Baptised at twelve
Takayama Ukon was born in 1552, probably at Takayama in Settsu, north of Osaka.His father was Takayama Hida-no-kami, who would build the first church at Takatsuki. In 1564, at the age of twelve, Ukon was baptised at his father's castle of Sawa in Yamato and given the name Justo, "the just".The Japanese Jesuit brother baptised him.
Ukon had everything a samurai could want: a castle, a domain, the favour of the two greatest men in Japan, a name in the tea ceremony. In 1587 he was asked to choose, and he chose Christ, and he made the same choice again in 1612 and in 1614. His martyrdom was not a single moment at a stake. It was twenty-eight years of losing everything by degrees, borne with courtesy, and ending in a foreign port with the name of Jesus on his lips. He had knelt first in the church at dawn and carried the poor to their graves; at the end the brothers of mercy did the same for him.
A Christian castle town
In 1573, at about twenty-one, Ukon and his father became lords of Takatsuki, between and Osaka, and made the castle strong.In 1574 his father built a church inside the castle grounds: a large wooden church with a house for the missionaries and, in the corner of a garden with a pond, a great cross.From there the faith spread among the retainers and the townspeople, and for a time Takatsuki stood with Kyoto and Sakai as a centre of the mission in the capital region.
The Jesuit left a picture of that church at dawn. In rain, snow, cold or heat, he wrote, the first to appear at the church were always Dario and his sons, on Sundays and feast days and weekdays alike.Dario was Ukon's father, and the lord of the castle knelt on the floor with his people for the morning prayers. The Ukon researcher Kubota Norihiko adds the story that Ukon and his father themselves carried the coffins of the poor at their funerals, work that in that age was left to outcast men. It was one of the fourteen works of mercy in the Christians' prayer books: to bury the dead.Unverified: the lecture tells the coffin story without citing the original letter.
Archaeologists have found the Christian cemetery that lay beside that church, buried under up to two metres of later earth. Adults and children lay in ordered rows. One coffin lid bore a two-barred cross painted in ink, and a wooden rosary had been laid with the dead, among the oldest Christian objects ever excavated in Japan.
The story goes Of some 25,000 people in Ukon's domain, more than seven in ten became Christians, and he built more than twenty churches. Tradition: the Takatsuki tourism association gives this as "it is said".
In one of the civil wars of those years, Profillet writes, Ukon was besieged in Takatsuki and faced a cruel choice: to see his own children die, or to fail his conscience. He put duty first, God brought him through, and admired his loyalty.
Ukon served Oda Nobunaga and then . He led Hideyoshi's vanguard at the battle of Yamazaki in 1582.He was a master of the tea ceremony, counted among the seven great disciples of Sen no Rikyū.And he brought other lords to the faith, among them Kuroda Kanbei and Gamō Ujisato.
Easter at Takatsuki
In the spring of 1581 the Jesuit Visitor, , came up to the capital region. He spent Holy Week and Easter in Ukon's castle at Takatsuki. Christians came from all over the region to meet him, and fifteen thousand Catholics walked in the Easter procession. The ceremonies, the historian Hubert Cieslik writes, reminded Valignano of what he had seen in Rome.He came back for Corpus Christi and baptised two large groups, of five hundred and of fifteen hundred people.It was the high summer of the Christian century, and its centre was a samurai's castle town.
The seminary under the blue tiles
When Nobunaga gave the Jesuit land beside his new castle at Azuchi in 1580, it was Ukon who led the Christians who helped build the seminary there.Its boys included the future martyr .After Nobunaga's death in 1582 the school moved, for a time, to Ukon's own town of Takatsuki.
In 1585 Hideyoshi moved Ukon to a new domain at Akashi in Harima.
July 1587
In July 1587 Hideyoshi was at Hakata, at the end of his conquest of Kyushu. On 22 July Ukon went to see the head of the , , and told him to prepare the padres and the Christians for a great trial.Within two days Hideyoshi had issued his order expelling the missionaries.
Ukon would not bend. Friends who were not Christians begged him to soften his answer to Hideyoshi. He told them that in the things of God not one point should be bent.His retainers cut their hair, the Japanese sign of a man ready for death or exile, to show they would share their lord's fate, and his father Dario told the Jesuits that his son's exile was for him a cause of joy and thanksgiving.He lost his domain and his rank, and his friend hid him for a time on the island of Shōdoshima.A tourism history says that Pope Sixtus V wrote to him in praise of his constancy.Unverified: the letter itself has not been found.
Twenty-six years in Kanazawa
In 1588 Maeda Toshiie, lord of Kaga, invited him to Kanazawa.The parish there remembers that Ukon came on one condition: "If you will build one church of Jesus, I will come."Tradition: the source of the saying is not given. He lived as a guest commander of the Maeda, served in their councils and in their wars, and is credited with work on the castle and moats of Kanazawa.He built a church in Kanazawa and two more in Noto, and in 1605 obtained a resident priest and brother.
In 1612, as the shogun turned against the Christians, the lord of Kaga begged him to give up the faith and escape the shogun's anger. Ukon answered that he held the one truth, and that at his age a man did not change.
Exile
At the end of 1613 ordered the Christians expelled. In 1614 Ukon left Kanazawa with his family and his friend Naitō Joan, walked to Kyoto, and went down by boat from Osaka to .Before he left, the French historian Profillet writes, he sent sixty bars of gold to the Maeda heir, saying that it was the income of the land he held from them, and since he had had no chance to serve them in war he asked them to take it back. To the lord himself, who had always treated him well, he sent a tea kettle worth thirty bars of gold; the lord refused the kettle. When the lord, fearing a rising, shut himself in the castle with his best men, Ukon sent word to reassure him. Crowds lined the road, so that "this journey into exile was like a triumph".At Nagasaki he made the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, as he had after the ; Bishop Mizobe Osamu sees in those two retreats his preparation for martyrdom.
He could have gone to . He chose instead to sail with the priests bound for , and he asked whether he could make the Spiritual Exercises on the way; on board, the postulator of his cause notes, he became a peacemaker in the quarrels among the passengers.The ship left on 7 November 1614.At Manila the Spanish governor and a great crowd met the exiles with gun salutes and every honour.The honour weighed on him; he felt he did not deserve it.But he was worn out by the voyage and fever. He died there early in February 1615, aged sixty-three.Disputed: the parish gives the night of 2 February, Profillet 5 February, and the bishops' committee keeps 3 February.About a month after he landed, a fever took hold of him. On his deathbed he told his confessor: "I commend my family to no one. They have the honour, as I have, of being banished for the faith; that must be enough for them."To his wife and children he said: "What comparison is there between the service of men and the service of God? I have grown white under the helmet. And when men failed me, God did not."
All the bells of Manila rang for him. The governor, Juan de Silva, and the king's judges carried his body out to the street themselves, and there handed it to the brothers of the Misericordia, the of mercy, because Ukon had been one of its members at Miyako and at Nagasaki.The man who had carried the coffins of the poor at Takatsuki was carried to his grave by the brothers of mercy.
Blessed
The Church sees in him a model of fortitude: he gave up honours and comfort, accepted humiliation and exile rather than compromise, and died repeating the name of Jesus.He was a layman and the father of a family.On 21 January 2016 Pope Francis approved the decree declaring him a martyr.On 7 February 2017 Cardinal Angelo Amato beatified him at Osaka-jō Hall, before about ten thousand people.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Sixtus V's letter. Cited by the tourism association only. Unverified.
- 25,000 people, seven in ten Christians, twenty churches. Tradition.
- The church condition at Kanazawa. Tradition; original source to find.
- Coffin bearing. Told in a 2011 lecture without the primary reference; Fróis is the likely source. Unverified.