Martyrs of Japan

Twenty-six Christians — six Franciscan friars, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese laymen including three boys ages twelve to fifteen — crucified at Nagasaki on February 5, 1597, on orders of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. They represent the first major wave of Christian martyrdom in Japan and established Christianity as a faith willing to endure persecution in East Asia.

The martyrs are remembered as exemplars of faithfulness unto death. Their mixed composition — foreign missionaries and Japanese converts, adults and children — represents the cross-cultural nature of Japanese Christianity. The Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christian) communities preserved their memory through centuries of persecution.

Christianity arrived in Japan with the Jesuit Francis Xavier in 1549 and grew rapidly, reaching an estimated 300,000 converts by the 1580s. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japan's military ruler, viewed Christianity as a destabilizing foreign influence and issued an expulsion edict against missionaries in 1587, though enforcement was sporadic.

In 1596, after a Spanish ship captain boasted that missionaries were advance agents of colonial conquest, Hideyoshi ordered arrests. Twenty-six Christians were seized: six Franciscan friars (four Spanish, one Mexican, one Indian), three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese laymen of various ages, including three boys (Luis Ibaraki, age 12; Antonio de Nagasaki, age 13; and Tomás Kozaki, age 14). After interrogation in Kyoto, they were marched approximately 600 miles to Nagasaki, their ears cut as a mark of shame.

On February 5, 1597, they were crucified on crosses planted on a hill overlooking Nagasaki harbor, with lances delivering the final blows. Contemporary Jesuit witnesses, including Luis Frois, recorded that the martyrs sang hymns, proclaimed their faith, and went to death with constancy. The execution inaugurated waves of increasingly severe persecution (1614, 1622, 1632) that drove Christianity underground for over two centuries. The Twenty-Six were canonized in 1862.

• Martyr