The Great Martyrdom of Nagasaki, 1622

Chapter One

The Hill

Nishizaka hill overlooked Nagasaki harbour. It was not a large hill, and it was not a notable one, a modest rise at the edge of a port city that had, in the space of fifty years, transformed from a fishing village into the most cosmopolitan settlement in Japan. Portuguese carracks had docked in its harbour. Jesuit priests had built churches in its streets. Chinese merchants, Japanese silk brokers, African and Malay sailors, European adventurers of every description had crowded its wharves and alleyways. Nagasaki was the place where the world met Japan.

It was also, by 1622, the place where Japan killed Christians.

The hill had form in this regard. Twenty-five years earlier, on February 5, 1597, twenty-six Christians had been crucified on Nishizaka under the orders of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, six Spanish Franciscans, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese laymen, including three boys. That execution had been the first time the central government shed blood in a coordinated persecution of the faith.

On September 10, 1622, the shogunate returned to Nishizaka to finish what Hideyoshi had started. This time, fifty-five would die.

Chapter Two

The Condemned

The victims had been assembled from prisons across Kyushu, missionaries captured while operating underground, Japanese converts who had sheltered them, their families. The shogunate divided them into two groups, and the division was deliberate: it encoded a hierarchy of punishment calibrated to the condemned’s role in the Church.

The first group, twenty-four or twenty-five people, the sources vary slightly, were the foreign missionaries and the most prominent Japanese leaders. They were condemned to be burned alive. The second group, thirty or thirty-one, were the ordinary lay faithful: women, children, men of no particular standing whose crime was not preaching or leading but simply believing, or simply refusing to stop believing. They were condemned to decapitation.

Among the condemned were figures whose lives traced the entire arc of the Jesuit enterprise in Japan. Carlo Spinola, an Italian Jesuit who had lectured on European mathematics and astronomy in Kyoto, a man who embodied the intellectual exchange that had once characterised the mission’s relationship with Japanese society, was led to the stake. Sebastian Kimura, a Japanese Jesuit priest, represented the native clergy that Valignano had worked so hard to build and that the shogunate found most threatening of all: proof that Christianity had put down roots deep enough to produce its own Japanese priests. Jacinto Orfanel, a Spanish Dominican who had worked in Kyushu since 1607 and chronicled the history of the missions, went to his death with the documentary record of the mission he had served still incomplete.

And there was Lucia de Freitas. She was eighty years old. She was the widow of a Spanish merchant. The local Christians called her the “mother of the confraternity” for her decades of work feeding the poor, nursing the sick, and providing food and shelter to hunted missionaries. Her crime, specifically, was hiding priests. She was burned alive.

Among the beheaded was Maria Murayama, a laywoman who happened to be the niece of the local commissioner, proof that family connections to the authorities provided no protection once the machinery of persecution was engaged. She died alongside seven children. The youngest were described in contemporary accounts as being butchered “as if they were lambs”, a phrase that suggests the executioners themselves were conscious that a line was being crossed.

Chapter Three

The Method

The Japanese method of burning at the stake was not the European one. It was worse.

In Europe, the condemned were typically bound tightly to a post surrounded by kindling at close range. The fire reached the body quickly. Death, while agonising, was often measured in minutes. The Japanese method was engineered for duration. The victims were tied loosely, by one wrist, allowing them to thrash, to stakes set in the ground. The firewood was arranged in a ring several feet away from the body, creating a slow, radiating heat rather than a consuming blaze. The condemned roasted rather than burned. Death took two to four hours.

On September 10, 1622, the situation was further prolonged by weather. Heavy rain the previous night had soaked the faggots. The wet wood smouldered rather than flamed. The smoke was thick, the heat uneven, the dying slow.

Reyer Gysbertszoon, a Dutch merchant and eyewitness, recorded what happened when the binding cords of several victims burned through before the victims themselves had died. They sprang from the fire, driven by pain beyond endurance, and attempted to recant. The executioners drove them back into the flames with pikes, telling them it was too late for mercy.

The beheadings were swifter but no less deliberate. Thirty people, women and children among them, were decapitated in sequence while the burnings were still in progress. The two methods of execution were conducted simultaneously, each group in view of the other, so that those waiting for the sword could watch those dying in the fire.

Chapter Four

Thirty Thousand Witnesses

The shogunate had staged the execution as a public spectacle. It was meant to terrify. The logic was straightforward: display the consequences of Christian faith with sufficient brutality, and the underground Church would collapse. People would apostatise. Missionaries would stop coming. The problem would solve itself.

Approximately thirty thousand people came to watch.

What happened next was not what the authorities had planned.

As the fires were kindled, the martyrs called out sayonara, farewell, to the crowd. The crowd responded. Not with silence, not with fear, not with the stunned submission the shogunate had anticipated, but with singing. The onlookers began to intone the Magnificat, the canticle of the Virgin Mary, the song of the lowly exalted and the mighty brought low. As the hours passed and the fires consumed the living and the swords took the heads of the kneeling, the crowd moved through psalms. Laudate pueri Dominum. Praise the Lord, O children. The singing continued through the entire duration of the execution, through the two to four hours it took the wet wood to kill the bound figures at the stakes, through the rhythmic fall of the executioner’s blade.

The Japanese judges sat in a row observing the proceedings in what the Dutch witness described as “affected majesty and gravity.” They had ordered a spectacle of state power. They were witnessing a counter-spectacle of communal defiance, thirty thousand voices raised in Latin hymns over the bodies of the dying, culminating in the Te Deum Laudamus as the last martyr fell silent.

The authorities understood, immediately, that the execution had failed in its primary objective. Dead Christians, singing Christians, crowds of Christians who turned a public killing into a public act of worship, these were not the outputs of a successful deterrent programme. The martyrs were not cautionary tales. They were, in the eyes of the faithful, saints. Their deaths did not weaken the Church.

Chapter Five

The Ashes

The shogunate had anticipated the problem of relics.

Japanese Christians venerated the remains of martyrs with an intensity that the Jesuit missionaries had actively cultivated, bone fragments, scraps of clothing, blood-soaked earth from execution sites. These relics circulated through the underground Church, strengthening faith and binding communities. Every martyr’s body was a potential shrine.

The authorities moved to prevent this. Following the executions, they prohibited prayer at the site. All fifty-five bodies, the burned and the beheaded, were thrown into a single massive pit lined with charcoal and wood. The pit was set alight. The remains were completely incinerated. The ashes were collected and scattered into the sea.

Nothing was left. No bones to venerate. No grave to visit. No physical trace that fifty-five people had died on this spot on this day. The shogunate had destroyed the relics.

Chapter Six

The Lesson the Shogunate Learned

The Great Martyrdom of 1622 was not the beginning of the persecution, that had started with Hideyoshi’s edict in 1587 and escalated through the mass expulsion of missionaries in 1614. Nor was it the end, the killing would continue, with increasing methodological sophistication, for another two decades. What it was, in the calculus of the Tokugawa state, was a proof of concept’s failure.

Public execution did not work. Not at this scale, not with this faith, not against these people. The Twenty-Six Martyrs of 1597 had inspired rather than deterred. The Great Martyrdom of 1622 had produced a crowd of thirty thousand singing hymns. Each round of killing seeded the next generation of believers.

The shogunate drew the correct strategic conclusion. Under the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, the policy shifted, from killing Christians to breaking them. The goal was no longer martyrdom but apostasy. The state needed not dead saints but living failures: priests who had publicly renounced their faith, converts who had trampled the fumi-e, bronze or wooden images of Christ or the Virgin, communities that had been demonstrated, visibly and undeniably, to have abandoned their God.

The instruments of this new strategy were developed through the late 1620s and 1630s with a bureaucratic thoroughness that the shogunate brought to everything it did.

The fumi-e trampling, became an annual ritual across Nagasaki and other regions with significant Christian populations. It was first deployed in 1629 and continued, in some areas, for over two centuries. The act of trampling was not physically harmful. It was spiritually devastating, a forced desecration that divided the community between those who complied and those who could not.

The terauke system required every Japanese citizen to register at a local Buddhist temple, whose priests were tasked with conducting annual inspections to certify that their parishioners were not secret Christians. The Buddhist clergy became, in effect, a nationwide surveillance apparatus, religious police operating under the cover of pastoral care.

The goningumi, five-family neighbourhood associations, imposed collective responsibility for religious compliance. Each household was accountable for the orthodoxy of its four neighbours. Failure to report a hidden Christian meant punishment for the entire group. The system turned every citizen into a potential informer and every community into a trap.

Bounty boards were erected across the country, advertising cash rewards for those who turned in Christians or priests: two to three hundred pieces of silver for a bateren (padre), one hundred for an iruman (brother), lesser amounts for laypeople. The incentives weaponised poverty against faith.

And then there was the tsurushi, the torture of the pit, which arrived at the conclusion that the Great Martyrdom had implied: if you wanted to destroy faith, you had to make the faithful watch their leaders break. The ana-tsurushi that would break Cristóvão Ferreira in 1633, detailed in the article on Ferreira elsewhere on this site, was the logical terminus of a strategy that began on Nishizaka hill in 1622, when the shogunate watched thirty thousand people sing over fifty-five burning and bleeding bodies and understood that spectacles of death were not enough.

Chapter Seven

What Followed the Hill

The decade between the Great Martyrdom and the definitive closure of Japan was a cascade of escalating measures, each building on the last.

In 1630, the shogunate banned the importation of thirty-two Christian and quasi-Christian texts, sealing the country’s intellectual borders. Between 1633 and 1639, the five sakoku edicts progressively tightened the physical borders: Japanese subjects were forbidden from travelling abroad on pain of death; those living overseas were barred from returning; the construction of ocean-going vessels was prohibited; Portuguese merchants were confined to Dejima; and finally, in the aftermath of the Shimabara Rebellion, Portuguese ships were banned entirely under penalty of death for their crews.

The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38, the Christian-bannered uprising that required over a hundred thousand troops to suppress and ended with the massacre of thirty-seven thousand defenders at Hara Castle, was the event that sealed everything. It confirmed the shogunate’s darkest assessment: Christianity was not merely a devotional practice but a military force, capable of inspiring armed insurrection on a scale that threatened the state itself. The fifty-five dead on Nishizaka hill in 1622 had been a warning. The thirty-seven thousand dead at Hara Castle in 1638 were proof.

The hidden Christians of Kyushu remembered anyway. In the fishing villages of the Gotō Islands, on Ikitsuki, in the hills above Nagasaki, in the Amakusa archipelago, communities that had gone underground after the persecutions preserved the names of the martyrs in whispered prayers, the orasho, garbled Portuguese and Latin transmitted orally across generations until the words had lost their dictionary meanings but not their sacred weight.

When Nishizaka hill was finally marked with a monument, the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum, built in 1962, commemorating the 1597 crucifixions, the fifty-five of 1622 were remembered alongside them. In 1867, Pope Pius IX beatified the victims of the Great Martyrdom. In 2008, 188 Japanese martyrs of the persecution era, including many from the broader campaign that the 1622 event epitomised, were beatified by Pope Benedict XVI.