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The Jesuit Missions in Japan (1549-1644)

The Jesuit missions in Japan, opened by Saint Francis Xavier on 15 August 1549, gave the 16th century a Christendom of nearly 300,000 baptized faithful, later crushed by the Tokugawa edicts, until the providential encounter of 17 March 1865 between Fr Petitjean and the hidden Christians of Urakami at Nagasaki.

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The Jesuit missions in Japan denote one of the most remarkable apostolic adventures of modern Christendom: between the landing of Francis Xavier at Kagoshima on 15 August 1549 and the official eradication of Catholicism by the Tokugawa shogunate in the mid-17th century, the Society of Jesus brought the Japanese an entire Church — sacraments, local councils, seminaries, hierarchy, theology, printing — before it was driven underground by Hideyoshi's edict (1587) and the Tokugawa edict of 1614 (promulgated in the name of Hidetada).

The outcome is unique. Nearly 300,000 baptized lived in Japan on the eve of the great persecution[1]. More than 3,000 martyrs recorded between 1597 and 1643[2], including the 26 crucified of Nagasaki (5 February 1597) canonized by Pius IX in 1862, and the 205 martyrs of Japan (1617-1632) beatified in 1867 by the same pope[3]. Then everything seemed to die out. For more than two centuries, Tokugawa Japan became one of the most hermetically closed countries in the world — yet entire families secretly preserved baptism, the Pater, the Credo and the memory of the priests who had come from beyond the seas. On 17 March 1865, at Ōura Cathedral near Nagasaki, Fr Bernard Petitjean of the Paris Foreign Missions Society received this moving confession: the hearts of all those present were the same as his[4]. The Christendom believed dead had survived.

This article retraces the whole of the Japanese "Christian century" — in the phrase of the great English historian Charles R. Boxer[5] — from Xavier's missionary dream to the providential resurrection of Ōura. The endpoint of 1644 — the presumed death of the last priest remaining in Japan, Konishi Mansho — marks the end of the visible mission; everything that follows (hidden Christians, the rediscovery of Ōura, Roman and UNESCO recognitions) is its posterity, recounted here as an epilogue. For the founder's complete biography, see Saint Francis Xavier. For the institutional founding of the Society, see The Founding of the Society of Jesus (1521-1556). For the overall missionary dynamic of which the Japanese missions are the farthest outpost, see The Catholic Counter-Reformation (1517-1648).

The Japanese adventure deserves special attention because it is, in the entire history of evangelization outside Europe, the limit case: the conversion of a literate, refined, state-organized, military people; the most ambitious policy of cultural accommodation ever attempted by a Catholic order; mass martyrdom; multi-century clandestinity; final resurrection by grace. No other modern apostolic field — neither the Portuguese Indies, nor Matteo Ricci's China, nor the Ibero-American missions, nor Paraguay with its Guaraní reductions — concentrates, within a single century, so much splendour and so many trials.

Why evangelize Japan?

The Asian dream of the young Society

The Society of Jesus, approved by Paul III in the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae of 27 September 1540[6], defined itself from the outset by its worldwide vocation. Ignatius of Loyola refused any fixed territorial assignment; his companions took a "fourth vow" of obedience to the Pope circa missiones — to go, in the formula's words, to every place in the world, to believers and unbelievers alike, without hesitation or excuse[7]. This mobility is written into the Constitutions drafted by Ignatius and his secretary Polanco between 1547 and 1556[8].

When, in 1540, King John III of Portugal asked for missionaries for the East Indies, it was Francis Xavier — one of the seven companions of Montmartre, a Navarrese, former regent at the Collège de Beauvais — who embarked on 7 April 1541 and reached Goa, capital of the Portuguese Estado da Índia, on 6 May 1542[9]. In a letter written from the Indies to his companions in Europe (late 1543 – early 1544), he already lamented that multitudes were failing to become Christians for lack of workers to instruct them[10]. It is this logic of expansion, not a plan drawn up in Rome, that brought the Society to Japan.

The decisive meeting with Anjirō at Malacca (1547)

The turning point came in December 1547, in the Portuguese port of Malacca. Xavier, returning from the Moluccas, met there a fugitive Japanese samurai, Anjirō (sometimes transcribed Yajirō), a native of Kagoshima in the southern province of Satsuma. Anjirō had killed a man and boarded a Portuguese ship clandestinely to escape the justice of the daimyo Shimazu. At Malacca he discovered Christianity through a Portuguese captain and friend of Xavier, Jorge Álvares, who handed him a letter intended for the missionary[11].

Xavier questioned the Japanese man at length: he discovered, against all European expectations of the time, a literate, organized, hierarchical, refined people endowed with a structured religion. Three months after his arrival, his first report from Japan — the Kagoshima letter of 5 November 1549 to the Society at Goa — contains the now-famous assessment:

"From the experience we have had of them here, the Japanese people are, among all the pagan nations discovered so far, the best we have encountered, and it seems to me that among unbelievers no other people will be found superior to the Japanese." — Saint Francis Xavier, letter from Kagoshima, 5 November 1549, to the Society at Goa, in Monumenta Xaveriana, vol. II, 1912[12]

Nanban screen (nanban byōbu) by Kanō Naizen, around 1600: a Portuguese ship (kurofune or black ship) berths before a Japanese port; missionaries in black cassocks come ashore, accompanied by Lusitanian merchants and African slaves. Six panels of paper over lacquer and gold, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Anjirō was taken to Goa, baptized in St Paul's church in May 1548 under the name of Paulo de Santa Fé, and trained for a year at the Jesuit college in the Indies. Xavier decided to carry the Gospel in person to this archipelago whose soil no European — except three Portuguese merchants accidentally arrived at Tanegashima in 1543 — had yet trodden.

The apostolate of Francis Xavier (1549-1551)

The landing at Kagoshima (15 August 1549)

Xavier left Goa on 15 April 1549 with two Jesuit companions — Cosme de Torres (a Castilian priest) and Juan Fernández (a Spanish lay brother gifted in languages) — accompanied by Anjirō and two other Japanese converts. The voyage was made aboard the Chinese junk of the Cantonese pirate Avan, nicknamed by the Portuguese "the Thief"[13]. After a stop at Malacca and three months of perilous navigation, they landed at Kagoshima, port of the province of Satsuma, on 15 August 1549, feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary[14]. This date — the Montmartre vow of 1534, the Japanese landing of 1549 — became the emblematic date of the worldwide Jesuit mission.

Xavier was courteously received by the daimyo Shimazu Takahisa. The feudal lord saw in the Portuguese presence a prospect of direct trade (the famous arquebuses, introduced at Tanegashima in 1543, had already revolutionized Japanese warfare) and tolerated the missionaries' preaching. Anjirō translated; Xavier preached, sometimes in the street, with the help of an improvised bilingual catechism. About a hundred baptisms were recorded at Kagoshima in less than a year, including Anjirō's own mother, wife and daughter[15].

An immediate difficulty: translating "God"

Very soon Xavier encountered the central theological problem of the whole Japanese mission: how to say God in a language possessing no univocal term for the Supreme Being? Anjirō, trained in Shingon Buddhism, suggested the word Dainichi (great sun) — the name of the cosmic Buddha. Xavier accepted it at first, and for several months preached a "Dainichi" he believed to be God. But on questioning Buddhist monks, he discovered that Dainichi denotes a pantheistic principle, without person, without Creation, without Providence — the exact opposite of the Christian God. Xavier reversed course terminologically: he returned to the Latin Deus, transcribed into Japanese as Deusu, which he had the faithful repeat by rote[16].

It is a founding methodological lesson the Jesuits kept in mind: inculturation cannot compromise on the divine names. The Dainichi → Deusu turning point foreshadows, half a century ahead, the Chinese Rites controversy the Society would go through around Matteo Ricci and the term Tianzhu[17].

Hirado, Yamaguchi, Kyoto (1550-1551)

Faced with the growing hostility of the Shingon monks of Kagoshima — who saw their authority threatened — Xavier left the city in the summer of 1550 for Hirado, a free port the Portuguese merchants were beginning to frequent. There he baptized "as many in a fortnight as at Kagoshima in a year," in the words of his letter of 29 January 1552[18]. Then he pushed north: to Yamaguchi, capital of the daimyo Ōuchi Yoshitaka, one of the most brilliant courts of Sengoku Japan. The first audience was a disaster: Xavier, in poor dress, failed to make himself heard.

He then took the road to Kyoto — Miyako, the imperial capital — which he reached in January 1551 after a frightening winter journey. The city lay in ruins, ravaged by civil wars; Emperor Go-Nara lived in misery; the Ashikaga shogun was a name only. Xavier gave up any imperial audience and returned to Yamaguchi, this time in silk garments, with the diplomatic gifts intended for the emperor — a mechanical clock, a Venetian mirror, a musket, Porto wine, Brazilian sugar. Ōuchi Yoshitaka received him with favour, offered him a disused former Buddhist temple, the Daidō-ji, and authorized preaching[19]. This lesson in dress would be developed thirty years later by Valignano in his accommodation policy.

Bungo and the departure for China (1551)

Last Japanese episode: Xavier went down to Funai (today Ōita), capital of the daimyo Ōtomo Yoshishige in the province of Bungo. Yoshishige — who would not be baptized until 1578 under the name of Francisco — welcomed him warmly. Xavier remained there from September to November 1551. He then entrusted the Japanese mission to Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernández, and embarked for Goa with the already settled intention of evangelizing China, the "source of all the religions of Japan." He died on the island of Sancian (Shangchuan), off mainland China, on 3 December 1552, without ever entering the Ming empire[20].

Xavier's personal record: two years and three months in Japan, about 800 baptisms, four foundations (Kagoshima, Hirado, Yamaguchi, Funai), a viable mission entrusted to successors, a missionary method in embryo — and a lasting judgment on the Japanese people that the Society would repeat for a century.

The golden age of the missions (1552-1587)

Cosme de Torres and consolidation

At Xavier's death, Cosme de Torres was the only priest on the ground. The mission numbered only three religious — Torres, Fernández, and the Portuguese brother Duarte da Silva — for about 2,000 faithful spread over three islands. Torres, a prudent and patient man, governed the mission for eighteen years (1552-1570), from Yamaguchi and then from Funai.

Three decisive reinforcements arrived in the following years: Gaspar Vilela (1554), a tireless preacher who obtained in 1560 from the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru permission to preach Christianity at Kyoto[21]; Luís Fróis (1563), the future official historian of the mission; and Luís de Almeida, a former Portuguese merchant turned Jesuit and physician — in 1557 he founded at Funai the first European-style hospital in Japan, with a surgery and a maternity ward, financially supported by Ōtomo Yoshishige[22]. This fusion of care for the body and proclamation of the Gospel characterizes the whole Jesuit missionary pedagogy.

The great Christian daimyo

Christianity took root in Japan by a classic path of evangelization: the conversion of the great. Three daimyo of southern Kyūshū played a decisive role and hold their statues in Japanese Catholic memory.

Detail of a Nanban screen by Kanō Naizen (around 1600) showing a Catholic Mass celebrated at Nagasaki in the late 16th century: a Jesuit priest in chasuble presides over the office, surrounded by Japanese faithful kneeling in court dress. Source: Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ōmura Sumitada (1533-1587), lord of Yokoseura and then of Nagasaki, was baptized in 1563 under the name of Dom Bartolomeu — becoming the first Christian daimyo in Japanese history. He offered the Jesuits the port of Nagasaki in 1571, turning the small fishing cove into a commercial and missionary platform; he made it a legal gift to the Society in 1580, which governed it directly until 1587[23]. Sumitada himself destroyed the Buddhist and Shintō statues of his fiefs: a wave of forced conversions that would later draw legitimate criticism from the Jesuit historians themselves (Fróis, Valignano).

Ōtomo Yoshishige (1530-1587), lord of Bungo, Xavier's friend since 1551, yet baptized only on 28 August 1578 under the name of Dom Francisco. At his peak, his domain, one of the vastest in Kyūshū, sheltered several tens of thousands of Christians. His military defeat against the Shimazu at the battle of Mimigawa (1578), shortly after his conversion, was interpreted by the monks as a "punishment of the kami"[24].

Arima Harunobu (1567-1612), lord of Hizen, baptized in 1580 under the name of Protasio. He established the Jesuit seminary of Arima in 1580 and supplied one of the four youths sent to Europe by the Tenshō embassy. He would be beheaded in 1612 by Tokugawa Ieyasu — the first martyr of daimyo rank[25].

DaimyoProvinceYear of baptismBaptismal nameEnd of life
Ōmura SumitadaHizen / Nagasaki1563Dom BartolomeuDied a Christian in 1587
Ōtomo YoshishigeBungo1578Dom FranciscoDied a Christian in 1587
Arima HarunobuHizen1580ProtasioExecuted in 1612
Kuroda YoshitakaBuzen1585SimeãoApostate in 1587, died in 1604
Konishi YukinagaHigoc. 1583Dom AgostinhoExecuted in 1600
Justo Takayama UkonSettsu / Akashi1564 (childhood)JustoExiled to Manila, died in 1615

Oda Nobunaga, ambiguous protector (1568-1582)

The political turning point of Sengoku Japan came with Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), the first of the three great "unifiers." When Nobunaga entered Kyoto in 1568 and drove out the last Ashikaga shogun, he became the effective master of central Japan. He welcomed the Jesuits with a disconcerting benevolence: Fr Luís Fróis presented his credentials to him on 8 April 1569, and received in return permission to preach in all his lands[26].

This favour was not religious. Nobunaga hated militant Buddhism and its soldier-monks (sōhei): he had burned Mount Hiei and massacred the Tendai monks in 1571; he annihilated the Ikkō-ikki of Ishiyama Hongan-ji in 1580. The Jesuits appeared to him as a strategic counterweight to Buddhist power. When asked whether he thought of becoming Christian himself, Nobunaga laughed, and authorized the Jesuits to establish a seminary at the foot of his castle of Azuchi[27]. He further presented Fr Valignano with a pair of screens depicting his Azuchi castle, which would be brought to the pope in Rome by the Tenshō embassy in 1585. At his death, on 21 June 1582, victim of Akechi Mitsuhide's treachery at the Honnō-ji temple in Kyoto, Japanese Christianity had reached a peak of prosperity: 150,000 Christians, 200 churches, 75 European and Japanese Jesuits[28].

Alessandro Valignano and the accommodation policy

Alessandro Valignano S.J. (1539-1606), Visitor of the Society of Jesus for the Indies and architect of the Japanese accommodation policy. Anonymous portrait, kept in the archives of the Society. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The great craftsman of Jesuit inculturation was Fr Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), a Neapolitan from the Abruzzi, doctor of law at Padua at nineteen, entered the Society in 1566, appointed Visitor of the Indies in 1573 at thirty-four. His jurisdiction extended from Goa to Macao by way of Japan; in practice he was the co-superior general of the Far East.

Valignano landed in Japan on 25 July 1579 and stayed three years. He noted with dismay that the European Jesuits, despite their successes, treated the Japanese like the Africans of Mozambique or the Brazilian slaves. He railed against this cultural arrogance. His answer, set out in the Sumario de las cosas de Japón (1583) and in the Cerimoniale per i missionari del Giappone (1581), was a genuine revolution in missionary practice:

"The things of Japan are so foreign and so different from the things of Europe that one must almost become Japanese to be able to communicate Our Lord to them. Their customs must be accepted, eating as they do, sitting as they do, speaking their language, following their rules of ceremony. We cannot hope to make a great nation Christian by imposing on it the dress, the table and the manners of Lisbon or Rome." — Alessandro Valignano S.J., Sumario de las cosas de Japón, Rome, 1583, in Monumenta Historica Iaponiae, vol. I, 1954, p. 134[29]

Concretely, Valignano imposed: the wearing of the black silk kimono of Zen monks for European Jesuits; written and spoken mastery of Japanese as a condition for ordination; scrupulous respect for Japanese rules of hospitality (entering, greeting, tea); opening the novitiate to native Japanese (refused until then by superiors fearing "Asian weakness"); and the creation of a complete Japanese hierarchy. Internal resistance was fierce: some old-school Portuguese fathers — like Francisco Cabral — protested against this "Japanization." Valignano replaced them.

The seminaries of Arima and Azuchi (1580-1582)

To form a Japanese Christian elite, Valignano founded two European-style seminaries (seminario): Arima in 1580, with 22 young nobles; Azuchi in 1582, near Nobunaga's castle, with 33 pupils[30]. There they studied Latin, rhetoric, Gregorian chant, but also classical Japanese, calligraphy and archery. A college of theology was opened at Funai (1581), then at Nagasaki. Around 1590, more than 150 Japanese seminarians were in training simultaneously.

The master idea was the building of a native Church. Valignano explicitly foresaw that the Japanese mission would, in time, be led by a Japanese clergy under a Japanese bishopric. This vision — truly revolutionary for the 16th-century Iberian world — was to be shattered by persecution.

The Tenshō embassy to Europe (1582-1590)

Four young Japanese for the Vatican

Valignano's stroke of genius, on leaving Japan in 1582, was to take to Rome four Christian Japanese adolescents. They would testify de visu to Europe that Japan was no myth and that its elites were embracing the Gospel; in return, they would bring back to Japan tangible testimony of the majesty of Roman Christendom. This is the Tenshō embassy, named after the Japanese era (Just August Reign, 1573-1592).

The four chosen, all aged 13 to 14, came from the seminaries of Arima and Azuchi:

  • Itō Mancio (1570-1612), nephew of Ōtomo Yoshishige and Itō Yoshisuke, nominal head of the embassy.
  • Chijiwa Miguel (1569-1633), cousin of Ōmura Sumitada and Arima Harunobu.
  • Hara Martinho (1568-1629), son of a samurai of the Hara clan.
  • Nakaura Julião (1568-1633), descendant of the Nakaura, vassals of the Ōmura.
The audience of Gregory XIII granted to the Tenshō embassy, given at Rome on 23 March 1585 in the Vatican Hall of Kings. Contemporary Italian engraving of the event (1586), kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

They embarked at Nagasaki on 20 February 1582, accompanied by Valignano himself as far as Goa, then by Fr Diogo de Mesquita as guide and interpreter[31].

The journey: Macao, Goa, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome

The odyssey lasted eight years and five months. The Portuguese ship left Nagasaki on 20 February 1582, called at Macao (March 1582 - December 1582), Malacca, Cochin, Goa (October 1583 - February 1584), Saint Helena, and reached Lisbon on 10 August 1584. Received with pomp by Cardinal-King Albert, governor of Portugal for Philip II, the four youths crossed Spain and were received at Madrid by Philip II himself on 14 November 1584 — an unprecedented event.

They then made for Alicante, embarked for Italy, and landed at Livorno on 1 March 1585. They crossed Pisa and Florence (where Bianca Cappello, wife of Grand Duke Francesco I, organized a feast in their honour), and entered Rome on 22 March 1585. The next day — 23 March 1585 — Pope Gregory XIII Boncompagni, already gravely ill, granted them a public audience in the Vatican Hall of Kings, in the presence of almost the entire Sacred College. The four Japanese, in damasked silk court dress, kissed the pope's foot; Itō Mancio delivered a speech in Latin written for him by the Jesuits[32].

The four young Tenshō ambassadors in a 1586 Augsburg engraving: Itō Mancio (top left), Chijiwa Miguel (bottom left), Hara Martinho (bottom right) and Nakaura Julião (top right), with Fr Diogo de Mesquita at the centre. Engraving from the Newe Zeyttung auss der Insel Japonien, Augsburg, 1586. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Gregory XIII died eighteen days later, on 10 April 1585. His successor, Sixtus V Peretti, elected on 24 April, received the ambassadors in turn and made them Knights of the Golden Spur in May 1585.

The return and Valignano's printing press

The embassy travelled back: Venice (the doge offered each of them a gold medallion), Milan, Genoa, Goa, Macao, where Valignano rejoined them. He brought them himself to Nagasaki, where they finally landed on 21 July 1590, after eight years and five months away. Itō Mancio, Hara Martinho and Nakaura Julião would enter the Society of Jesus; Chijiwa Miguel would apostatize. Three of the four would be martyrs or confessors under the Tokugawa persecution, including Nakaura Julião, beatified by Benedict XVI in 2008[33].

Above all, Valignano brought back with him from Macao a European movable-type printing press. It began operating at Kazusa, then at Amakusa, then at Nagasaki. The Jesuit press — the first Western printing press in Japan — produced between 1590 and 1614 more than a hundred works: catechisms in romanized Japanese (Doctrina Christiana, 1591), grammars (Arte da Lingoa de Iapam by João Rodrigues, 1604-1608), dictionaries (Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam, 1603), and even a romaji edition of Aesop's fables[34].

The reversal of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1587)

The expulsion edict of 24 July 1587

Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), second unifier of Sengoku Japan. Posthumous portrait around 1598, kept at the Kōdai-ji temple in Kyoto, founded by his widow Nene. He promulgated the first anti-Christian edict (1587) and ordered the crucifixion of the 26 martyrs of Nagasaki (1597). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

With Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), everything changed. Nobunaga's de facto successor after defeating Akechi Mitsuhide at Yamazaki on 2 July 1582, Hideyoshi undertook the military unification of Japan. His Kyūshū campaign, in May-July 1587, subdued the Shimazu — and revealed to him the scale of Christianity in the south. At Hakata, in the night of 23-24 July 1587, he summoned the Jesuit vice-provincial, Gaspar Coelho, and put three blunt questions to him: why were the missionaries forcing Japanese to become Christians? why were they destroying Buddhist temples? why did Portuguese trade sell Japanese as slaves in Macao and Manila?[35]

The third grievance was the only one materially founded: in the 1580s, Portuguese merchants were buying Japanese in Kyūshū — prisoners of the feudal wars, like those women and children of Bungo sold at Shimabara described by Luís Fróis — to resell them in Macao, Manila and as far as India[36]. The Jesuits denounced this traffic and had Japanese captives embarked on the official Macao ship set free, but, dependent on the Portuguese merchants for their mission, they remained in an ambiguous position; Hideyoshi, for his part, banned the trade on pain of death and had brokers of Nagasaki executed[37].

The next morning, 24 July 1587, Hideyoshi promulgated the Bateren tsuihōrei (Edict of Expulsion of the missionary fathers) in five articles. He declared Japan the "Land of the gods" (Shinkoku); ordered all missionaries to leave the country within twenty days; forbade all forced conversion; but maintained Portuguese trade and tolerated individual Christians[38].

"Japan is the Land of the gods, and it is unfitting that a perverse doctrine from Christian countries should be preached there. [...] The missionary Fathers, judged unfitting, are condemned to leave Japan. They shall have twenty days to embark and leave the country." — Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Bateren tsuihōrei, 24 July 1587, articles 1 and 4, in Jurgis Elisonas, Deus Destroyed, 1973, p. 117-118[39]

Deferred enforcement

The edict was not immediately executed. Hideyoshi did not want to break with Portuguese trade — on which Macao's silver depended, but above all the supply of the arquebuses he needed for his future Korean campaigns. The missionaries merely left Kyoto and the centre, and withdrew discreetly to Nagasaki under Ōmura's protection. Valignano returned to Japan in 1590 as official ambassador of the Viceroy of the Indies, accompanying the return of the Tenshō embassy, and Hideyoshi received him with pomp. The diplomatic fiction allowed the Church to breathe for some ten years. But the sword hung suspended.

Between 1587 and 1597, Japanese Christianity kept growing silently: 300,000 baptized, according to the figures reported to Rome by Valignano in 1592[40]. This was the numerical peak, on the eve of the rupture.

The San Felipe incident (1596)

The trigger of the disaster was a shipwreck. On 19 October 1596, the Spanish galleon San Felipe, sailed from Acapulco for Manila, was wrecked on the coast of Shikoku, near Urado. The local lord Chōsokabe Motochika confiscated the cargo (a million pesos) in Hideyoshi's name. The Portuguese pilot Francisco de Olandia, interrogated at Kyoto by the inquisitor Mashita Nagamori, is said — according to Jesuit tradition — to have pointed on a world map to the territories of Philip II, saying: "The King of Spain first sends missionaries, then soldiers."[41]

True or invented, the remark set off the powder keg. Hideyoshi, already furious with the Spanish Franciscans who had arrived at Kyoto in 1593 against the papal arrangement reserving Japan to the Portuguese Jesuits, ordered on 8 December 1596 the arrest of all missionaries in Kyoto and Ōsaka.

The 26 martyrs of Nagasaki (5 February 1597)

Crucifixion of the twenty-six martyrs of Nagasaki, Japanese engraving made around 1635, kept in the Jesuit archives in Rome. The 26 condemned are bound to Y-shaped wooden crosses on Nishizaka hill, simultaneously pierced by two lances. On the left: Paul Miki S.J., standing on his cross, preaching to the crowd. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty-six Christians were condemned: six Franciscans (4 Spaniards — including Saint Pedro Bautista —, 1 Mexican, Saint Felipe de Jesús, and 1 Portuguese from the Indies, Gonzalo García, born at Bassein), three Japanese Jesuits — including the novice Paul Miki (1564-1597), son of a samurai, trained at Azuchi —, and seventeen Japanese lay people, among them three altar boys aged twelve, thirteen and fourteen (Louis Ibaraki, Anthony and Thomas Kozaki). Their left ears were cut off at Kyoto for public exposure, then they were marched barefoot for a month through the snow to Nagasaki, a distance of about 800 kilometres[42].

They reached Nishizaka (Nagasaki) on 4 February 1597. On the morning of 5 February 1597, they were bound to twenty-six wooden crosses arranged in a semicircle on the hill. Two executioners per condemned man drove their lances simultaneously into their chests. Paul Miki delivered from atop his cross the most famous sermon of Japanese Christendom, recorded by Luís Fróis:

"All present, hear me: I do not come from the Philippines, I am no foreigner. I am Japanese like you, and a Jesuit. I have committed no crime; the sole reason I am put to death is that I taught the doctrine of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I thank God for this grace. Like Christ, I wish to forgive all those who condemned me and to ask them to become Christians." — Saint Paul Miki S.J., from atop his cross at Nishizaka, 5 February 1597, in Luís Fróis, Relación del Martirio, Nagasaki, February 1597, in Monumenta Iaponiae (1597), p. 12[43]

The twenty-six were beatified by Urban VIII on 14 September 1627 and canonized by Pius IX on 8 June 1862. Their liturgical feast is fixed on 6 February. The museum and monument of the Twenty-Six Martyrs, erected in 1962 on Nishizaka hill beside St Philip's Church, remain Japan's principal Christian memorial site[44][45].

The great Tokugawa persecution (1614-1639)

The Tokugawa edicts (1612-1614)

Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), third unifier of Japan, founder of the Tokugawa shogunate after the victory of Sekigahara (1600). Kakemono portrait attributed to the Kanō school, early 17th century. It was at his instigation that the definitive edict banning Christianity was promulgated in 1614, in the name of his son Hidetada. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Hideyoshi died on 18 September 1598. After the decisive battle of Sekigahara (21 October 1600), Tokugawa Ieyasu took effective power and then the title of shōgun in 1603, founding the Edo shogunate (Bakufu) which would reign 264 years. Ieyasu first tolerated Christianity: he needed Portuguese and Dutch trade. But from 1612, two affairs precipitated the rupture.

First, the Okamoto Daihachi scandal on 31 March 1612: a Christian vassal of the shogun, an official in charge of diplomatic gifts, was convicted of corruption for the benefit of the Christian daimyo Arima Harunobu. Both men were executed. On 19 April 1612, Ieyasu banned Christianity in the shogun's direct lands (tenryō) and drove the Christians from the palace.

Second, the Edict of 27 January 1614 (Bateren-tsuihō no fumi, "Manifesto of Expulsion of the missionary fathers"), drafted by the Zen monk Konchi-in Sūden on Ieyasu's orders but promulgated in the name of the 2nd shogun Tokugawa Hidetada (in office since 1605), extended the ban to the whole empire. The text, more virulent than Hideyoshi's, denounced Christianity as a "pernicious doctrine seeking to overturn the right way of the gods and to upset just government"[46].

A great roundup was organized in autumn 1614. All the missionaries — about 120 Jesuits, 16 Franciscans, 7 Dominicans, 7 Augustinians — were gathered at Nagasaki and forcibly embarked for Macao and Manila in November 1614. With them went into exile the great Christian lay figures: Justo Takayama Ukon, the famous Christian daimyo of Akashi, embarked for Manila where he died on 3 February 1615; his family; the Naitō, the Konishi. Forty-seven missionaries remained hidden in Japan, in violation of the edict, to serve the faithful clandestinely[47].

The Great Martyrdom of Nagasaki (10 September 1622)

Individual executions resumed as early as 1614 and grew in intensity. The emblematic date is 10 September 1622 — Genwa no daijunkyō (Great Martyrdom of the Genwa era). At Nagasaki, at Nishizaka — the same hill as in 1597 — fifty-five Christians were executed in a single day: twenty-five burned alive, including Fr Carlos Spinola S.J. (an Italian, former professor of mathematics and astronomy at the Jesuit college of Miyako), nine religious; and thirty beheaded, including women and children. The torment lasted six hours before a crowd estimated at thirty thousand people[48].

Pope Pius IX would beatify 205 martyrs of Japan, put to death between 1617 and 1632 — only some of whom perished in the Great Martyrdom of 10 September 1622 — on 7 July 1867: many of them were Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, or lay people of both sexes and all ages[49].

The torment of the pit and the apostasy of Cristóvão Ferreira (1633)

From 1633, the shogun Iemitsu introduced a new refined torment, designed to break the soul before the body: ana-tsurushi, the torment of the pit. The condemned was suspended upside down, bound by the ankles, in a pit of night soil and corpses, the face covered with a tight cloth, a slight incision behind the ear to prevent death from the rush of blood. He could survive several days, conscious. The slightest sign of apostasy set him free.

It was this torment that broke, on 18 October 1633, Fr Cristóvão Ferreira (c. 1580-1650), a Portuguese from Torres Vedras, provincial of the Jesuits in Japan since 1632. After five hours in the pit, Ferreira renounced his faith. He took the Japanese name Sawano Chūan, married a Japanese woman, and worked for the shogunate as translator and expert on the West until his death in 1650. It is, in all modern history, the most resounding apostasy of a high-ranking missionary[50]. Ferreira's fate would inspire, in the 20th century, the famous novel Silence (Chinmoku) by the Japanese Catholic Endō Shūsaku, published in 1966, and Martin Scorsese's film (2016).

The Shimabara rebellion (1637-1638)

The death agony of visible Christendom played out in the Shimabara peninsula, former land of the Christian Arima, where the new daimyo Matsukura Shigemasa levied confiscatory taxes on already Christian peasants struck by famine. In October 1637 the revolt broke out. Thirty-seven thousand peasants, mostly Christians, chose as their leader a charismatic sixteen-year-old youth, Amakusa Shirō Tokisada (1621-1638), nicknamed "the Messiah of Amakusa." They barricaded themselves in the abandoned castle of Hara, brandishing banners bearing the Latin cross, the Eucharist or the names of Saint James and Saint Francis Xavier[51].

The shogunate besieged the castle for three months. When it fell on 12 April 1638, after the tactical help of Dutch cannon — for which the Dutch would be rewarded with the monopoly of Western trade — thirty-seven thousand Christians were massacred. Amakusa Shirō was beheaded; his head was displayed at Nagasaki[52]. It is one of the greatest massacres of Christians in a single military campaign in modern history. Having died arms in hand in a revolt that began over taxes and became a war with a religious dimension, these insurgents are not counted as martyrs in the Church's canonical sense[53].

Sakoku and apparent eradication (1639)

In 1639, Iemitsu promulgated the last of the Sakoku edicts (chained country): any Portuguese ship touching Japan was to be burned, its crew executed. In 1640, a Portuguese embassy from Macao come to negotiate reopening was beheaded at Nagasaki on 3 and 4 August: 61 executed, 13 men spared and sent back to Macao to carry the news. Only the Dutch Protestants were tolerated, confined to the artificial islet of Dejima in Nagasaki bay. For two centuries, Japan disappeared from visible Christendom. The last secret Catholic priest, Konishi Mansho, is said to have been martyred around 1644, according to the tradition reconstructed by Hubert Cieslik S.J. (1959) — the exact date of his death remaining uncertain[54].

The hidden Christians (around 1644-1865)

More than two centuries without clergy

The silent miracle of the kakure kirishitan (hidden Christians) is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in world religious history. Without a single priest, without Mass, without communion, without sacramental confession, without a printed Bible, tens of thousands of families secretly kept the faith for seven generations — from around 1644 to 1865.

The organization rested on three hereditary lay offices: the mizukata administered water baptism to newborns; the chōkata kept the liturgical calendar (Lent, Easter, Christmas, saints' feasts) by a method of counting through leap years; the kyōkata recited in a low voice the prayers handed down orally. The Pater and the Ave Maria, preserved in a strange phonetic form — "Panchimaria garasa," "deus paron," "sancta maria orashō" — remained recognizable thanks to their Latin, Portuguese and Spanish roots[55].

Maria Kannon and protective syncretism

To shield themselves from shogunal inspections, the Christians of Urakami, the Gotō islands and Ikitsuki disguised their devotions under Buddhist appearances. Statuettes of the Virgin and Child took the form of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, holding a child in her arms; they are known today as Maria Kannon. Family altars looked like classic Japanese butsudan altars, but hid behind their doors a medal, a cross or a concealed holy image.

The most humiliating system for Christians was the fumi-e (image to be trodden upon): each year, at the Buddhist census (shūmon-aratame), every inhabitant had to trample a bronze plaque depicting Christ or the Virgin to prove he was not Christian. Many trampled with inward tears; some refused and were tortured; others memorized a secret formula of confession to recite in the evening before the Maria Kannon statue[56].

The resurrection at Ōura (17 March 1865)

The "miracle of the Orient"

Ōura Cathedral (Ōura Tenshudō) at Nagasaki, dedicated to the Twenty-Six Martyrs and consecrated in February 1865 by Fr Bernard Petitjean MEP. It was in this church, on 17 March 1865, that the discovery of the hidden Christians took place. The building has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2018. Photograph under CC BY-SA licence, via Wikimedia Commons.

When Japan half-opened its doors after the Edo treaties (1858), the Paris Foreign Missions Society (M.E.P.) resumed the Japanese mission for the foreigners residing at Nagasaki. In February 1865, Fr Bernard Petitjean (1829-1884), born at Blanzy in Burgundy, consecrated at Ōura, on the harbour's edge, a neo-Gothic church dedicated to the Twenty-Six Martyrs of 1597[57].

A month later, on 17 March 1865 around noon, a small group of Japanese — fifteen people, men, women and children — entered the church out of curiosity. A Christian woman from the village of Urakami approached Fr Petitjean as he prayed before the altar and confided to him in a whisper, in hesitant Japanese, that the hearts of all those present were the same as his[58].

To verify the incredible rumour, the visitor put three questions to the French priest: did he have a Santa Maria? had he taken a vow of celibacy? did he obey the pope of Rome? At each affirmative answer, faces lit up. She then whispered the hidden Christians' creed and invited Fr Petitjean to come secretly to Urakami. The Christendom the Tokugawa had believed extirpated for more than two hundred and twenty years still existed.

In the following weeks, Petitjean estimated at about 30,000 the number of surviving hidden Christians in the Nagasaki district and the Gotō islands[59]. His letter of 18 March 1865 to the MEP superior was published in Louis Veuillot's Univers and caused an immense stir throughout European Christendom: people spoke of an "Orient miracle." Pius IX, on reading it — according to a second-hand remark reported by Francisque Marnas from Cardinal Antonelli, with no Vatican primary source recovered to this day — is said to have shed tears and hailed this return of the Christians as a signal miracle[60].

The new Urakami persecution (1867-1873)

The joy was short-lived. The dying shogunate — then the young Meiji government — did not accept the resurgence of the Christians. In the summer of 1867, 3,414 Christians of Urakami were arrested, deported and scattered across some twenty provinces. Men, women, children, separated from their own, were subjected to cold torture, interrogations, hunger. More than six hundred of them would die[61].

The Western embassies, in particular that of Napoleon III's France, protested vigorously. In February 1873, under the dual pressure of the Western chancelleries and Meiji modernization, the imperial government abolished the anti-Christian edicts and restored religious freedom. The Urakami survivors were freed and returned home. Japanese Christianity was officially legal, 324 years after Xavier's landing.

The iconographic legacy of the kakure kirishitan

Virgin and Child surrounded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier, Christianized Japanese painting of the early 17th century, late namban art. Kept at the Kyoto University Museum. Work composed for the private devotion of Japanese Christians, just before the ban of 1614. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Not all hidden Christians immediately entered the restored Roman Catholic communion. Some of them — about 10,000 according to historical estimates —, attached to the secret rite handed down for two centuries, refused the foreign clergy and kept their tradition; they are known today as Hanare Kirishitan (separated Christians). By the mid-2020s, no more than about a hundred at most remained, chiefly on the island of Ikitsuki, near Hirado[62][63].

The objects of devotion recovered from the attics and family altars of Urakami, the Gotōs, Amakusa and Ikitsuki — the Maria Kannon, the secret medals, the Beatas (hand-copied prayer books), the Buddhicized rosaries, the holy images hidden under Shintō prints — today form one of the treasures of the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum in Nagasaki and the Tokyo National Museum. They give visual testimony of what the kakure kirishitan were: a Christian people without hierarchy, without complete sacraments, without a printed Bible, who believed for seven generations against all visible evidence.

In 2018, twelve sites of the hidden Christians of Kyūshū — including Ōura Cathedral, the village of Egami in the Gotōs and the hamlet of Sakitsu in Amakusa — were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List under the title "Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region"[64].

Historical and theological readings

How many Christians, how many martyrs?

The oft-cited figures deserve a sourced discussion. The peak of baptized Japanese under the Tokugawa is generally estimated at between 300,000 and 750,000 depending on method: contemporary Jesuit sources (Valignano 1592, Coelho 1597, Carvalho 1614) give 300,000; modern estimates based on the Buddhist shūmon-aratame registers and post-1614 inquiries run as high as 750,000[65]. For a total Japanese population estimated at between 12 and 18 million inhabitants around 1600[66], this represents between about 1.7% and 6% — roughly the equivalent of the proportion of Catholics today in the United Kingdom or Russia.

The number of martyrs is established by the martyrology drawn up by Louis Delplace: 3,125 martyrs between 1597 and 1643 — 1,648 names with place of execution, plus the groups reported by the missionaries and by Dutch travellers between 1649 and 1660 — not counting the exiles, confiscated goods or deaths from misery; the martyrology counts therein 55 Jesuits, 36 Franciscans, 38 Dominicans and 20 Augustinians, the rest being lay people — men, women, children, samurai, peasants[67]. It is, in proportion to population and period, one of the greatest anti-Christian persecutions since Diocletian.

An unprecedented apostolic work

Several features make the Japanese missions a unique case in the modern history of evangelization:

  • Inculturation pushed to the extreme by Valignano, with written and spoken mastery of classical Japanese required for ordination, wearing of the Zen monks' kimono, respect for codes of hospitality, opening of the novitiate to natives;
  • The raising of a national Christendom through the seminaries of Arima and Azuchi, with on the eve of persecution more than 150 Japanese seminarians in training, a first step toward a Japanese bishopric Valignano wished to propose to Rome;
  • The Jesuit mobile missionary printing press, producing in fifteen years (1590-1614) more than a hundred titles: catechisms, lives of saints, grammars, dictionaries — well before the first equivalent Chinese or Indian presses;
  • Worldwide Christian diplomacy with the Tenshō embassy and the first official visit of a non-European people to the Vatican in 1585;
  • Clandestine survival of more than two centuries without a single priest, from around 1644 to 1865[68][69].

Catholic reading: the fruitfulness of blood shed

"The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians." — Tertullian, Apologeticum, 50, 13, translation from the Sources Chrétiennes ed., no. 213, Cerf, 1971, p. 312[70]

The Church's traditional teaching, formulated by Tertullian as early as the 3rd century, illuminates the Japanese case in a particular light. The apparent record — ban, persecution, sakoku, two centuries of silence — could pass for a total historical failure. 17 March 1865 revealed it was nothing of the sort: the seed had germinated underground. Pope John Paul II, during his visit to Nagasaki on 26 February 1981, presented himself at Nishizaka, before the monument of the Twenty-Six Martyrs, as one of many pilgrims come to Martyrs' Hill: Christians died at Nagasaki, he said in substance, but the Church at Nagasaki did not die — gone underground, handed from parents to children, rooted in this hill, it grew and flowered[71].

The Catholic Church in Japan numbers, according to the 2012 statistics of the Bishops' Conference, about 440,000 faithful, or 0.35% of the population[72] — a small minority, but visible, missionary and venerated. The metropolitan cathedral of Tokyo, the basilica of Ōura at Nagasaki, the sanctuary of the Twenty-Six Martyrs at Nishizaka recall world Catholicism's debt to these margins. Justo Takayama Ukon, the daimyo exiled to Manila in 1614 where he died forty days after his arrival — whose martyrdom was recognized by decree of Pope Francis on 21 January 2016 — was beatified at Osaka on 7 February 2017 in a rite presided over by Cardinal Angelo Amato as the pope's envoy; Pedro Kibe and 187 martyr companions of the 17th century had been beatified by Benedict XVI at Nagasaki on 24 November 2008. Three centuries after the apparent end of Japanese Christendom, Japanese continue to enter the catalogue of the blessed and the saints.

To go further

Notes and References

  1. Charles R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan 1549-1650, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1951, re-ed. Carcanet, Manchester, 1993, ISBN 978-1-85754-035-2, p. 320-321: Boxer cites the cautious figure of 300,000 baptized reported to Rome by Valignano in 1592 and confirmed by Coelho in 1597. Modern estimates by Higashibaba Ikuo (Christianity in Early Modern Japan, Brill, 2001) raise this figure to 750,000 around 1614 by combining Jesuit sources with the shūmon-aratame registers.

    1

  2. Louis Delplace S.J., "Japanese Martyrs," in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9, New York, 1913, p. 756-758: 1,648 names (surname, Christian first name, place of execution), raised to 3,125 with the groups reported by the missionaries and by Dutch travellers between 1649 and 1660 — excluding exiles, confiscated goods and deaths from misery; the martyrology counts therein 55 Jesuits, 36 Franciscans, 38 Dominicans and 20 Augustinians (Le Catholicisme au Japon, t. II, Brussels, 1910, p. 181-195 and 263-275). The last known missionaries are 5 Jesuits and 3 seculars, put to the pit torment from 25 to 31 March 1643. Modern estimates vary between 2,000 and 5,000 (Yakichi Kataoka: 4,000), in "On Christian Martyrdom in Japan (1597-1658)," Hipogrifo, 2021. Those killed in the Shimabara rebellion (1637-1638), who died arms in hand, are not counted therein as martyrs in the canonical sense: after 1632, it is no longer possible to obtain data reliable enough for canonical beatification (Delplace, ibid.).

    2 53 67

  3. The 205 martyrs, put to death between 1617 and 1632 — Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and lay people of both sexes — were beatified by Pius IX on 7 July 1867: Antonio Borrelli, "Beati 205 Martiri del Giappone," Santi e Beati (santiebeati.it); venerated on 26 February 1866 by decree on martyrdom. The range 1617-1632 is that of the cause's martyrology: the first of the 205 is the Dominican Alphonse Navarrete, beheaded on 1 June 1617 at Ōmura (McClintock-Strong, Cyclopaedia; AUGNET, Augustinian history of Japan; National Catholic Register), and the last are from 1632. The heading "1598-1632" in some syntheses takes up the start of the persecutions after 1597, but the body of those same syntheses places the 205 between 1617 and 1632. On composition: 33 of the Society of Jesus, 23 Augustinians and Augustinian tertiaries, 45 Dominicans and tertiaries, 28 Franciscans and tertiaries, the others being Japanese faithful and entire families, many of them confreres of the Rosary (Borrelli, ibid.).

    3

  4. Fr Bernard Petitjean MEP, letter of 18 March 1865 to the superior of the Paris Foreign Missions seminary, Fr Augustin Albrand, cited in full in Annales de la Société de Saint-François-Xavier, vol. XII, Lyon, 1866, p. 167-172. Reproduced as an appendix in Francisque Marnas, La "religion de Jésus" ressuscitée au Japon dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, Delhomme et Briguet, Paris, 1896, vol. I, p. 491-493. In it Petitjean transcribes the Japanese phrase heard at Ōura as "Watakushidomo no mune wa anata no mune to onaji desu"; the English above renders its meaning as Petitjean reports it, with no accessible source establishing an independent verbatim.

    4 58 69

  5. Charles R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan 1549-1650, op. cit. — the reference work in English, whose first edition was crowned in 1951 by the Library of Congress. The French translation Le siècle chrétien du Japon exists only in abridged form in Histoire des missions chrétiennes au Japon, by Jean-Pierre Lehmann, Maisonneuve and Larose, Paris, 1977.

    5

  6. Paul III, bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, 27 September 1540. Latin text in Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Constitutiones, vol. I, Rome, Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1934, p. 24-32; critical edition in Bullarium Romanum, Taurinensis ed., vol. VI, Turin, 1860, p. 286-289.

    6

  7. Deliberatio primorum patrum, spring 1539, in Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Constitutiones, vol. I, op. cit., p. 1-7. French translation in Maurice Giuliani S.J. (ed.), Saint Ignace de Loyola — Écrits, Desclée De Brouwer, Paris, 1991, p. 269-275. The English above renders the meaning of the Latin formula of the Formula Instituti (bull Regimini militantis, 1540): mission on the Pope's orders circa missiones, "sine ulla tergiversatione aut excusatione" — without hesitation or excuse.

    7

  8. John W. O'Malley S.J., The First Jesuits, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1993, ISBN 978-0-674-30312-2, ch. 7-8 on the Constitutions.

    8

  9. The precise chronology of Xavier's voyage to the Indies is established by Georg Schurhammer S.J., Franz Xaver: sein Leben und seine Zeit, 4 vol., Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1955-1973 — English edition Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, translated by M. Joseph Costelloe S.J., Institute of Jesuit Sources, St Louis (Mo.), 1973-1982, vol. II: India 1541-1545, ch. I.

    9

  10. Saint Francis Xavier, letter written from the Indies to his companions in Europe (late 1543 – early 1544), in Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Monumenta Xaveriana — Epistolae S. Francisci Xaverii, vol. I, Madrid, 1899. Modern critical edition by Georg Schurhammer and Joseph Wicki S.J., Epistolae S. Francisci Xaverii aliaque eius scripta, 2 vol., Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, Rome, 1944-1945. The English above renders its meaning, after the universally cited English translation ("Multitudes out here fail to become Christians only because there is nobody prepared for the holy task of instructing them," letter to the companions in Rome, 1544): the exact date of 31 December 1543 and the earlier page reference are not established here.

    10

  11. On the Xavier-Anjirō-Álvares meeting at Malacca in December 1547, see Georg Schurhammer S.J., Francis Xavier, op. cit., vol. III: Indonesia and India 1545-1549, ch. XII, p. 277-282; and Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China 1542-1742, T and T Clark / Orbis, Edinburgh / Maryknoll, 1994, ISBN 978-0-88344-998-8, p. 17-19.

    11

  12. Saint Francis Xavier, letter of 5 November 1549, from Kagoshima to the Society at Goa — first report from Japan, letter no. 90 of the Schurhammer-Wicki collection —, in Monumenta Xaveriana — Epistolae S. Francisci Xaverii, vol. II, Madrid, 1912, p. 184-204. The letter of 20 January 1548 (Cochin, to the companions in Europe, vol. I) contains only an anticipation of it based on Anjirō's account ("a most reasonable people," according to the Portuguese merchants); the famous judgment on "the best [people] discovered so far" belongs to the Kagoshima report: "the people with whom we have thus far conversed are the best that have as yet been discovered," in the universally cited English translation, of which the English above is the rendering.

    12

  13. Luís Fróis S.J., Historia de Japam, written between 1583 and 1597, book I, ch. 1-3; critical edition by José Wicki S.J. in 5 volumes, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, 1976-1984, vol. I, p. 60-78. On the pirate Avan, see Charles R. Boxer, The Christian Century, op. cit., p. 36-38.

    13

  14. The date of 15 August 1549 is attested by Xavier's letter of 5 November 1549 (Kagoshima), to the Society at Goa, in Monumenta Xaveriana — Epistolae, vol. II, Madrid, 1912, p. 184-204; as well as by Luís Fróis S.J., Historia de Japam, vol. I, ch. 5.

    14

  15. Schurhammer, Francis Xavier, op. cit., vol. IV: Japan and China 1549-1552, ch. III. The figure of a hundred baptisms at Kagoshima in less than a year comes from Xavier's letter of 29 January 1552 to Ignatius of Loyola, Epistolae, vol. II, p. 277.

    15

  16. On the Dainichi → Deusu episode, see Luís Fróis S.J., Historia de Japam, vol. I, ch. 7; and Joseph Jennes M.S.C., Histoire de l'Église catholique au Japon, Tokyo, Oriens Institute for Religious Research, 1959, p. 8-10; enriched re-ed. A History of the Catholic Church in Japan, Oriens Institute, Tokyo, 1973.

    16

  17. On the Chinese Rites controversy, see the specialized article The Chinese Rites Controversy. The parallel between the two terminological moments (Dainichi/Deusu in Japan, Tianzhu/Shangdi in China) is analysed by Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed, op. cit., p. 24-26 and 145-149.

    17

  18. Saint Francis Xavier, letter of 29 January 1552, from Cochin to the companions in Europe — the great narrative letter on the Japan mission —, in Epistolae, vol. II, op. cit., p. 277-283 (letter no. 96 of the Schurhammer-Wicki collection). The letter of 5 November 1549, written from Kagoshima before the Hirado stay (summer 1550), in Epistolae, vol. II, op. cit., p. 184-204, does not contain this passage.

    18

  19. Luís Fróis S.J., Historia de Japam, vol. I, ch. 10-12, on the two successive audiences with Ōuchi Yoshitaka and the effect of the "second appearance in silk dress." See also Schurhammer, Francis Xavier, op. cit., vol. IV, ch. VIII.

    19

  20. The death of Francis Xavier on 3 December 1552 is documented by the letter of the Chinese Antonio de Sainte-Foi, his companion, to Manuel Teixeira S.J., in Monumenta Xaveriana, vol. II, op. cit., p. 763-770. See also Schurhammer, Francis Xavier, op. cit., vol. IV, ch. XV.

    20

  21. On the permission obtained by Gaspar Vilela from the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru: the Japanese corpus retains 1560 — Japanese Wiki Corpus, "Ashikaga Yoshiteru" ("in 1560, he allowed Gaspar Vilela to preach Christianity"); Russell Stutler's Kirishitan chronology (1560 meeting, first Mass at Kyoto in 1562) — while the English synthesis History of the Catholic Church in Japan gives 1559 ("obtained permission from Ashikaga Yoshiteru to teach Christianity"). The text retains 1560; it was a permission to preach, not a general edict of tolerance.

    21

  22. Diego Pacheco S.J., Luis de Almeida (1525-1583): médico, caminhante, apóstolo, Centro Cultural Português, Lisbon, 1972; and Joseph Jennes, History of the Catholic Church in Japan, op. cit., p. 24-26.

    22

  23. On the donation of Nagasaki by Ōmura to the Society (June 1580), see Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed, op. cit., p. 39-42; and Diego Pacheco S.J., El hombre que forjó Nagasaki — Vida del Padre Cosme de Torres, Apostolado de la Prensa, Madrid, 1973.

    23

  24. On Ōtomo's defeat at Mimigawa (November 1578) and its reading by the monks, see Luís Fróis S.J., Historia de Japam, vol. III, ch. 16; and Higashibaba Ikuo, Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice, Brill, Leiden, 2001, ISBN 978-90-04-12290-1, p. 49-52.

    24

  25. On the execution of Arima Harunobu on 5 June 1612, see George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1973, re-ed. 1988, ISBN 978-0-674-19962-3, ch. III, p. 87-91.

    25

  26. Luís Fróis S.J., Historia de Japam, vol. II, ch. 1-5, on the meeting of 8 April 1569 at Kyoto with Oda Nobunaga; Wicki edition, op. cit., vol. II, p. 73-89.

    26

  27. On the Azuchi seminary (1582) and Nobunaga's generosity toward the Jesuits, see Jurgis S. A. Elisonas, "Christianity and the Daimyo," in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. IV: Early Modern Japan, ed. John W. Hall, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 301-372, esp. p. 318-322. On the Azuchi screens given by Nobunaga to Valignano and then brought to the pope in Rome by the Tenshō embassy in 1585 (works now lost), see J. F. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits, op. cit.

    27

  28. The 1582 figures (150,000 Christians, 200 churches, 75 Jesuits) are those of Alessandro Valignano S.J., Sumario de las cosas que pertenecen a la Provincia de Japón, written at Goa in 1583, in Monumenta Historica Iaponiae, vol. I, ed. Josef Wicki S.J., Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, Rome, 1954, p. 5-7.

    28

  29. Alessandro Valignano S.J., Sumario de las cosas que pertenecen a la Provincia de Japón y al gobierno della, Goa, 1583, in Monumenta Historica Iaponiae, vol. I, op. cit., p. 134. Original Castilian text: "Las cosas del Japón son tan diversas y differentes de las de Europa, que es menester casi hazerse japón para podelles communicar a Nuestro Señor." See also the analysis by J. F. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth-Century Japan, Routledge, London, 1993, ISBN 978-0-415-09167-7, ch. III.

    29

  30. On the founding of Arima (1580) and Azuchi (1582), see J. F. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits, op. cit., ch. V; and Diego Pacheco S.J., "The Founding of the Port of Nagasaki and Its Cession to the Society of Jesus," in Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 25, no. 3-4, 1970, p. 303-323.

    30

  31. On the Tenshō embassy and the departure of 20 February 1582, see Derek Massarella and J. F. Moran, Japanese Travellers in Sixteenth-Century Europe: A Dialogue Concerning the Mission of the Japanese Ambassadors to the Roman Curia (1590), translation of the De Missione Legatorum Iaponensium of Duarte de Sande / Valignano, Hakluyt Society, London, 2012, ISBN 978-1-908145-04-2.

    31

  32. On the audience of 23 March 1585, see Adriana Boscaro, Sixteenth Century European Printed Works on the First Japanese Mission to Europe, Brill, Leiden, 1973; and Henri Bernard-Maître S.J., Les Premiers Rapports culturels entre l'Europe et le Japon, Sophia University, Tokyo, 1938, p. 95-114.

    32

  33. On the beatification of Julião Nakaura (24 November 2008, Nagasaki, by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins with Pope Benedict XVI by decree), see the Decretum super martyrio of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints of 1 June 2007, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 99, 2007, p. 656-660.

    33

  34. On the Japanese Jesuit press (Kirishitan-ban, "Christian editions"), see Diego Pacheco S.J., "The Foundation of the Port of Nagasaki and the Beginnings of the Mission Press," in Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 26, no. 1-2, 1971, p. 137-180; and Joseph Laures S.J., Kirishitan Bunko: A Manual of Books and Documents on the Early Christian Mission in Japan, Sophia University, Tokyo, 3rd ed. 1957.

    34

  35. On Hideyoshi's three questions to Coelho in the night of 23-24 July 1587 and the origin of the edict, see George Elison, Deus Destroyed, op. cit., ch. I, p. 109-118; and Jurgis Elisonas, "Christianity and the Daimyo," op. cit., p. 351-356.

    35

  36. On the trade in Japanese by Portuguese merchants in the 1580s, see Lúcio de Sousa, The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves, Brill, Leiden, 2019, ch. 2. The example of the Bungo captives sold at Shimabara is reported by Luís Fróis S.J., História de Japam, vol. 4, p. 296 and vol. 5, p. 41-42.

    36

  37. Letter from Toyotomi Hideyoshi to Vice-Provincial Gaspar Coelho, 24 July 1587, demanding an end to purchases of Japanese and the repatriation of captives taken as far as India; law banning the trade on pain of death and execution of Nagasaki brokers; Jesuit intervention freeing Japanese captives embarked on the official Macao ship. See Lúcio de Sousa, The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan, op. cit., ch. 2.

    37

  38. The Japanese text of the Bateren tsuihōrei, dated Tenshō 15/6/19 — i.e. 24 July 1587 in the conversion retained by Elison — is kept in the archives of Komine-ji temple and published in the Tokugawa Kinrei-kō, vol. V. Complete English translation in George Elison, Deus Destroyed, op. cit., appendix II, p. 116-118. French translation in Pierre Souyri, Histoire du Japon médiéval, Perrin, Paris, 2013, ISBN 978-2-262-04138-7, p. 459.

    38

  39. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Bateren tsuihōrei, 24 July 1587, articles 1 and 4. Original Japanese text kept at the Kōmyō-ji temple in Kyoto. English translation adapted from Elison's translation, Deus Destroyed, op. cit., p. 117.

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  40. Alessandro Valignano S.J., Adiciones del Sumario de Japón, Macao, June 1592, in Monumenta Historica Iaponiae, vol. I, op. cit., p. 642-643: Valignano counts 300,000 Christians in Hideyoshi's lands at that date.

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  41. On the San Felipe incident (19 October 1596) and the statements attributed to the pilot, see William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1939, p. 105-110; and Diego Pacheco S.J., "The Martyrs of Japan," in Studia Missionalia, vol. 27, Rome, 1978, p. 105-141. The debate on the historicity of the pilot's remark is unresolved: Elison judges it probable, Pacheco judges it legendary.

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  42. On the march of the condemned from Kyoto to Nagasaki (4 January - 4 February 1597), see Luís Fróis S.J., Relación del Martirio, Nagasaki, February 1597, cited and translated by Diego R. Yuuki S.J., Los 26 mártires del Japón, Tipografía de Nagasaki, 1992; and Pedro Morejón S.J., Relación de la persecución que hubo en la iglesia de Japón, Mexico, Diego López Daualos, 1616, book I, ch. 8-10. The distance of about 800 kilometres corresponds to the modern overland distance between Kyoto and Nagasaki (about 760 to 780 kilometres by road).

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  43. Saint Paul Miki S.J., sermon from atop the cross at Nishizaka, 5 February 1597, reported by Luís Fróis S.J., Relación del Martirio, op. cit. See also Diego R. Yuuki S.J., Los 26 mártires del Japón, op. cit., p. 86-89. Original Spanish-Portuguese text: "Yo soy japonés y de la Compañía de Jesús. No tengo otro pecado que haber enseñado la doctrina de Cristo."

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  44. Pius IX, bull of canonization of the 26 martyrs, Ut sanctissimum, 8 June 1862, in Acta Sanctae Sedis, vol. I, Rome, 1865, p. 12-18.

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  45. The museum and monument of the Twenty-Six Martyrs were built on Nishizaka hill in June 1962 for the centenary of the canonization: "Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum and Monument"; LiCAS News, 25 November 2019, on the occasion of Pope Francis's visit; the bronze monument by sculptor Yasutake Funakoshi, unveiled in 1962, shows the 26 saints life-size. The St Philip memorial church of Nishizaka stands just behind the monument.

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  46. The text of the edict of 27 January 1614 (Bateren-tsuihō no fumi) was drafted by the Zen monk Konchi-in Sūden on Ieyasu's orders, and promulgated in the name of the 2nd shogun Tokugawa Hidetada (in office since 1605), Ieyasu retired (ōgosho) remaining the real master of power until his death in 1616. See Brill, Journal of Jesuit Studies, "Letters from Exile": "In that year, Tokugawa Hidetada (1579–1632), acting on the counsel of his retired father, issued the most infamous anti-Christian edict." Date of 27 January: William E. Griffis, The Religions of Japan, 4th ed., 1912, p. 370 ("that great proclamation of January 27, 1614"). Japanese text in the Tokugawa Jikki, book 5. English translation in George Elison, Deus Destroyed, op. cit., appendix IV, p. 197-205.

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  47. On the 47 missionaries who remained hidden in Japan after the forced embarkation of November 1614, see Charles R. Boxer, The Christian Century, op. cit., p. 326-330; and Hubert Cieslik S.J., "The Case of Christovão Ferreira," in Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 29, no. 1, 1974, p. 1-54.

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  48. On the Great Martyrdom of Nagasaki of 10 September 1622, see Diego Pacheco S.J., El gran martirio del Japón, Edicep, Valencia, 1989; and Pedro Morejón S.J., Historia y relación de lo sucedido en los Reynos del Japón y China, Lisbon, 1621.

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  49. Beatification by Pius IX on 7 July 1867: Antonio Borrelli, "Beati 205 Martiri del Giappone," Santi e Beati (santiebeati.it); veneration on 26 February 1866 by decree on martyrdom. The date of 7 July is corroborated by the very title of a contemporary account, Los doscientos cinco martires del Japon... beatificados por el sumo pontifice Pio IX, el dia 7 de julio de 1867 (UPenn Online Books Page notice), and by the notice for Caius of Korea, 128th of the 205, given as "beatified on 7 July 1867"; the variant "7 May" in some syntheses rests on no accessible contemporary source.

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  50. On the apostasy of Cristóvão Ferreira (18 October 1633), see Hubert Cieslik S.J., "The Case of Christovão Ferreira," op. cit.; and Lawrence Tuck, The Last Confucian: An Alternative Narrative of Christopher Ferreira, Sophia University Press, Tokyo, 2014. The debate on his final retraction (before his death in 1650) remains open: no contemporary source establishes with certainty that he rejoined martyrdom.

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  51. On the Christian banners of the Shimabara revolt (1637-1638), see Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1975, ISBN 978-0-03-010811-7, p. 144-179; and Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai and the Sacred, Osprey, Oxford, 2006.

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  52. On the final Shimabara massacre (12 April 1638), see Pierre Souyri, Histoire du Japon médiéval, op. cit., p. 478-484; and Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, p. 119-125.

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  53. On the last hidden Japanese priest Konishi Mansho (d. around 1644), see Hubert Cieslik S.J., "P. Manzio Konishi, the Last Japanese Jesuit," in Missionalia Hispanica, vol. 16, Madrid, 1959, p. 217-238 — title kept as is, Manzio being the Italianate spelling of Mansho (old sources also write Mancio). The date of 1644 is corroborated by the official Japanese chronology of Nagasaki Christianity: "1644 (Shōhō 1) — the missionary Konishi Mansho is martyred at Kyoto." The exact date of his death remains uncertain: 1644 is a date reconstructed by historiographical tradition, not a date attested by a contemporary record.

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  54. On the oral liturgy of the kakure kirishitan and the transmission of Latino-Portuguese prayers in Japanese phonetic form, see Stephen Turnbull, The Kakure Kirishitan of Japan: A Study of Their Development, Beliefs and Rituals to the Present Day, Japan Library / Curzon Press, Richmond (Surrey), 1998, ISBN 978-1-873410-70-7, ch. III-V; and Christal Whelan, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth: The Sacred Book of Japan's Hidden Christians, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1996.

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  55. On the fumi-e and the Buddhist surveillance system shūmon-aratame, see Charles R. Boxer, The Christian Century, op. cit., p. 446-450; and George Elison, Deus Destroyed, op. cit., ch. VIII.

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  56. Bernard Thaddée Petitjean, born 14 June 1829 at Blanzy (Blanzy-sur-Bourbince, Burgundy), ordained priest in 1853, left for Japan in 1858 ("Bernard Petitjean"; Japanese government brochure, MLIT, Father Petitjean, the Missionary Who Discovered the Hidden Christians in Nagasaki). The Ōura church, designed by Fr Furet and built under carpenter Koyama, completed at the end of 1864, was opened for worship at the start of 1865, a few weeks before the discovery of 17 March 1865 ("Oura Church"). The precise day of the blessing is established by no accessible source: only the month of February 1865 is retained here.

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  57. Fr Bernard Petitjean MEP, letter of 18 April 1865 and later notes, kept in the archives of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, Southern Japan file. Petitjean's figure of 30,000 designates only the Urakami and Gotō region; the later demographic inquiry (1880) would count about 40,000 surviving hidden Christians.

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  58. The remark attributed to Pius IX is known only from a second-hand source: it is reported by Francisque Marnas, La "religion de Jésus" ressuscitée, op. cit., vol. I, p. 526-528, from testimony by Cardinal Antonelli. It is also taken up by Joseph Jennes, History of the Catholic Church in Japan, op. cit., p. 167. No Vatican primary source attesting these words has been recovered to this day; the oft-cited formula ("the greatest miracle of modern times") is therefore presented here as reported, not as a verified verbatim.

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  59. On the fourth Urakami persecution (Urakami yonban kuzure, 1867-1873), see Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed, op. cit., p. 211-217; and Brian Burke-Gaffney, Starcrossed: A Biography of Madame Butterfly, EastBridge, Norwalk (Conn.), 2004, ch. I-II. The figure of 3,414 deportees is documented by the registers of the Meiji government offices of the receiving departments (Hiroshima, Tsuwano, Kanazawa, Tokushima, etc.).

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  60. On the contemporary Hanare Kirishitan ("separated Christians"), see Stephen Turnbull, The Kakure Kirishitan, op. cit., ch. VIII; and Christal Whelan, "Religion Concealed: The Kakure Kirishitan on Narushima," in Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 47, no. 3, 1992, p. 369-387.

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  61. Associated Press, ""A huge loss." In remote Nagasaki islands, a rare version of Christianity heads toward extinction," June 2025: the last confirmed baptismal ritual dates to 1994, and no more than about a hundred hidden Christians would remain, chiefly on Ikitsuki island (against about 10,000 in the 1940s).

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  62. UNESCO, Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region, inscribed on the World Heritage List on 30 June 2018 (42nd session of the World Heritage Committee, Manama, Bahrain), no. 1495. Documentary sources: nomination file 1495 prepared by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, Tokyo, 2017.

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  63. Higashibaba Ikuo, Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice, op. cit., introduction, p. xviii-xxv, on the statistical debate over the total number of baptized (range 300,000 - 750,000 depending on the sources retained).

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  64. On the Japanese population around 1600, estimates run from about 12 million (Akira Hayami, classic estimate taken up in Tokugawa Japan, 2004) to 16 million (William Wayne Farris, Japan's Medieval Population, 2006) and 17-18.5 million (Osamu Saito, estimate cited in Farris 2006; Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, OECD, Paris, 2001, p. 237). No serious estimate reaches 25 million; the range retained here is 12 to 18 million.

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  65. Tertullian, Apologeticum, 50, 13. Original Latin text: "Plures efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis : semen est sanguis christianorum." Translation by Jean-Pierre Waltzing, Apologétique, Sources Chrétiennes, no. 213, Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1971, p. 312.

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  66. Saint John Paul II, address during the visit to Martyrs' Hill, Nishizaka, Nagasaki, 26 February 1981: Italian text verified against the Holy See archives (vatican.va, Discorso durante la visita alla collina dei martiri), in keeping with the Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, vol. IV/1 (gennaio-giugno 1981), Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1981, p. 478-484. Full text in French in La Documentation Catholique, no. 1806, 5 April 1981, p. 320-322. The passage above is a faithful paraphrase of the Italian original, presented as such: no word-for-word quotation is alleged.

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  67. Catholic Bishops' Conference of Japan, reply to the Vatican inquiry for the Synod on the Family: "The latest statistics (2012) show that there are approximately 440,000 Japanese Catholics, about 0.35% of the population," relayed in The Tablet, 15 January 2014.

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