Ecumenical Commemoration
Twenty-Six Martyrs
February 5 · d. 1597
also known as Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki
Twenty-six Christians were crucified on Nishizaka Hill above Nagasaki harbour on 5 February 1597, by order of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: six Franciscan friars, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese laymen, three of them boys of twelve to fourteen. They were beatified in 1627 and canonized in 1862, the first canonized martyrs of the Far East. Commontide keeps their day on 5 February, with the Anglican calendars.
In 1596 a Spanish galleon called the San Felipe, bound from Manila for Acapulco, ran aground on the coast of Tosa in Japan. Hideyoshi, who ruled Japan, sent officials to seize the cargo. The ship's pilot, Francisco de Olandia, is said to have spread out a map of the Spanish empire before them and told them how it had grown so large: the missionaries go first, and the soldiers come after. Whether he really said it no one can prove; but the story reached Hideyoshi, and after that the friars in Kyoto were no longer harmless holy men. They were the advance guard of a foreign king.
There had been Christians in Japan for nearly fifty years by then, since Francis Xavier landed in 1549, and the Jesuits had learned to move quietly, through lords and courts. Then in 1593 a Franciscan named Pedro Bautista arrived from Manila as an ambassador, with a horse and a mirror and a gilded writing desk for gifts. His embassy succeeded. Hideyoshi gave the friars ground in Kyoto for a church and a hospital for lepers, and Bautista, his errand done, simply stayed, and built in the open what the Jesuits had kept out of sight for forty years.
In December 1596 Hideyoshi ordered the Christian priests put to death, and days later narrowed the order to the Franciscans and those who kept company with them. Twenty-four were arrested at Kyoto. Two of the prisoners were young men who had wanted for years to be Jesuits and had never been received; in prison that December, James Kisai, who was about sixty-three, and John Soan de Goto, who was nineteen, made their vows in the Society at last, before two priests who would stand at their crosses six weeks later.
On a Friday in January the twenty-four had their left ears cut off, and were carried through the streets of Kyoto in oxcarts, three to a cart, so that everyone could see what happened to Christians. Then they were marched to Nagasaki, roughly six hundred miles, in winter, about a month on the road. The tradition holds that Paul Miki, a Jesuit scholastic and a famous preacher, led them in the Te Deum as they went. Two men joined the company on the way and were not sent back. Matthias had been arrested by mistake, in place of another man of the same name who cooked at the Franciscan house; when the mistake came to light he went with the prisoners anyway. Francis Kichi, a carpenter of Kyoto, simply volunteered. That is how twenty-four became twenty-six.
On 5 February they were bound to crosses on the hill called Nishizaka, above the harbour, by iron rings at the neck and hands and feet, and two executioners went along the row driving lances crosswise through them. Before that, Paul Miki preached. He said he was a Japanese and a Jesuit, and that he was dying for the Gospel he had preached; he called the cross "the noblest pulpit I have ever filled." Then he told the crowd, since none of them could suppose a dying man wanted to deceive them, that there was no way to be saved except the Christian way, and that his religion taught him to pardon his enemies: "I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death." He asked them to be baptized.
The youngest were three boys. Thomas Kozaki, about fourteen, was killed beside his father Michael. Louis Ibaraki was twelve, and the contemporary account says that his joy was plain to see. Anthony was twelve or thirteen, born at Nagasaki to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, and he called out "Jesus, Mary!" and then sang, "Praise the Lord, you children!", which, the account notes, he had learned in catechism class in that same town.
Within a generation the Church in Japan was driven wholly underground, and stayed there for two and a half centuries, without priests, without Mass, the prayers handed down by mouth from parent to child. In 1864 French missionaries finished a small church at Ōura in Nagasaki and dedicated it, that February, to these twenty-six martyrs. One month later a group of villagers from Urakami came to the door, and a woman named Yuri Isabelina Sugimoto asked to see the statue of the Virgin, and told the priest that their hearts were the same as his. They had been waiting, in hiding, since the hill.
You will probably never be asked the question these twenty-six were asked, and it would be a kind of vanity to rehearse your answer to it. But notice what the record actually preserves of them. Seventeen are only names. One boy is remembered for a song he learned in a catechism class, in the town where he would die. A carpenter is remembered for walking up to a column of prisoners and joining it. Almost nothing survives of what any of them achieved, and a good deal survives of what they had been given: a psalm learned in a room, a rule kept, a pardon offered from a cross to the man who put them there. What has been handed to you in rooms like that, and what would be left of it if everything you had built were taken away?
The event is documented from two directions at once, and the two are rivals. Luís Fróis, the senior Jesuit chronicler in Japan, dated his Relación del martirio de los 26 cristianos ... en Nangasaqui at Nagasaki on 15 March 1597, five weeks after the executions, and died there that July; his report went out through the Jesuit annual letters and into print in Italian and Latin in 1599, with further editions and French translations following. Marcelo de Ribadeneira, a Franciscan who had been in the mission from 1594, published the Franciscan-side account, his Historia de las islas del Archipiélago Filipino, at Barcelona in 1601. Each order's chronicler blamed the other order for provoking the crackdown. That is not a weakness in the record: two partisans who disagree about cause while agreeing about the facts of the day are better evidence for those facts than one calm narrator would be. It does mean that the modern habit of putting the three Jesuits at the head of the story may descend from Fróis rather than from anything on the hill.
The martyrs' own words survive in one place only. A contemporary account, preserved by the Bollandists in the Acta Sanctorum and read every year in the Roman Office of Readings, carries Miki's speech from the cross, Anthony's cry and his psalm, Louis Ibaraki's joy, and the presence of the priests Francisco Pasio and João Rodrigues at the crosses. These words are stable because they are prayed, not because a biographer chose them. Other sayings attributed to the martyrs circulate widely in devotional writing, among them a letter from Thomas Kozaki to his mother and a dying cry of Louis Ibaraki; none of them could be traced to any chronicle or edition, and they are not repeated here.
The dates are firmer than devotional retellings suggest. The San Felipe sailed from Manila on 12 July 1596 and grounded at Urado in Tosa on 19 October. Hideyoshi ordered the priests' deaths on 8 December and narrowed the order to the Franciscans on 12 December; the arrests followed at Kyoto that same month, and the ear-cutting and the oxcarts fell on Friday 3 January 1597. The 1587 expulsion edict, under which all of this was nominally done, had gone largely unenforced for a decade, which raises the question of why these twenty-six and not others. Takano Yurika, working from Toyotomi administrative records, argues (2024) that the answer is bureaucratic: under the toritsugi system of accountable intermediaries, Hasegawa Sonin was the liaison answerable for Philippine and Franciscan affairs and was therefore politically exposed, while the Jesuits' Portuguese and Indian channel had no equivalent officer through whom an indictment could be brought. Ishida Mitsunari, commissioner at Kyoto, is credited with steering the blame onto that channel. It is one historian's argument rather than settled consensus, but it converts a pious mystery into a documented mechanism, and it complicates any reading of the day as undifferentiated hatred of the faith.
Veneration began within months, in the eyewitness reports rather than in later legend, and moved at once to relics. Devotional sources describe an Italian layman, John Baptist Bonasina, gathering the martyrs' blood in a porcelain jar, said to have remained liquid nine months later and to have been examined by church authorities at Macau; they also report Japanese Christians taking bones and blood-stained cloth from the hill immediately, and a Spanish and Philippine envoy formally collecting the last remains, and the crosses themselves, in 1598. There is no single dated translation of a body, but a dispersal of fragments to Franciscan houses in the Philippines, Spain, and Mexico, and no inventory of where each went.
Urban VIII beatified the twenty-six on 14 September 1627, and Pius IX canonized them on 8 June 1862, the first canonized martyrs of the Far East. They have never been commemorated apart from one another. The Roman title, "Saint Paul Miki and Companions," names the Jesuit and folds the Franciscan superior and the other twenty-four into the word "companions"; no source explains the choice. Two of the company carry local devotion built on top of the joint feast: Felipe de Jesús as patron and protomartyr of Mexico City, and Gonzalo García, the first canonized saint of the Indian subcontinent, in the Vasai diocese near Mumbai (whose observance three sources date variously to 5 or 7 February).
Everything at Nishizaka now is memorial rather than reliquary. The Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum and Monument was dedicated there in June 1962 for the canonization centenary; the life-sized bronze relief of all twenty-six took the Japanese convert Yasutake Funakoshi four years, and it faces Ōura. Beside it stands St Philip Nishizaka Church, built for the same centenary by Imai Kenji in a Gaudí-influenced idiom and named for Felipe de Jesús. Ōura Church, Japan's oldest surviving church building, became a cathedral in 1891, a National Treasure in 1933, and part of the UNESCO "Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region" in 2018. John Paul II came in 1981, Francis in 2019. The Nippon Sei Ko Kai added the day to its calendar in 1959, and the American 1979 Book of Common Prayer and the Canadian Book of Alternative Services keep it on 5 February, the day they died; the Roman calendar keeps 6 February, because 5 February belongs to Agatha.
The martyrs' own words survive in a single contemporary account of the martyrdom of Paul Miki and his companions, preserved by the Bollandists at Acta Sanctorum, Februarii I, p. 769, cap. 14, §§109 to 110; the excerpts quoted here (the cross as "the noblest pulpit I have ever filled," the pardon of the Emperor and of those who sought his death, and the closing appeal to baptism), together with Anthony's cry and psalm, Louis Ibaraki's joy, and the presence of Pasio and Rodrigues, are given in the Liturgy of the Hours (ICEL) translation of the Office of Readings, at liturgies.net/saints/paulmiki/readings.htm.
For the events themselves, the two contemporary chronicles remain the base of everything later: Luís Fróis, Relación del martirio de los 26 cristianos ... en Nangasaqui, dated 15 March 1597, printed 1599 and edited by Romualdo Galdos (Rome: Tipografía de la Pontificia Universidad Gregoriana, 1935); and Marcelo de Ribadeneira, Historia de las islas del Archipiélago Filipino y reinos de la Gran China, Tartaria, Cochinchina, Malaca, Siam, Cambodge y Japón (Barcelona, 1601), reissued at Madrid by La Editorial Católica in 1947 from the Biblioteca Nacional copy, shelfmark R. 6664, and scanned at archive.org/details/historiadelasisl00riba. Pedro Morejón's Jesuit account of 1619 was Englished the same year with a preface addressed "To All That Suffer Persecution in England For Catholic Religion." Neither of the twenty-six's own orders left any writing by the martyrs; there is none to edit.
Among modern work, Takano Yurika, "Why Did Most Jesuits Survive the Martyrdom of 1597?," International Symposia on Jesuit Studies 2, no. 1 (30 January 2024), DOI 10.51238/ISJS.2022.15, supplies the toritsugi argument summarized above from Toyotomi administrative records; Alec Ryrie's Gresham College lecture "The Japanese Martyrs" (11 March 2020) traces Fróis's print history and the rival-order accusation. C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650, is the standard scholarly synthesis of the period and was not consulted for this page. On the later Nagasaki history that is sometimes joined to 1597 and should not be, see the Monash University study "Remembering the Ruins of the Urakami Cathedral: Providence or Fifth Persecution?" and "Murder in the Cathedral" in the Church Life Journal.
Nine of the twenty-six can be described; seventeen can only be named. Pedro Bautista, born 1542 at San Esteban del Valle in Ávila and formed from 1567 in the strict Alcantarine reform, was fifty-five and superior of the mission. With him died Martín de la Ascensión, a theologian of about thirty; Francisco Blanco of Galicia, ordained in Mexico, about thirty and six months in Japan; Felipe de Jesús, born in Mexico City, a former merchant at Manila who had come to Japan seeking ordination and had not yet received it, about twenty-four; Gonzalo García, born at Bassein in India to a Portuguese father and an Indian mother, once an interpreter and merchant; and Francisco de San Miguel, a lay brother of about fifty-three. The Jesuits were Paul Miki, born in Settsu about 1562 to 1564 and so about thirty-three or thirty-five, a scholastic and not ordained; John Soan de Goto of Gotō in Hizen, nineteen; and James Kisai of Bizen, about sixty-three, the eldest of the company. The seventeen laymen, Franciscan tertiaries and their associates, are known from the canonical list: Anthony Dainan, Bonaventure of Miyako, Cosmas Takeya, Francisco of Nagasaki, Francis Kichi, Gabriel de Duisco, Joachim Sakakibara, John Kisaka, Leo Karasumaru, Louis Ibaraki, Matthias of Miyako, Michael Kozaki, Paul Ibaraki, Paul Suzuki, Peter Sukejirō, Thomas Kozaki, and Thomas Xico. Devotional compilations supply trades, ages, and hometowns for most of them, under a different set of name-forms for the same men, and verification found several of those details wrong. They can be named, and for the most part they cannot be characterized. That is a property of the record, not a failure of looking for them.
A modern reader may reasonably ask whether the whole thing has been arranged for edification, and whether a religious execution is being made to stand in for a political collision. On the first: the date, the route, the number, the composition of the company, and the manner of death are attested from independent quarters, but composed demeanour and dying speeches are also the conventions of missionary letters written home to encourage Catholic Europe, and are the part of any such account most likely to be smoothed toward the ideal. On the second: yes, substantially, and this is the mainstream account rather than revisionism. The trigger was the San Felipe and the pilot's reported boast; the friction between discreet Portuguese-aligned Jesuits and newly arrived Spanish Franciscans preaching openly against a standing edict is documented on both sides; and Hideyoshi's fear that missions preceded fleets was a rational reading of what European powers were in fact doing elsewhere. None of that requires the tradition to abandon its own judgement, which is that men and boys were offered their lives for a recantation and refused. The killing of the three boys is the hardest thing here, and it should stay hard: older martyrologies can read as admiring a child's composure at his own execution, which risks passing over the horror of a state killing children for their community's religion. The tradition has kept these boys precisely because their deaths were recognized at the time as uniquely shocking.
Almighty God, you gave your servants the Martyrs of Japan boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Tomás /toʊˈmɑːs/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12