Holy Innocents and St Columba Episcopal Churches

The Martyrs Of Japan

Who were the Martyrs of Japan? As it happens, the webmistress has actually been to their memorial.

As explained in the link to the lectionary page for today, the Martyrs of Japan were six Franciscan friars and twenty of their Japanese converts, some very young. They were crucified in Nagasaki in 1597, and persecutions continued off and on for another 40 years, until the Japanese Christian community had been driven totally underground. The political tensions of the time were the biggest cause; the ruler or shogun feared either a peasant uprising, or invasion by the various European nations that were sending Catholic missionaries to Japan.

I took a trip to Japan in 1993, and while there I attended church at an Anglican parish in Nagoya. The service was conducted entirely in Japanese, but an English "expat" kindly translated parts of the sermon for me and showed me where the "eigo" or English transliteration of the prayers was in the service booklet. The service was familiar and yet strange. Following Japanese custom, everyone removed their shoes and put them in a cubby just inside the entrance; I arrived a few minutes late but figured it out in time so that I didn't commit a "shoe crime."

The next week, I had wandered by train as far as Nagasaki, and stumbled upon the memorial to the Martyrs, which was in a park or plaza near a Catholic church (a modern one, not the cathedral that was nearly destroyed in the city center by the atomic bomb). The martyrs' memorial is very sombre compared to the Peace Park downtown, where school groups had been hanging garlands of origami cranes (symbolic of eternal life) all morning. It was so busy at the Peace Park that I took a walk or a tram ride up the hill with the vague intention to check out the memorial, which was marked on my tourist map. It was almost noon when I got there. I was taking pictures and someone had just offered to take mine, standing in front of the memorial, when an eerie wailing filled the air. Everyone got very, very quiet. Someone who spoke a little English explained quickly that the sirens always went off at that time to commemorate the moment the atomic bomb was detonated, and there would be a couple of minutes of silence.

The memorial to the Martyrs of Japan is very simple - even stark, and a little unnerving. I had never heard of them before that moment, when the sirens were wailing, but I never forgot them.

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