Christianity came to Japan in 1549. The Land of the Rising Sun must have been ready to hear the good news when St Francis Xavier first set foot on its shores. By the time he left, just two years later, there were three thousand Japanese Christians. Over the next forty years that number increased to two hundred thousand. That was when the persecution began.
The story of Japanese Christianity is grim. It is doubtful whether any group of Christians has faced such intense persecution over such a lengthy period. After seeing thousands of Christians tortured and executed over the course of about fifty years, even the Jesuits stopped sending missionaries to Japan. The torments inflicted on these courageous Christian communities have been movingly depicted by Shusaku Endo in his provocative novel, Silence. Himself a Japanese Christian, Endo drew on oral histories from Japanese Catholic communities, which are among relatively few sources of information about the fate of these Christians through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One thing, however, is known. When Commodore Matthew Perry forced his way into Japan in 1853, he found around twenty thousand Japanese Christians still practicing their faith in secret. Through centuries of brutal persecution, and without any support from the West, the gates of Hell still had not prevailed against Japanese Christianity.
Silence is a work of tremendous power and subtlety, appropriate for the seasoned Christian. For pure triumphalist hagiography, however, it is hard to beat St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Victories of the Martyrs, which provides an account of the much-revered twenty-six martyrs who were crucified at Nagasaki in 1597. In its own way, this text too is likely to provoke discomfort. To the average Western reader, the Japanese thirst for martyrdom seems altogether excessive. We see women sewing festive garments in preparation for the happy day, as children beg permission to join their parents in attaining that glorious crown of death. A son shames his newly converted father into joining the martyrs instead of fleeing to a more protected region to practice his faith in secret. Reading these stories as a twenty-first century American, it is difficult not to think of kamikaze pilots and samurai warriors falling on their swords, and to wonder whether these martyrs might not be reflecting a characteristically Japanese fatalism and a morbid fascination with death.
I encourage my students to discuss these concerns when we read St. Alphonsus as part of our study of the virtue of courage. We use the Japanese martyrs as a lens through which to consider the claim (advanced by many great thinkers, from Aristotle to G.K. Chesterton) that courage entails a willingness to fall in battle. Clearly, the Japanese Christians are willing, but does their enthusiasm overflow into rashness? Is it fitting to run eagerly into the arms of martyrdom, potentially forsaking dependent children (or even encouraging them to participate)? The students worry, reasonably enough, that this kind of attitude might exhibit a vicious light-mindedness, and a failure to appreciate the significance of earthly goods and obligations. After all, a desire for martyrdom does not remit earthly debts, and sacrifice is not meaningful unless we understand the gravity of what is lost.
Even while acknowledging the seriousness of these worries, I ultimately suggest to the students that perhaps the Japanese attitude was suited to the grimness of the circumstances. For a seventeenth century Japanese Christian, practicing the faith meant living under a constant shadow of fear. An early and painful death was always a strong possibility, and apostasy and death were the only available escape routes. Emigration was impractical for these desperately impoverished peasants, and a less-hostile political climate was still centuries away. There was nothing a committed Christian could do to ease his companions’ burden, except to show them that death was not to be feared. This, then, was the witness that the Japanese martyrs offered, and the surviva