The Japanese martyrs

I've been meaning to read through a short history of the Japanese martyrs ever since the feast day earlier this month of Saint Paul Miki and companions, who suffered in 1597. Paul was of a wealthy people and was educated by the Jesuit Fathers, before himself becoming a Jesuit and a well-known preacher. In the persecutions of the emperor Hideyoshi that destroyed the Church in Japan, Paul was arrested with many others and forced to march from Kyoto to Nagasaki, where they were massacred together, by being tied or shackled to crosses and then speared. 

The Japanese Catholics and their European fellows had much to suffer in the persecutions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as the Church was gradually pushed over a cliff. Today itself (the twenty-second day of February), in the Roman martyrology, we hear of a Portuguese Jesuit Father called Didacus (aka. Diego) Carvalho, who was grievously imprisoned and then placed naked for days on a frozen lake to suffer exposure. Japan had been evangelised first by the present of Portuguese merchants in the mid sixteenth-century, merchants who had been quickly followed by the Jesuit Fathers, led by Saint Francis Xavier himself, a co-founder of the Order. The Fathers discovered a mixture of the Chinese religions and local deities, served by priests called bonzes, who served under a high-priest. Saint Francis' influence was profound, and several of these communities survived without priests and Sacraments until Europeans revisited in the nineteenth century. Japanese nobility and royalty itself had bowed to Christ and to his vicar in Rome until about 1588, when a Japanese emperor called Cambacundono decided that he was a god and expelled the Jesuits. They hung about, disguised. More persecution of the Church arrived in 1592, under the emperor Tagcosama, who suspected European mariners of using Christianity to monopolise trade in the region and eventually extend European rule. Paul Miki and his companions, both Jesuit and Franciscan, died in 1597.

The brief reprieve following the death of Tagcosama in 1599 ended with the arrival in 1602 of emperor Cubosama, who was more vicious and ordered the torture of Christians in various ways, each as barbaric as the others. Cubosama's son Xogun (acceding in 1616) was apparently worse yet, his greatest victim being the Jesuit Father Charles Spinola, who was burnt alive with other Religious of the great Orders and several other priests. In 1639, all Europeans but the Dutch were prohibited from entering Japan. Thus ended the external work of the Jesuit Fathers there for about two centuries.