The Samurai with the Cross: The Martyrs of Japan

The mystery of Christianity in the Land of the Rising Sun is of a Church repeatedly persecuted but always reborn.

ROMA, (Chiesa) - A samurai carrying the cross is not a conventional image. But there were some of these among the 188 Japanese martyrs of the seventeenth century who were proclaimed blessed on November 24, 2008 in Nagasaki. There were noblemen, priests - four of them - and one religious. But most of them were ordinary Christians: farmers, women, young people under the age of twenty, even small children, entire families. All of them were killed for refusing to renounce the Christian faith.

The beatification of "Fr. Peter Kibe and his 187 companions" - as the title of the ceremony put it - was the first ever celebrated in Japan. The new blesseds joined 42 Japanese saints and 395 blesseds, all of them martyrs, elevated to the honors of the altar beginning with Pius IX.

The new blesseds were martyred between 1603 and 1639. At the time, there were about 300,000 Catholics in Japan, evangelized first by the Jesuits, with St. Francis Xavier, and then also by the Franciscans.

The initial flowering of Christianity was followed by terrible persecutions. Many people were killed, with an unprecedented cruelty that did not spare women and children. In addition to the killings, the Catholic community was decimated by the apostasy of those who abjured the faith out of fear. But it was not annihilated.

Part of it went underground, and kept the faith alive by transmitting it from parents to children for two centuries, even without bishops, priests, and sacraments. It is recounted that on Good Friday in 1865, ten thousand of these "kakure kirisitan," hidden Christians, emerged from the villages and presented themselves in Nagasaki to the astonished missionaries who had just recently regained access to Japan.

As it had been three centuries before, in the beginning of the twentieth century Nagasaki again became the city with the strongest Catholic presence in Japan. On the eve of the second world war, two out of three Japanese Catholics lived in Nagasaki. But in 1945 came a terrible new extermination. This time it was not from persecution, but from the atomic bomb dropped on their city.

Today, there are just over half a million Catholics in Japan. They are a small proportion in relation to a population of 126 million. But they are respected and influential, thanks in part to an extensive network of schools and universities. And if to those of Japanese birth are added the immigrants from other Asian countries, the number of Catholics doubles, and exceeds one million.

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"But I do not believe that the criterion of statistics is the best for judging the value of a Church," said Cardinal Peter Seichi Shirayanagi, archbishop emeritus of Tokyo, in an interview with "Asia News" on the eve of the beatification of the 188 martyrs.

The difficulty that Catholicism has in spreading not only in Japan, but in all of Asia, is a problem that has long troubled the Church.

The Jesuits, for example, were convinced that after the second world war Japan was fertile soil for a great missionary expansion. For this reason, they sent some of their most talented people to the country. The current superior general of the Society of Jesus, Adolfo Nicolás, 71, lived in the Far East beginning in 1964, mainly in Tokyo, as a professor of theology at Sophia University, as the provincial of the Jesuits in Japan, and most recently, from 2004-2007, as the moderator of the Jesuit conference of East Asia and Oceania. In addition to Spanish, Italian, English, and French, he speaks Japanese fluently. Fr. Pedro Arrupe, superior general of the Jesuits from 1965-1983, also spent many years in Japan. And so did Fr. Giuseppe Pittau, who was interim director of the Society.

The beatification of the 188 martyrs has in any case brought the attention of all of Japan back to the presence in its midst of the "little flock" that is the Catholic Church. Their martyrdom for faith in Christ has become known to a much wider public. And it is a story that in many ways recalls the acts of the martyrs of the first Christian centuries, in imperial Rome.

"Semen est sanguis christianorum," the blood of the martyrs is fruitful seed, Tertullian wrote at the beginning of the third century.

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Chiesa is a wonderful source on all things Catholic in Europe. It is skillfully edited by Sandro Magister. SANDRO MAGISTER was born on the feast of the Guardian Angels in 1943, in the town of Busto Arsizio in the archdiocese of Milan. The following day he was baptized into the Catholic Church. His wife’s name is Anna, and he has two daughters, Sara and Marta. He lives in Rome.