Why Japan’s Shogun Executed Dozens of Christians During the Great Genna Martyrdom of 1622

On an early September day in 1622, a large group of Christians gathered on a hill in Nagasaki, Japan, to bear witness. Dozens of their fellow believers had been rounded up and sentenced to be tortured for their illicit faith.

Christianity had taken root in the seven decades since its arrival on Japan’s shores, surviving through Jesuit missionaries and underground communities. When Japan’s leaders closed the country to foreigners in the early 17th century, however, they banned the religion as an insidious influence.

As the crowd looked on that day in Nagasaki, government officials, “with unmerciful ferocity, cut off the heads” of 30 Christians, according to a contemporary pamphlet. The executioners then placed the severed heads in front of 25 other prisoners who were tied to stakes nearby. Asked why they had beheaded some before killing the others, the officials responded that “it was for the purpose of frightening the confessors of Christ, and thus disheartening them for the torture of burning.”

The martyrs remained steadfast as they died in the flames, enduring their pain as if they were made “of marble, so calm and motionless they stood,” the pamphlet stated. Within a few hours, all were dead. The prisoners’ remains were burned to ashes and scattered at sea to prevent the crowd from venerating them as relics. In total, 55 Christians died on Nishizaka Hill on September 10, 1622, joining the ranks of more than 400 people killed in Japan for their religious beliefs between 1597 and 1637. The mass execution is known today as the Great Genna Martyrdom, after Japan’s Genna era, which spanned 1615 to 1624.

Missionaries had introduced Christianity to Japan in 1549 during a pivotal period in the country’s history. For more than a century, between 1467 and 1603, rival feudal lords known as daimyo fought for control of the Asian archipelago, attempting—with varying degrees of success—to unite the warring states. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was the first to achieve this goal, unifying Japan by 1590; beginning in 1603, Hideyoshi’s successors, the Tokugawa shogunate, oversaw an era of relative peace and prosperity.

Initially, many of the warring feudal lords embraced Christianity, viewing it as a way of undermining those in power. At its peak, Christianity in Japan boasted some 500,000 adherents, the majority of them clustered in Nagasaki. “Oppressed peasants” were attracted to Christianity by the promise of salvation, while merchants and “trade-conscious daimyos” were more concerned with the economic opportunities afforded by the new religion.

[ACM] Christianity in Asia: Martyrdom of Nagasaki, 1622

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But Hideyoshi quickly grew skeptical of a belief system with such close ties to foreign powers: namely, Portugal, the home of many Jesuit missionaries, and Rome, where the Catholic Church was based. Japan’s leaders “were looking to get rid of Christianity, but they were also looking to remove the foreigners as a political threat to [the] security of the state … so the two things were related,” Kiri Paramore, a historian at the National University of Ireland, told BBC News in 2019.

In 1587, Hideyoshi expelled Christian missionaries, accusing them of committing “the illegal act of destroying the teachings of Buddha”—the dominant faith in Japan at the time. A decade later, the warlord ordered the executions of 26 Catholics, including Franciscan missionaries and Japanese converts. The youngest martyr, a 12-year-old boy named Luis Ibaraki, reportedly refused the chance to save his life by renouncing Christianity, instead declaring, “I do not want to live on that condition, for it is not reasonable to exchange a life that has no end for one that soon finishes.” All of the Christians were crucified on Nishizaka Hill, the same spot where 55 martyrs would die 25 years later on the orders of Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada.

By the time of the Great Genna Martyrdom, Christianity was struggling to survive in Japan. Catholics continued to face severe persecution under the shogunate. In addition to holding public executions, the government tortured missionaries and converts by pouring boiling water on them, freezing them to death in ice water and hanging them upside down in pits filled with excrement.

Authorities also forced suspected Christians to trample on a brass likeness of Jesus or the Virgin Mary—a blasphemous act. Those who succumbed to government pressure would often “return home, begging God to forgive them,” Simon Hull, an expert on Japanese Catholicism, told BBC News in 2019. “In one community, they would even burn the sandals they had worn, mixing the ashes with water before drinking it as an expression of their profound penitence.”

It was only in the mid-19th century, after American Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open its ports to foreign powers, that the country’s hidden Christian communities started to resurface. Today, Catholics represent less than 1 percent of Japan’s population.

Meilan Solly | | READ MORE

Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's senior associate digital editor, history.