1597 · Nagasaki, Japan
Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki
Japan's ruler crucified twenty-six Christians on a hill outside Nagasaki in 1597, the first act in a persecution that would drive the faith underground for over two centuries.
Christianity had come to Japan in 1549 with the Jesuit Francis Xavier, and it spread fast. By the 1580s, there were perhaps 200,000 Japanese Christians and growing. The ruling warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi grew alarmed. He saw Christianity as a foreign ideology that undermined loyalty to the state and suspected the missionaries were advance scouts for European colonizers. He was not entirely wrong about the colonial fears, though most converts were genuine believers. In December 1596, he ordered a crackdown. Twenty-six men were arrested in Kyoto and Osaka: six Franciscan friars (four Spanish, one Mexican, one Indian), three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese laypeople, including three boys aged twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. They were marched six hundred miles through winter to Nagasaki as a public warning. On February 5, 1597, they were bound to crosses on a hill overlooking the harbor and pierced with lances. The youngest, twelve-year-old Luis Ibaraki, reportedly sang a psalm as he died. The persecution intensified over the following decades. By the 1630s, Christianity was completely banned. Thousands were killed, some by crucifixion, some by being suspended over sulfurous hot springs. The remaining Christians went underground, practicing in secret for over two hundred years without priests or sacraments.
Why it matters
Began Japan's systematic persecution of Christians, which drove the faith underground for 250 years and produced thousands of martyrs.
What Happened
Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered the arrest of twenty-six Christians, including Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries and Japanese laypeople, the youngest of them just twelve years old. They were paraded through several cities and then crucified on Nishizaka Hill in Nagasaki on February 5, 1597. The persecution escalated dramatically under the Tokugawa shogunate. By 1639, Japan was closed to the outside world, and Christianity was a capital crime. Hidden Christians, called Kakure Kirishitan, preserved fragments of the faith in secret for generations.
Why It Still Matters
When Japan reopened in the 1850s, French missionaries in Nagasaki were astonished to find communities of hidden Christians who had maintained their faith without clergy for over two centuries. They had baptized their children, prayed in a mixture of Japanese, Portuguese, and Latin, and kept statues of Mary disguised as Buddhist figures. The twenty-six martyrs, canonized in 1862, are a reminder that faith can survive even the most complete suppression, and that ordinary laypeople, including children, have shown extraordinary courage.