The hill above the harbour
On the morning of 5 February 1597, twenty-six Christians were led up the hill of Nishizaka, overlooking Nagasaki. , the ruler of Japan, had ordered their deaths. They had been arrested in Kyoto and Osaka and made to walk the length of western Japan in midwinter. On the hill they were fixed to crosses one by one and killed with spears.
They were six Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese of the Jesuits, among them , and seventeen lay Christians. Besides the Japanese there were four Spaniards, a Mexican and a Portuguese. The youngest were boys of twelve to fourteen.
The unclean ground
Under the Tokugawa, the place where they died was called , "the unclean ground of the foreign priests". It went on being used. The prefecture records that hundreds more were martyred here after 1597. In 1637 , the first Filipino martyr and the first Filipino saint, was executed here.
Saints
Pope Pius IX canonised the twenty-six in 1862. Three years later the Paris Foreign Missions built their church on the hill and dedicated it to them as the Church of the Twenty-Six Martyrs, today's Ōura Cathedral. It was in that church that the hidden Christians of Urakami made themselves known to Father Petitjean on 17 March 1865.
In 1950 Pope Pius XII declared Nishizaka an official place of Catholic pilgrimage. Nagasaki Prefecture made the martyrdom site a historic site on 6 April 1956.
A monument, a museum and a church
For the centenary of the canonisation the sculptor , a convert in his late thirties, made a great bronze high relief of the twenty-six, life size. The prefecture dates the monument to 1961 and the museum and the church to 1962; the Japan Tourism Agency says the complex opened in 1962. The relief faces Ōura Cathedral.
The museum and the Church of St Philip beside it were designed by , another convert, who as a young man had seen Antoni Gaudí's work in Spain. Gaudí's influence shows in the twin towers of St Philip's, covered in coloured ceramic mosaic, and in a white phoenix on a mosaic of broken crockery on the museum's west wall. The museum's lower wall recalls the stone walls of Nagasaki's temple quarter; above it is a pattern taken from the bamboo fence round the execution ground, and above that, bars like a prison's. The red tops of the coloured tiles stand for the bloodied spears.
Pope John Paul II came here in 1981, Mother Teresa in 1982 and Pope Francis in 2019.
