February 1597

February 1597 stands as the first major eruption of state violence against Christianity in Japan, a cold winter morning on which twenty-six people—European missionaries and Japanese converts alike—were crucified at Nishizaka in Nagasaki. The execution was ordered by the regent Hideyoshi, who had flown into a rage after learning from the pilot of a stranded Spanish ship that missionaries often prepared the way for the armed forces of the Spanish king. This mass crucifixion did not end the mission, but it broke the earlier pattern of tolerated evangelization and signaled that the Tokugawa shogunate would eventually pursue a policy of total eradication.

Background and Causes

Christianity had arrived in Japan with Francis Xavier in 1549 and flourished during the Sengoku period, when warring daimyos offered protection to missionaries partly for trade with Portuguese ships. By the 1580s the community numbered some 150,000 converts, and Alessandro Valignano had founded seminaries and a local clergy. Yet the unification of Japan under Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu created a centralized state increasingly suspicious of foreign influence. Hideyoshi’s first expulsion decree in 1587 had quickly become a dead letter, but the underlying xenophobia remained. The immediate trigger for the 1597 executions was the boast of a Spanish ship pilot that missionaries paved the way for conquest—a claim that confirmed Hideyoshi’s fears that Christianity was a political threat.

The Execution at Nishizaka

On a cold winter morning in February 1597, twenty-six Christians—a mix of European Franciscans and Jesuits and Japanese converts—were crucified at Nishizaka in Nagasaki. The site later became a monument, and the event entered the Church’s calendar as the Martyrdom of the Twenty-Six Saints of Japan. The execution was designed as a public spectacle to deter further conversions, but it had the opposite effect: the courage of the martyrs inspired deeper faith among the remaining Christians and became a recurring reference point for later missionaries, including Sebastian Rodrigues, who carried the memory of these deaths as a model of heroic fidelity.

Consequences and Aftermath

Although the 1597 crucifixion did not immediately halt missionary work—the Jesuits remained influential at court for another decade—it marked the end of the period of relative tolerance. Under Ieyasu and especially his successor Iemitsu, persecution became systematic and ruthless. The Edict of Expulsion in 1614 forced most missionaries out of the country, and those who remained, like Christovao Ferreira, operated underground. The torture methods that followed—the pit, boiling water at Unzen, and the water punishment—were designed not only to kill but to induce apostasy, a strategy that eventually succeeded with Ferreira and later with Rodrigues. The 1597 martyrs thus stand as the first wave of a long, brutal campaign that by the 1640s had wiped out every visible trace of Christianity in Japan.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

In Silence, the 1597 execution functions as a foundational myth of heroic martyrdom that the young Rodrigues idealizes. He imagines a glorious death like that of the twenty-six, but the novel systematically dismantles this ideal: the martyrs he actually witnesses—Mokichi and Ichizo drowned by the tide, the one-eyed man beheaded in the courtyard—die in squalor and silence, without trumpets or angels. The contrast between the 1597 spectacle and the lonely, inglorious deaths of the later Christians underscores the novel’s central question: why does God remain silent while his followers suffer? The twenty-six martyrs become a benchmark of courage that the weak, like Kichijiro, cannot meet, and that the strong, like Rodrigues, find themselves unable to sustain when the torture is not physical but moral—the suffering of others held hostage to their faith.