They got a small boat and, escorted by officials of Satsuma, reached the port of Bōnotsu, in today's Prefecture. At the guardhouse they passed themselves off as shipwrecked merchants and were let go.
It was July 1630. Kibe had been away fifteen or sixteen years, and had gone halfway round the world and back to get home.
Home, and hunted
He went to Nagasaki with Matsuda. Matsuda soon died, worn out in the mountains after the family hiding him turned him out. Nagasaki was in the middle of a fierce manhunt for Christians.
Then, in 1633, came terrible news. gave up his faith after hours in the pit.
The story goes that Kibe, hiding in the hills near Nagasaki, came down into the city by night, found Ferreira and pleaded with him: "Father, let us go to the magistrate together. Take back your apostasy and die with me." Ferreira refused.
Tradition says he went on to before heading north.
In Mizusawa the Christians had once gathered around a Christian samurai, Juan , until the lord Date Masamune turned against them. Kibe went by his old family name, Pedro Kibe. Few records survive of those years. Jesuit letters show only that he was still alive in 1636.
Betrayed
After the Shimabara rising of 1637 to 1638, the shogunate went after the last priests in earnest, with cash rewards for informers. The Sendai domain posted its own notice in January 1639, offering ten pieces of gold.
It worked. A former dōjuku named Chōzaburō went to the authorities. His written report still survives in the papers of the Date family: "At a place called Mizusawa in the Sendai domain, a man called Miyake Tōemon and his wife are both Christians. ... Because they gave lodging to Kibe, I believe they are of that religion."
How he was caught is told in several ways. The fullest account, by the church historian Takagi Kazuo, says he was found hiding in Miyake Tōemon's house in Mizusawa, the house named in Chōzaburō's report. In Mizusawa the story goes that he was seized on a bridge beside the Kurusuba cemetery. The Japanese bishops' account says he let himself be taken in Sendai so that no harm would come to the family sheltering him, and the Jesuits say a poor and hungry fellow believer sold him. Only the house is tied to a document of the time, and even that report says where he stayed, not where he was seized.
By spring 1639 an official relay pass was ordering four prisoners sent from Sendai to Edo: Kibe; Martinho Shikimi, a Japanese Jesuit; Francisco de Barajas, a Franciscan; and Giovanni Battista Porro, an Italian Jesuit.
Before the shogun
He was taken to Edo in chains. One account notes that he walked the whole 91 ri, rather than being carried in a cage. He was locked in the Denmachō prison, whose site is now Jisshi Park in Nihonbashi Kodenmachō, in central Tokyo.
With Porro and Shikimi he was brought four times before the shogunate's senior officials. The questioning got nowhere.
Next they brought in Ferreira, now Sawano Chūan, to talk them round. Instead, Kibe urged Ferreira to come back to the faith. One writer says he called him "the stumbling block of the world" and "the shame of the Jesuits".
Then came a fifth hearing, with the most powerful man in Japan in the room. The shogun went to a residence of his senior councillor Sakai Tadakatsu to hear the three priests questioned on their religion. With him were the Zen priest Takuan and the sword master Yagyū Munenori.
The case then went to , the shogunate's chief official for Christian affairs. For ten days he argued with them at his residence.
Then the torture began. According to the record of Inoue's own office, his men went to the prison to torture the three priests. One account says there were ten sessions in all.
The pit
The last step was the pit, called ana-tsurushi. The prisoner was bound and hung head down into a hole in the ground, sometimes with a small cut at the temple, and fed a little so that he would last.
Porro and Shikimi, both old and ill, gave way.
Kibe was hung in one pit with two dōjuku, and he would not stop encouraging them. One tradition remembers his words: "Bear it, you will go to heaven."
The plainest account comes from the other side, from Inoue's own record: "Kibe Peitoro did not apostatize. He was killed in the pit. Until then he was an obscure man; because two dōjuku were hung in the same pit with Kibe, and he kept encouraging them, Kibe was killed. After Kibe died, both dōjuku apostatized."
Accounts differ on how exactly they killed him. The Dutch trade chief François Caron heard from an interpreter just back from Edo about "the shaven-pate fellow called Kibe": small dry sticks were laid on his bare belly and slowly set alight, while he was questioned about his faith. A Jesuit in Macau heard that he was burned with red-hot plates. The Jesuits' website says a guard's spear.
He died in July 1639, aged 52, after nineteen years as a Jesuit. Church sources say he died in the Denmachō prison; another reading puts the pit on open ground near Matsuchiyama in Asakusa. Where he was buried, nobody knows. One writer suggests the temples Honryūji or Saihōji in Asakusa, but says himself that it cannot be known.
Remembered
News of his death reached Rome, and there was talk of beatifying him, but nothing could be investigated in closed Japan, and his name faded for three centuries. In 1959 the Jesuit historian Hubert Cieslik brought him back to light.
Today his home village has a memorial park at the foot of the old Kibe Castle hill, opened in 1963, with a bronze statue by Funakoshi Yasutake (1965), a chapel (1987) and a festival every autumn since 1967. In 1992 the people of Ōita even staged an opera about him, Petro Kibe: Korobi-mōsazu-sōrō, "he did not apostatize", the very words of Inoue's record.
On 24 November 2008, in the rain, more than 30,000 people filled the baseball stadium in Nagasaki as Petro Kibe and 187 companions were declared Blessed. His name heads the list. Their feast day is 1 July. In 2022 the Japanese Jesuits unveiled the first icon of him, by the Moscow iconographer Aleksandr Griaznov, in Kibe Hall at their residence in Tokyo.
The boy who was turned away in Nagasaki and told "no" in Macau became a priest in Rome, a pilgrim in Jerusalem, and the first name on the roll of Japan's Blessed.
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