To the average Western reader, the Japanese thirst for martyrdom seems altogether excessive.

Lessons Drawn from the Japanese Martyrs

by Rachel Lu

Christianity came to Japan in 1549. The Land of the Rising Sun must have been ready to hear the good news when St Francis Xavier first set foot on its shores. By the time he left, just two years later, there were three thousand Japanese Christians. Over the next forty years that number increased to two hundred thousand. That was when the persecution began.

The story of Japanese Christianity is grim. It is doubtful whether any group of Christians has faced such intense persecution over such a lengthy period. After seeing thousands of Christians tortured and executed over the course of about fifty years, even the Jesuits stopped sending missionaries to Japan. The torments inflicted on these courageous Christian communities have been movingly depicted by Shusaku Endo in his provocative novel, Silence. Himself a Japanese Christian, Endo drew on oral histories from Japanese Catholic communities, which are among relatively few sources of information about the fate of these Christians through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One thing, however, is known. When Commodore Matthew Perry forced his way into Japan in 1853, he found around twenty thousand Japanese Christians still practicing their faith in secret. Through centuries of brutal persecution, and without any support from the West, the gates of Hell still had not prevailed against Japanese Christianity.

Silence is a work of tremendous power and subtlety, appropriate for the seasoned Christian. For pure triumphalist hagiography, however, it is hard to beat St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Victories of the Martyrs,which provides an account of the much-revered twenty-six martyrs who were crucified at Nagasaki in 1597. In its own way, this text too is likely to provoke discomfort. To the average Western reader, the Japanese thirst for martyrdom seems altogether excessive. We see women sewing festive garments in preparation for the happy day, as children beg permission to join their parents in attaining that glorious crown of death. A son shames his newly converted father into joining the martyrs instead of fleeing to a more protected region to practice his faith in secret. Reading these stories as a twenty-first century American, it is difficult not to think of kamikaze pilots and samurai warriors falling on their swords, and to wonder whether these martyrs might not be reflecting a characteristically Japanese fatalism and a morbid fascination with death.

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