Martyrdom of the Twenty-Six at Nishizaka

The Martyrdom of the Twenty-Six at Nishizaka, carried out on a cold winter's morning in February 1597 near Nagasaki, was the first large-scale public execution of Christians by the Japanese state and a decisive turning point in the persecution that would eventually extinguish the visible Church in Japan. Twenty-six people—European missionaries and Japanese converts alike—were crucified on a hill at Nishizaka, an event that both horrified and inspired the Christian world and set the pattern for the state's escalating campaign of torture and execution. The martyrdom marked the moment when the Tokugawa Shogunate's sporadic hostility toward Christianity hardened into a systematic, state-sponsored policy of eradication, and it became a foundational memory for the underground Church that survived in secret for centuries.

Background and Causes

The execution of the Twenty-Six Martyrs did not occur in a vacuum but was the culmination of a decade of growing tension between the Christian mission and the Japanese state. Christianity had been brought to Japan by the Basque missionary Francis Xavier, who landed at Kagoshima in 1549, and the mission flourished during the Sengoku Period, when Japan was torn by civil war among warring daimyos. By the 1580s, the mission had grown to some 150,000 converts, and the Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano had founded seminaries, colleges, and a novitiate with the vision of a Japanese clergy. The missionaries enjoyed a privileged position at the court of the Bakufu, partly because the unifiers Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu valued trade with the Portuguese black ships from Macao. Yet Japan could be a land of schizophrenic change. On July 24, 1587, the regent Hideyoshi, while in his cups, flew into a violent rage and ordered the missionaries to leave the country, declaring, "I am resolved that the padres should not stay on Japanese soil. I therefore order that having settled their affairs within twenty days, they must return to their own country." His anger quickly subsided, the expulsion decree became a dead letter, and within four years there was a community of more than 200,000 converts. But the writing was on the wall. Ten years later, Hideyoshi's anger overflowed again, this time occasioned by the pilot of a stranded Spanish ship who boasted that the greatness of the Spanish Empire was partly due to the missionaries who always prepared the way for the armed forces of the Spanish king. When this news was brought to Hideyoshi, he ordered the immediate execution of a group of Christian missionaries.

What Happens

On a cold winter's morning in February 1597, twenty-six people—Japanese and European—were crucified at Nishizaka in Nagasaki. The group included Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries as well as Japanese converts, among them lay brothers, catechists, and even children. The execution was a public spectacle designed to terrify the Christian population into apostasy. The victims were marched to the hill, tied or nailed to crosses, and left to die slowly in the cold. The site, not far from what is now Nagasaki station, became a place of pilgrimage and memory for the persecuted Church. Today, a monument stands there to commemorate the spot where they died.

Consequences and Aftermath

The martyrdom of the Twenty-Six at Nishizaka had profound and lasting consequences for Christianity in Japan. It marked the beginning of a systematic, state-sponsored persecution that would intensify under Hideyoshi's successors, particularly the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, whose methods were so savage that "neither the infamous brutality of the methods which he used to exterminate the Christians, nor the heroic constancy of the sufferers has ever been surpassed in the long and painful history of martyrdom." The executions became a religious spectacle: at one mass burning of fifty-five persons of all ages and both sexes on the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto in October 1619, the martyrs said "sayonara" to the onlookers, who then began to intone the Magnificat and psalms while the Japanese judges sat on one side "in affected majesty and gravity." The Tokugawa Bakufu, however, was not slow to see that such glorious martyrdoms were not serving the desired purpose, and bit by bit death was preceded by torture in a tremendous effort to make the martyrs apostatize. The most effective means of inducing apostasy became the "ana-tsurushi" or hanging in the pit, in which the victim was tightly bound, hung upside down from a gallows into a pit of filth, and left to die over days or even weeks. The martyrdom at Nishizaka also became a foundational event for the crypto-Christians who kept their faith in secret for centuries, handing down the tradition that the fathers would return. When Japan was reopened in 1865, the crypto-Christians came out from their hiding, asking for the statue of Santa Maria and speaking about Christmas and Lent, recalling the celibacy of the priests. The event is also a key reference point in Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, where it is recalled as the beginning of the persecution that the novel's characters face, and it is mentioned in the context of the Church in Rome receiving news of the apostasy of Christovao Ferreira, which seemed unthinkable given the heroism of the earlier martyrs.