Japanese saints

[odile53]

I’ll admit that most of my knowledge of Catholic history is pretty much limited to the Church in Europe and the United States, and even that knowledge isn’t very comprehensive. But I had googled a list of saints, and for whatever reason, came upon a sidebar which had the title for Japanese saints.

Interested, I clicked on the tab, and clicked on quite a few of the saints and beatified that were listed. I think I may have clicked on in the neighborhood of twenty or so, and was shocked to realize that every last one of them were martyrs (mostly in the 1600s, most of them canonized in the 1800s.) That was at a particularly aggressive time of feudal Japanese history where the Japanese were particularly hostile to foreign influences. The saints I clicked on were native Japanese, mostly converts, who were associated with missionary orders, and many of them died by crucifixion (apparently, a common form of execution in feudal Japan, but unlike Roman style crucifixion. The crucified individuals were dispatched fairly quickly by executioners with spears, sorry for the gruesome details.)

I thought I’d throw this out here–Does anyone know of a Japanese saint who was not a martyr?

 

[po18guy]

I do not know of one. As a peripheral issue, here is a link to a brief article on Korean martyrs. Amazingly, due to lay evangelization, the early Korean Catholic Church had 4,000 faithful before a Priest ever set foot on the peninsula! Due to intense persecution, in less than 100 years, Korea had 10,000 martyrs. 10,000. Can you imagine?

 

[Diakonia]

There are almost 700 persons, the majority of them ethnic Japanese, who have been formally beatified (600+) or canonized (50+) as a result of being martyred in odium fidei on Japanese soil. The actual numbers are considered to be closer to 1,000. It is an extraordinary number for a nation which came late to Christianity. There are no formally canonized or beatified Japanese saints who are not martyrs.

Equally amazing is the fact that several hundred Kirishitan or “Hidden Catholics” presented themselves to a French priest in the mid-1860s, a few years after Matthew Perry ‘reopened’ Japan. They had retained practice of the Catholic faith for something close to 250 years without a priesthood, baptizing their infants and verbally passing down the tenets of their faith, generation to generation.

 

[Ghosty]

During the Sengoku Jidei period Japan came into contact with the West and was exposed to Christianity. The Faith actually spread fairly quickly was likely and set deep roots. Japan was initially quite fertile ground for the Faith, but at the end of the civil war the new Shogun had to consolidate his power and the Christians were a major target. They were brutally suppressed and martyred, and the Japan was largely sealed off from outside contact for centuries, in large part to hold back rapid conversions. Had a different clan risen to power, history might have been very different; one major clan had even established an “embassy” in the Vatican prior to the suppression.

Another interesting note is that MacArthur asked the Catholic Church specifically to send missionaries after WWII, because the state religion of Japan had fallen apart and he viewed the Catholic Faith as the most likely to succeed there, though he wasn’t Catholic. The efforts never really took off, though, due to lack of language training in Japanese.

Peace and God bless!

 

[Ghosty]

One more interesting point: Christianty in Japan was in most ways spread through native lay initiative. It was not established through imperial control by a foreign power. The suppression of it required extrodinary effort, hence the high number of martyrs and closing off most outside contact.

 

[odile53]

Wow. I’m positively humbled by their devotion. Can you imagine–lay initiative being responsible for maintaining the Faith over a couple of centuries and a half? And the story of the Korean converts, amazing.

Thanks to all of you who answered, and if anyone else has any good information, keep on posting!

 

[Diakonia]

You can read the names of some 400+ of these holy persons at the Hagiography Circle:

42 Martyrs of the period 1597-1637

207 Martyrs of the period 1597-1637

188 Martyrs of the period 1603-1639

You can also read accounts of the martyrdom of some 150 of them at:

Japanese Saints

the details of these are, in many instances, incredibly horrific.

Of note, the Catholic Japanese martyrs are commemorated in some churches and jurisdictions of both the Anglican Communion and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

 

[choliks]

It’s also known that pioneers in introducing Catholicism to Japan were Portuguese explorers and missionary orders, the Jesuits in particular, such as St. Francis Xavier.

Side note: I was actually surprised that Nagasaki was founded by the Catholic Portuguese.

 

[patrick457]

During the Sengoku Jidei period Japan came into contact with the West and was exposed to Christianity. The Faith actually spread fairly quickly was likely and set deep roots. Japan was initially quite fertile ground for the Faith, but at the end of the civil war the new Shogun had to consolidate his power and the Christians were a major target. They were brutally suppressed and martyred, and the Japan was largely sealed off from outside contact for centuries, in large part to hold back rapid conversions.

A little history lesson is in order here I believe.

The first definite arrival of Christianity here was in 1549, when St. Francis Xavier arrived with companions. At first Christianity was thought to be an Indian religion by the Japanese - more specifically a new sect of Buddhism - partly because of the ties between the Portuguese and India at the time (cf. Goa and the Portuguese East India Company), and partly because the earliest missionaries happened to use Buddhist terminology for Christian ideas (i.e. Dainichi for ‘God’). Some of the daimyos were keen at the arrival of Christianity, not so much for the belief itself as for political and commercial reasons.

The Japanese at the time really knew of only two countries: India and China, and perhaps Korea: the rest are considered to be Nanban, ‘Southern Barbarians’ (an inheritance from Chinese thought). Of course there were a few Muslim and Southeast Asian immigrants since the late 14th century, but any information about these were largely confined to Kyoto (the capital; aka Heian-kyo) and parts of northern Kyushu (where the ports were). So the arrival of the Portuguese - also considered to be ‘Southern Barbarians’ since they came from there! - with their religion, their cargo and their firearms exposed Japan to a totally new world. For many of the feudal lords in that age marked with power struggles, the prospect of embarking on commercial trade with the ‘Barbarians’ was an alluring one, and so the adoption of the foreign religion was seen as a useful tool to that end.

 

[patrick457]

There are almost 700 persons, the majority of them ethnic Japanese, who have been formally beatified (600+) or canonized (50+) as a result of being martyred in odium fidei on Japanese soil. The actual numbers are considered to be closer to 1,000. It is an extraordinary number for a nation which came late to Christianity. There are no formally canonized or beatified Japanese saints who are not martyrs.

Equally amazing is the fact that several hundred Kirishitan or “Hidden Catholics” presented themselves to a French priest in the mid-1860s, a few years after Matthew Perry ‘reopened’ Japan. They had retained practice of the Catholic faith for something close to 250 years without a priesthood, baptizing their infants and verbally passing down the tenets of their faith, generation to generation.

Yes, but many of them handed their faith down in a rather distorted form. Prayers and hymns in corrupted Latin and Portuguese were handed down without regard to the meaning of the words, in effect becoming a mantra that one has to say properly for it to be effective; at the absence of a priest, a few communities even developed their own (married) priesthood which became a hereditary job passed down from father to son (as in Japanese Buddhism), along with a version of the Mass, with bowls of rice and sake. In such cases, the Faith seems to have degenerated into mere ancestor worship (the ‘ancestors’ in this case being the martyrs), mere customs stripped of their original context and meaning.

For the record, there are still apparently a few surviving groups of Kakure Kirishitan today, but most are in the process of dying out in the absence of anyone willing to continue the tradition.