St. Paul Miki and Companions

The twenty-six martyrs of Japan in 1597 are remembered together because they died together, crucified at Nagasaki on the hill now called the Holy Mountain on the fifth of February. They were a mixed company: three Japanese Jesuits, including Paul Miki who was the son of a Japanese military commander and the most prominent of the group; six Spanish Franciscans, several of them recently arrived in Japan; and seventeen Japanese laymen, among them catechists, Franciscan tertiaries, a physician, and one boy of twelve named Louis Ibaraki.

They had been arrested in Osaka and Kyoto at the order of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had grown alarmed at the depth to which Christianity had penetrated Japanese society. The top of the left ear of each prisoner was cut off — a mark of criminal punishment — and they were then marched six hundred miles in the dead of winter through the main island to Nagasaki, displayed in each town along the way as a deterrent. The intention was clearly to frighten the Japanese Christian community; the effect appears to have been the opposite.

The accounts of what was said from the crosses were preserved because Franciscan witnesses wrote them down within living memory of the events, and their depositions were later used in the canonization process. Paul Miki, a gifted preacher, spoke from the cross as he had preached in the missions, addressing the crowd in Japanese and forgiving Toyotomi Hideyoshi and all who had condemned him. He said that he died not as a Japanese criminal but as a Japanese Christian, and that he had no greater wish than that every Japanese person receive the faith.

The boy Louis and the others died with the same composure that the witnesses recorded with evident astonishment. These twenty-six were canonized by Pius IX in 1862 — the first canonization of the Japanese mission — in a ceremony that for the first time brought the heroism of that mission formally before the universal Church. The company as a whole is evidence of a Christian community in Japan deep enough and mature enough that, when the moment of trial came, it produced martyrs who died like the martyrs of the ancient persecutions.