While we continue assessing the historical significance and the legacy of the assassinated Japanese Prime Minister, his visit to the Vatican in 2014 is worth remembering.
by Marco Respinti
On July 8, 2022, former 67-years old Prime Minister of Japan, Abe Shinzo, was murdered during an electoral rally in Nara, the capital city of Nara Prefecture, Japan.
Bitter Winter focuses on religious liberty, and a particular incident in the life of Abe came to our mind. It is his visit to Pope Francis in the Vatican on June 6, 2014. During these public visits (which sometimes include a private interview) the Pope and his guests traditionally exchange gifts, whose value is symbolic.
Abe presented the Pope with a “magic mirror”—or this is how the press popularly dubbed his gift. The “magic” of that mirror was that, while appearing smooth and normal, when properly moved and inclined to intercept a ray from the Sun it revealed the face of Jesus Christ and the Cross. When he was told about the mirror, the Pope moved swiftly to a window to check up the secret wonder, alongside Abe himself, seeking the natural light. The “magic” mirror may seem little more than a toy, but is in fact a deep sign of devotion and prayer, and at the same time of persecution and resistance.
That gift was in fact a contemporary replica of an ancient artifact, and a Japanese artisan crafted it for the Pope at Abe’s specific request. “Magic” mirrors like that were used in the 17th century Japan by Japanese Catholics to “hide” the image of Christ, during one of the harshest persecutions Christianity suffered during the entire course of its history.
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Japanese society
Christianity arrived in Japan on August 15, 1549, brought there by the Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Jasso Azpilicueta Atondo y Aznárez de Javier, famously known as Francis Xavier (1506–1552). Devoid of a true central authority, Japan was torn apart by century-old clan struggles. The emperor was divided between his supposed divine origin, which made him untouchable, and the fact that he did not really rule the country. He was a puppet in the hands of the captain of his army, the shogun. The Sei-i Taishōgun, the “Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary Force Against the Barbarians,” as he was called by his full hereditary title, was part of a lineage of military appointees who de facto ruled autocratically large portions of the country, if not the whole of Japan, during most of the years between 1185 and 1868.
Japanese society was rigidly caste-based. Below were the peasants, above the samurai, or the hereditary military nobility and officer caste that existed from the late 12th century until its official abolition in 1876. Only the peasants paid taxes, and tax evasion was punished with death. They existed solely to produce the food needed to maintain the social pyramid that crushed them. Samurai had indeed the right of life and death over them. Full-time warriors, the samurai served the daimyō, or “feudal” lords (although applying the term “feudal” outside of Medieval Europe is historically inaccurate). The shōgun of the Japanese capital of those times, Kyoto, left to the daimyō the task of collecting taxes from the peasants. When a daimyō fell into disgrace, so did his samurai. He became a rōnin, literally a “drifter” with no master or lord, seeking employment.
Among them there were the samurai who lost everything when their daimyō died. Others were deprived of all possessions and powers for converting to Christianity and refusing to abjure when the shōgun ordered it. Many of them became peasants and sometimes were chosen as shōya, village headmen, for their talents.
Christianity in Japan
Initially, Christian preaching by European missionaries in Japan was permitted and even favored by some daimyō, or even by the shogun. Converts grew rapidly in numbers, reaching around 300,000 at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. At that point, religious competition took in and when other groups, especially Buddhists, gained the support of a political power who already saw as its main task to defend Shintoism, persecutions started.
When Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598, born Kinoshita Tōkichirō, and later called Hashiba Hideyoshi), regarded as the second “Great Unifier” of Japan, took power, he immediately grew suspicious of Japanese converts to Christianity and their European “allies.” On July 24, 1587, Toyotomi published an edict banning all European missionaries from the country and on February 5, 1597, he crucified 26 Christians (six Franciscans, three Japanese Jesuits, and 17 Japanese Franciscan tertiaries).
After Toyotomi, persecution diminished, but took new vigor with shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616). In 1614, all public declaration of Catholic faith was forbidden, and again missionaries were expelled. Persecution went on relentlessly under Tokugawa and his successors. Especially Nagasaki, the historic center of Japanese Christianity, began then to glow at the burning of missionaries and was soared with crosses on which converts were nailed.
Those Japanese Christians who were not killed went underground, becoming known, even to these days, as the “hidden” Christians, or kakure kirishitan. Their center became the Shimabara peninsula, 70 km south of Nagasaki, in the Hara fortress, now reduced to the ruins of an old castle. There, by 1577, the entire Japanese population had converted to Christianity, including the local daimyō, defying repression.
Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651), become shōgun in 1623. He was fiercely anti-Christian. One day in 1637, someone at Shimabara announced a miracle: a rich frame that was there before materialized around an icon that was venerated in the village. The next day, in the main square, a flag was waved bearing the Christian Cross at its center. Police arrived immediately. It was the Solemnity of the Ascension in the Christian calendar and the revolt broke out in the name of “Deusu,” the Judeo-Christian God, “Mariya,” the Virgin Mary, and “Iesu Kirisuto,” Jesus Christ. Other Japanese provinces added also fiscal lamentations to their rising in arms.
Revolt at Shimabara
Shimabara and the small Amakusa archipelago were soon under the control of the insurgents. Against a few thousand ragamuffins (who even went so far as to fight with pitchforks, pots, and pans), led by a few hundred Christian rōnin, shōgun Tokugawa came to deploy up to 200,000 trained warriors. A gunboat of Dutch Calvinist merchants gave him support against the Japanese “papists.” Then, hunger ran rampant. The rebels ate grass and seaweed, as government general Matsudaira Nobutsuna (1596–1662) ascertained by disemboweling the corpses of his enemies.
Against the Christian insurgents the shōgun even hurled Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645), the most famous samurai ever, he who would swat a fly with his rice chopsticks and cut a boiled grain with his katana without touching the head of the child on whom it was placed. Later, he also unleashed the deadly ninja, unscrupulous mercenary killers. But the kirishitan routed them, totally destroying their myth, which survives today only in the posturing imagination of certain Westerners. This epic battle become known as Shimabara no ran, the Revolt of Shimabara. At the end, however, the kirishitan could not avoid defeat.
On April 13, 1638, the revolt ended. Those who brought back heads of rebels were paid well. 20,000 were impaled on the beach and in front of Hara, but space was scarce and so pyramids of dead bodies were erected. Baskets were filled with women’s noses. Others Christian survivors ended up on three ships sent to Nagasaki. At the end of the day the shōgun lost 70,000 samurai.
Among the impaled heads of the kirishitan, there was also that of Masuda Shirō Tokisada (1621–1638), called Amakusa Shirō because of his birthplace, Kami-Amakusa, in the Kumamoto Prefecture, the son of a famous samurai who had converted to Christianity. He was 16, and on his white silk banner two angels adored the Chalice surmounted by the Host, the Grail of the knights. To the troops and their families, he preached the Gospel daily. A missionary’s prophecy had predicted his role. Some said they saw him walking above the waters. They called him “ame no tsukai,” “Heaven’s envoy.”
When the revolt was over, the shōgun declared the Sakoku, “chained country,” hermetically sealing Japan to all foreigners. Only another war with the West reopened it two and a half centuries later. Christians became more hidden than ever, even giving birth to a peculiar Christian “sect” sometimes at odds with official Christianity, once it re-entered the country, and studied almost as an “ethnic group” by scholars such as Christal Whelan.
The bibliography on the kakure kirishitan and Shimabara no ran, a staggering case of religious persecution and a fight for religious freedom, includes important books such as Stephen Turnbull’s “Kakure Kirishitan of Japan: A Study of Their Development, Beliefs and Rituals to the Present Day” (1998); John Doughill’s “In Search of Japan’s Hidden Christians: A Story of Suppression, Secrecy and Survival” (2012); and Jonathan Clements’ “Christ’s Samurai: The True Story of the Shimabara Rebellion” (2008).
From this sad story of anti-Christian persecution in Japan, Catholic novelist Endō Shūsaku (1923–1996) derived his masterpiece, “Silence,” in 1966. The novel was adapted into three movies: the first, under the same title, directed by Shinoda Masahiro in 1971; the second, somewhat controversial, directed by Martin Scorsese, once more with the same title, in 2016; and the third, in 1996, by the title “Os Olhos da Ásia” (The Eyes of Asia), directed by Portuguese João Mário Lourenço Bagão Grilo.
Back from the Christian samurai to the late Prime Minister
Our story also include Takayama Ukon (1552? –1615), a samurai son of a samurai, and a Christian son of Christians, who was born probably in 1552 in Haibara-cho, Nara prefecture. His father, Takayama Tomoteru (1531–1596), was the lord of the Saiwa castle, in Yamato Province, and was famous for his valor. Named Hikogoro when he was born, in 1564, at probably 12 years, Ukon took the name of Iustus or Justo: his father had in fact converted to Christianity, taking the name of Dario, along with his whole family. Later know as Dom Justo Takayama (“Ukon” is a title), and respected also by non-Christians, he has survived even his own life to become a character in the very popular 2012 manga series “Oda Nobuna no Yabou.”
Dario and Justo became daimyō of Takatuski castle, in Osaka Prefecture. When Christianity was banned from Japan in 1614, Justo was expelled with 300 fellow Christians of Nagasaki on November 8. On December 21, he arrived in Manila, in the Philippines, welcome by Spanish Jesuit missionaries. The Spanish king offered him support to overthrow the anti-Christian shōgun, but, as a man of honor, he refused. 40 days after, on February 5, 1615, he died of a disease. He is credited as the forerunner of a second Christian evangelization of the Philippines. Filipino historian Ambeth R. Ocampo has devoted several years to the study of his life. While these studies continue, Pope Francis beatified him on February 7, 2017.
The “magic” mirror that the late Abe Shinzo gave in 2014 to the Catholic Pope who would bring the samurai of Christ to the glory of the altars in 2017 tells us a great story, and an important one. A Japanese patriot found a way to publicly apologize to the Pope for his forefathers’ persecution of Catholics, without losing his honor nor that of his great country.