History and Historiography of Martyrdom in Japan

Abstract

The successive bans on Christianity in Early Modern Japan led to several persecution campaigns – especially during the early seventeenth century – which resulted in numerous deaths, among both the local converts and the missionaries. These events made a major impact on Europe, including the beatification of the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, who died in 1597 and were blessed 30 years later. Active missionary efforts ended by the late 1630s, but during the three centuries of the Edo era (mid-seventeenth–mid-nineteenth centuries), Christianity survived within hidden communities. Such communities kept legends of local martyrs, and they were sometimes the subjects of administrative control. A few incidents also saw people killed due to alleged links to Christianity. The martyrs of Japan came back to the forefront of Western discourse during the nineteenth century, with the rediscovery of “hidden Christians” in 1865 and the persecutions that followed. This process culminated in the beatifications of the martyrs in Japan and the official recognition of Christianity. In this context, the notions of Christian martyrs/martyrdom and persecution were accepted in Japan for the first time, and these terms became officially translated. After that, Japanese Christians started building a new identity through the construction of narratives on Christian martyrs. They especially tried to locate the alleged locations of the executions of martyrs in the early modern period. Such efforts resulted in the establishment of the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum in Nagasaki and the beatification and canonizations of various groups of martyrs (in 1981, 1987, 2007, and 2016), as well as the recognition of relevant locations as World Heritage Sites. After the Second World War, the martyrs of Japan were also linked to the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, a fact which was stressed during the visit of Pope John Paul II to Japan, becoming an important part of the identity of the city.KeywordsPersecutionMartyrdomBeatificationCanonizationJohn Paul IINagasakiAtomic bomb