Fruitful Rain

St Paul Miki's Blood against the Swamp of Silence

Photo by Adrienne Merritt on Unsplash

A swamp, where the sapling of Christianity simply cannot grow; a place with soil so alien that it cannot take root. Anyone familiar with mission in Japan will know this bleak assessment from Catholic novelist Endō Shūsaku’s Silence. And yet, only four decades before the setting of Endo’s fictional mission, a Christian went to his martyrdom in Nagasaki praying that his blood would water his nation like fruitful rain. Is silence the final answer to that prayer?

Endo’s novel concerns the dangerous and illegal mission of two young Jesuit priests to Japan. They are eager to join their former master, one Father Ferreira, whom they understood still to be serving there in secret after thirty-three years (surely not an insignificant number). Yet when they get to Japan and meet the now furtive “Hidden” Christians there, they eventually discover that Ferreira has apostatised, taken a Japanese name and wife, and writes anti-Christian polemical tracts for the government.

Those who have watched the 2016 Scorsese film adaptation of the book may recall the real-life torture this fictional father faced. On my recent pilgrimage to Shinmeizan, I could see from my window the volcano of Unzen. Nowadays, people go there to take selfies in front of the hell-like blight, immersed in the clouds of steam that rise from the boiling waters. Many have no idea that three hundred years ago, Christians were boiled to death in those pools. For some, like the fictional Ferreira, an even worse punishment was devised: anazuri, suspension upside-down over a pit often filled with excrement, with an incision made in the neck for slow bleeding out until apostasy or death.

Few could endure such torment. It is hard to blame those who did not. But some did. Among these were the Twenty-Six Martyrs commemorated today, including the Japanese Jesuit St Paul Miki, executed on 5 February 1597 on the hill of Nishizaka in Nagasaki.

Their left ears had been cut off to degrade them and to warn sympathisers against following in their path. They were then marched through the snow of the Japanese midwinter from Kyoto to Nagasaki, exhibited in towns and villages on the way. It was a journey of some 600 miles. As they went, they sang the Te Deum and invoked the names of Jesus and Mary, and arrived to their reward. An escaped Franciscan missionary, Marcelo de Ribadeneira, who fled before the martyrdom, later compiled eyewitness accounts:

Fr Gonsalo, the first to arrive, went straight to one of the crosses and asked ‘Is this mine?’. The reply was ‘It is not’. Then he was taken to another cross, where he knelt down and embraced it. The others, one after another, started doing the same.

Their number included seventeen Japanese laymen, three children among them, three Japanese Jesuits, and six Franciscans from Europe, Mexico, and India. Brother Gonsalo García, born in India to a Portuguese father and Indian mother, sang praises to God even as the executioners nailed him to his cross. One of the Jesuits, St Paul Miki, is reported as preaching from the cross. He extolled the Christian way as the sole means of salvation, forgave his enemies, and exhorted them to seek baptism themselves:

As I come to this supreme moment of my life, I am sure none of you would suppose I want to deceive you. And so I tell you plainly: there is no way to be saved except the Christian way. My religion teaches me to pardon my enemies and all who have offended me. I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death.

But first, he prayed:

Like my Master, I shall die upon the cross. Like him, a lance will pierce my heart so that my blood and my love can flow out upon the land and sanctify it to his name.

Here is a Japanese man who saw his land not as a swamp, but as good arable land ready to bear a crop, if only it was properly cultivated and watered. The water would be his love, symbolised by the blood his enemies would shed. And this blood, he further dared hope, “will fall on my fellow men as a fruitful rain.” And indeed, lances did spear his heart, and those of his companions, earning them their martyrs’ crowns.

Marcelo de Ribadeneira’s account is hagiographical and not without political intent. The uncomfortable fact remains that most Jesuits survived the martyrdom of 1597, unlike their Franciscan brethren, who were to say the least not the most friendly of siblings to one another. According to Takano Yurika’s 2024 essay, “Why Did Most Jesuits Survive the Martyrdom of 1597?” (International Symposia on Jesuit Studies 2, no. 1 (2024): 1–15), the martyrdom specifically targeted Franciscans, and for primarily political rather than religious reasons. Hideyoshi initially ordered the execution of all Christian missionaries on December 8, 1596, but by the time of the martyrdom on February 5, 1597, his orders had been narrowed to Franciscans and their Japanese associates only. This was owing to their association with the Philippines, whose government were using the Franciscans to effect illegal diplomatic actions. The Jesuits, though, had by 1597 been in Japan for forty-seven years, growing to 135 members and enjoying the support of some 300,000 laypeople—a degree of penetration that made them both valuable and dangerous. The Portuguese trade links they brought with them were deemed economically valuable enough, after a certain amount of diplomatic wrangling, to preserve their lives. The three Jesuits martyred on this day were executed because they were arrested in Osaka, outside the protection of their sponsor, Ishida Mitsunari, whose jurisdiction was Kyoto. Nonetheless, even taking into account de Ribadeneira’s hagiographic intent and political allegiance, we see that the Jesuits had embedded themselves into Japanese society enough to escape mass martyrdom at this stage. Though prohibited from proselytising, living under the dangerous conditions of little more than a gentlemen’s agreement, they counted for far more than a mere “sapling” growing in the supposed swamp. That growth took courage and cost the blood of St Paul Miki and his Jesuit brothers, who shared the Franciscans’ blame.

For all this, Endo has Fr Ferreira defend his apostasy by asserting:

The Japanese till this day have never had the concept of God and they never will...The Japanese cannot think of an existence that transcends the human.

And further:

A tree which flourishes in one kind of soil may wither if the soil is changed. As for the tree of Christianity, in a foreign country its leaves may grow thick and the buds may be rich, while in Japan the leaves wither and no bud appears.

Can this be so? Is it credible that a learned Jesuit seminarian and preacher like St Paul Miki really did not understand the God for whom he was willing to die any better than his European confreres? One might suppose that he was exceptional. But this would not explain why the Tokugawa shogunate would see such a threat in Christianity. If its roots were so intellectually shallow, there would surely have been easier ways to pull them up than by making so many martyrs. Nor, forty years later, in the late 1630s, would some 37,000 Christian rebels have faced off against 125,000 shogunate troops at Shimabara without the hope of salvation by a God who could offer them a transcendent reward beyond the pain of those nearby Unzen waters.

St Paul Miki professed absolute and exclusive faith in the King who claims authority above any Emperor or Shōgun. For this, his blood ruddied the swamp. But it was not washed away. Even now, not far from Nagasaki, overlooking Unzen, Shinmeizan stands, and not as a memorial or museum to a dead faith, but as a sign of ongoing life. The Christian faith was suppressed, of course, but it was suppressed precisely because it was flourishing. Kyushu was heavily Christian by the end of the sixteenth century, such that native catechists were evangelising their own people. It was not so much a sapling as a mustard bush. And even when that bush was burned down and trampled on for the 250-year sakoku period, thousands of hidden Christians attempted to keep the faith without priests or sacraments, emerging tentatively when Catholic missionaries were finally, in 1865, allowed to return. What they managed to maintain may not have impressed the missionaries much, but they did so at great peril to themselves. If in man’s eyes they seem but saplings, we cannot say what scent their secret blossoms carried to God.

God has not been silent in Japan, and He is not silent here now. As Endo’s protagonist comes to see, He suffered alongside him. But He also spoke. He spoke through the words of the evangelists, and through the blood and cries of the martyrs. Their blood still calls to us today, louder than Abel’s. It calls us to courage. It calls us, like the patriarchs of old, to walk into the land God entrusts to us, and to set up altars for the sacrifice, whether that land is volcano, mountain or swamp. And there, as we join angels and martyrs in the Te Deum, the bloodless sacrifice Our Lord offers at our hands will continue to sanctify this land.

Find out more about my recent trip to Shinmeizan below - and of your mercy, pray for the mission there on this day of the Martyrdom of St Paul Miki and companions.