Anti-Christian rage in feudal Japan
Behold a heart-wrenching martyrdom in which whole
families were immolated together — including mothers with infants in
their arms — just to satisfy the mighty Shogun Hidetada's ire.
In October of 1619, Hidetada was on a visit to Kyōto, the Imperial
capital, when he heard that there were a great many Christians being
held in Kyōto's jail. The volatile shogun exploded into rage and ordered
them all executed immediately, regardless of age, gender or station.
They were to be crucified and burned on their crosses as a mise-shime — a lesson to recalcitrant believers.
Hidetada's father, Tokugawa Ieyasu — the first of the Tokugawa
shoguns — had slapped a nationwide ban on the practice of Christianity
in 1614, fearful perhaps of its grant of sovereignty to every human
conscience. The son was now doubling down on his father's ban, doing his
utmost to scare that proscribed faith out of the hearts of all Japan's
believers lest the whole nation's heart should change, turn to the
truth and see that all men are equal in the sight of God.
Ieyasu's forebear, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had nailed his own lesson of
fear and intolerance to 26 crosses raised atop a mountain slope
overlooking Nagasaki Bay on Feb. 5, 1597.
He had crucified Br. Paul Miki, S.J., and his 25 brethren in faith on
the charge that they had brought to Japan's shores a subversive foreign
religion, a "religion of love and union" prejudicial to a martial
culture whose ethos was grounded on self-abnegation and blind obedience
to rigid rule from above.
In that world inherited by the present shogun, an overlord presumed
the right to cut down his servants at his whim or command them to take
their own lives; what horror to the tyrant, then, if every man should
see himself as a temple housing Almighty God.
Thus was Hidetada's boiling rage most likely fueled by fear.
Itakura Katsushige, Kyōto's shogunal governor, was a decent man —
"the most moderate man on earth," French historian Pierre de Charlevoix
tells us — but he dare not contravene the shogun's orders, not even to
"defer the execution of a lady of the first quality who was about to
give birth."
Continued
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/the-52-martyrs-of-kyto
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